Consult Hyperion

Just 2,149 electric cars have been sold since 2006, despite a government scheme last year offering customers up to £5,000 towards the cost of a vehicle. The Department for Transport says that around 2,500 charging points have been installed, although their precise location is not known.

[From Flat battery: Government reveals there are more charging points than electric cars in UK as sales slump | Mail Online]

How is it going to work then? Do you just leave open power sockets all over town? That's probably not the answer because then people will just run cables out of their houses and plug themselves into the power sockets thus getting free electricity. You could probably imagine some system of combination locks or keys but that would soon become unmanageable. How could you control the keys so that only authorised drivers of authorised electric cars could draw electricity from the relevant sockets?

One way forward is to use some combination of tamper-resistant chips (e.g., a SIM), short-range wireless interfaces (e.g. NFC) and an identity infrastructure (e.g. NSTIC or IDA) so that people can pull up next to a charging point (that they can find using the GPS on their smartphone), tap the socket with the NFC phone (or a contactless card) so the socket opens or becomes live and then plug their car in. Then when they come back from shopping, they can unplug and drive off safe in the knowledge that their account has been charged correctly. Sounds a bit farfetched? Not a bit of it. I read that

Members of each scheme get an RFID card, which unlocks the posts and allows free use of them. However, if travelling between areas, multiple memberships are required. Prices vary, but Source London currently offers access for just £10 per year at present.

[From Pay-as-you-go electric car charging arrives in North East England]

Given that the phones don't exist and the inexplicable use of proprietary cards makes these schemes regional, then surely the market will (exactly as in the car parking case study that I've written about ad nauseum) use the mobile phone to bypass physical interfaces: once again the phone as remote control to the cloud appears to be the solution.

Charge your Car, charge point network operator for the region, is trialling the new payment model under the 'Plugged-in Places’ scheme, and says the process is similar to paying for on-street parking by mobile phone. Drivers pull into a dedicated bay, text the Charge Your Car phone number and they’ll be charged accordingly.

[From Pay-as-you-go electric car charging arrives in North East England]

Now you can how it would be much more convenient for consumers to simply tap at the power socket and plug in, but it's not that much more hassle to run the app and type in the location number. Text messaging isn't secure enough for generalised mass market payments, but its good enough to get transactions going and as it is gradually replaced by IP, apps and identities stored in trusted environments (more on this to come) it will form part of an interoperable identity-centric ecosystem for transactions.