At its simplest, an electric vehicle charging point is a piece of interface equipment that connects a single electric vehicle to an electricity supply, allowing the vehicle’s battery to be charged. This battery provides the power to propel the vehicle, which can be fully electric or a plug-in hybrid. The term ‘charge point’ is often used interchangeably with ‘charging point’.
Charging points can be stand-alone interfaces (as is the case with most home charge points) or can be arranged in various combinations or clusters at particular locations. These combined charging points form hubs where more than one electric vehicle can charge at a time.
Most publicly accessible EV charging points consist of a single parking bay and an adjacent electricity connection point. Where more than one charging point is provided, multiple connection points can be grouped together in single charging stations. This reduces the cabling and hardware required to connect the charge point to the electricity supply and is an efficient way of allowing more than one vehicle to charge at a time. A common arrangement is to have two twinned sockets set in a single charging station serving two side-by-side or back-to-back parking bays.
When EV technologies were at an early stage, different manufacturers developed different types of connection points and sockets, meaning that vehicle owners had limited options when it came to where and how they could charge their EVs. As the EV market has developed, standard, interoperable connection points have become more common, particularly in the EU.
With more standardised connection points and charge point sockets, EV charging is now mainly differentiated by power and vehicle battery capacity, and whether the electricity supplied to the charge point can be drawn from conventional domestic supply arrangements or whether a higher connective capacity is required.