I live in a terraced house with no off-street parking. There are many people who live in similar houses. And there are many people who live in apartments. What is the plan for allowing us to charge our cars from our own charging points at the cheap night rates frequently talked about when I can’t run a cable across a public footpath?
I can have a very expensive and completely useless water meter installed outside my property buried into the footpath but not a channel for a cable? Is there an acknowledgment anywhere that this is a big factor when it comes to choices around what car to buy? – Alan T, Co Dublin
Since day one this has been a problem for anyone with an interest in going electric, but who lives in either a terraced house or an apartment. While there are some possible solutions for apartments, for those of us living in terraced houses the future appears to be either bleak or expensive or both.
We’ve asked this question before of some of the major urban councils in Ireland. Dublin City Council (DCC) has consistently failed to answer our queries on the subject, and the general vibe when it comes to people living in terraced houses is that you’re probably living close enough to the city centre, so just get a bus. In general, DCC seem to prefer that people just don’t drive cars at all, electric or otherwise.
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We did get a response on the subject from Cork City Council, which said: “It is planned to roll out the planned electric vehicle charging infrastructure on a phased basis in line with the projected growth in electric vehicles on our roads. It is likely the first tranche of infrastructure will be in place in 2026. The strategy does not make provision to allow private electric vehicle charging cables (either in pavement or overhead) to be installed across public footpaths or roads to facilitate home charging.”
So that seems like pretty cold comfort. Right now, the only viable solution for anyone living in a terraced house if they fancy an EV is to either charge at work, if that’s possible, or simply submit to the higher costs and lower convenience of public charging.
There are solutions, however. In the Netherlands, “cable arms” are a popular solution to charging at home with no driveway, but DCC has ordered some takedowns of those that have been installed. There are plenty of in-kerb solutions, but although you can get permission to dig a trench for the cabling (just as you can, as you point you, with your water meter or for gas main access) the act of installing an actual plug into the kerb or pavement, no matter how flush it sits, seems to be entirely verboten.
Lamp-post chargers have been successfully used in other countries and cities, notably London.
However, when we put this to Zero Emissions Vehicles Ireland – ZEVI, the Government department tasked with overseeing the switch to electric motoring – we received this response: “In other countries existing lamp-posts have been retrofitted with EV charge points with the meter for measuring electricity fitted to the charging cable (ie, external to the lamp-post).
“This allows for the existing lamp-post, where suitably located, to have a charge point installed using spare capacity within the post usually 2kW to 3kW. In Ireland this solution is not currently viable given the requirement from ESB to have a built-in meter and a separation from ESB and charge point infrastructure.
“This requires a bespoke lamp-post to be installed with enough space to include an ESB meter. The ESB is considering a bespoke lamp-post solution and are looking at potential pilots for this solution. However it should be noted that this solution will most likely add significant costs over retrofitting of existing lamp-posts and the use case for this solution will only be considered following the review of any pilot.
“It should also be noted that any lamp-post solution would only be considered where the lamp-post is positioned at the front of the footpath and any lamp-post positioned at the rear would not be suitable for health and safety purposes with cable not being permitted across footpaths.”
The thing is, this is a major issue. While it’s been slightly fatuously assumed that most Irish houses have a driveway, the fact is that somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of us don’t have one, and with an increasing focus on high-density dwellings, that’s a figure that’s likely to increase. So while there is still much talk about promoting electric motoring, and trying to get the Irish car-buying public to make the switch, there’s little-to-nothing concrete being done about that swathe of the population which might quite like to make the switch, but can’t.
The design of your house also plays a part. Where my own house is concerned, in theory I could park in the alley behind the house and install a charging point at the back gate, but my electricity meter is stuffed into a tiny cupboard in the front of the house, and I’d need to run more than 50 metres of cable to reach the back gate, involving ripping up floor, drilling through brick walls, and all manner of other complications and expenses. In theory, getting electricity to your electric car is simple, because electricity is everywhere. In practice, it’s far from simple.
For apartments, the news is a little better but it still entails you – and possibly several other people from the same apartment building – needing to go through the building’s management company to get the installation done. There are grants from the Sustainable Energy Authority Of Ireland for doing that, but it may not cover the total cost, and management companies are, at best, unlikely to be generous when it comes to such things. It’s also critical to ensure that any chargers installed are linked directly to the individual electricity meters of each apartment, rather than being installed on a pay-per-use basis, which will mean you wouldn’t be able to avail of the cheapest night time rates.
[ Dublin’s EV chargers row is pretentious, self-destructive nonsenseOpens in new window ]
Public charging, meanwhile, just gets more and more expensive even allowing for the fact that, in Budget 2026, VAT on electricity was held at 9 per cent, rather than going back up to 13.5 per cent as had been expected. We previously calculated that if you’re running a Volkswagen ID4 with the 77kWh battery, but only using public chargers, you’d be financially better off running on petrol instead.
For the foreseeable future, anyone living in an apartment or a terraced house is going to, at best, struggle to successfully and easily switch to electric driving.
