Irish Rail seeks operator for electric vehicle fast charging points at stations

Company says successful tender must be able to scale up in response to targets

Irish Rail has issued a tender for a company to manage fast charging points for electric vehicles at its railway stations.

The company said it is seeking a partner to provide “end-to-end operation and maintenance services” including “appropriate authentication, card payment options and portal access for consumers”.

Irish Rail said the tender will initially apply to just six fast chargers, which were installed with National Transport Authority funding and are reserved for taxi operators. The six are based at three railway stations, Heuston in Dublin, Kent in Cork and Colbert in Limerick.

The tender documentation says the action is in response to the State’s Climate Action Plan which “contains an ambitious target of 936,000 electric vehicle by 2030” and which identifies Irish Rail stations “as being key “to the delivery of the charge points “given the prominent location of train stations in our main cities and towns”.

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A spokesman said the successful tenderer would “obviously be a system to be scaled up across our network as EV charge points roll out”.

Irish Rail currently has 43 standard or “slow” charging points at station car parks across its network.

The spokesman added: We are currently developing plans for upgrades of existing car parks where we have capacity pressures, which will include both cycle parking and EV charging provision, and this will inform future plans for the expansion of cycle and EV charging facilities in our station car parks.

Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien is an Irish Times journalist