Who Gets the Flexibility Dividend? Smart Charging, Fairness and the Driveway Divide
The flexibility dividend flows disproportionately to households with a driveway. Closing the gap is a deliberate procurement choice, not a market default.
Every other article in this series has treated "smart charging" as a technical and commercial proposition. It's also a distributional one. The flexibility dividend — cheaper electricity, better use of solar generation, access to demand-response payments — flows disproportionately to households that already have the physical asset that makes it possible: a private driveway with a dedicated charger.
Zapmap reports that on-street residential charging was the fastest-growing location category in the year to June 2026 — a sign that demand for charging without a driveway is real and rising, even as most of the smart-charging commercial infrastructure built so far assumes one.
This briefing sets out where the gap sits, and what closing it actually requires.
Driveway vs no driveway
Figure 1. None of this is anyone's deliberate design choice — it's the accumulated effect of smart-charging products being built around the easiest use case first.
Home charging vs on-street and rapid
The cheapest way to charge an EV is at home, overnight, on a dynamic tariff. Not everyone has a home to do it at.
A domestic driveway charger paired with a time-of-use or fully dynamic tariff can bring the effective cost of a full charge well below both a standard variable domestic rate and, by a wide margin, the price typically charged at public rapid or on-street infrastructure — which usually carries higher per-unit costs to cover the operator's own connection, hardware and maintenance overheads. A driver without off-street parking is structurally priced out of the cheapest tier of charging, not through any fault of their own, but because the product wasn't built for their situation.
Flats and community energy
Multi-occupancy buildings raise a version of the same problem at a different scale — a shared car park with a handful of chargers serving many residents needs its own allocation, tariff and billing logic, and rarely has an obvious "owner" motivated to install smart coordination the way a single homeowner does. Community energy schemes and managed shared-charger models are starting to fill this gap, but they need active commercial and technical design; they don't happen by default the way individual home charging does.
Cross-pavement solutions and procurement
Cable channels or gullies that let a driver run a charging cable safely across a public pavement from their home to a kerbside parking spot are one of the more direct fixes for households without off-street parking, but they depend on local-authority permission, standardised installation, and a maintenance commitment that not every council has resourced. Where local authorities have procured on-street charging at scale with tariff parity to home charging in mind, the economics of the gap start to close — but that's a deliberate procurement choice, not a market default.
Vulnerable consumers and accessibility
Opt-out rights
Anyone enrolled in automated smart charging or demand response needs a straightforward, genuinely accessible way to override or leave it.
Physical accessibility
Charger height, cable weight and payment interfaces need to work for disabled drivers, not just the median user.
Digital exclusion
App-only access, dynamic pricing and account-based billing can all disadvantage drivers without a smartphone or reliable data connection.
Payment transparency
Clear, comparable pricing matters more, not less, for drivers who don't have a cheaper home-charging alternative to fall back on.
Sharing network savings with everyone
Smart charging that avoids or defers network reinforcement saves money for the system as a whole — costs that would otherwise show up in network charges paid by every billpayer, including the many households who don't and may never own an EV. How much of that saving flows back to flexible EV owners as a direct reward, versus being spread across all billpayers as a lower overall network cost, is a genuine policy choice, not just a market outcome — and it's one that shapes whether the transition is seen as broadly fair or as a subsidy flowing to those who could already afford a driveway and a smart tariff.
Consumer protection is now a central strand of both SSES and the 2026 flexibility roadmap, not an afterthought to technical deployment — which is the right instinct. A flexible grid that only works well for drivers with driveways isn't a fully realised flexible grid; it's a well-optimised system for half the driving population, with the harder half still to solve.
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Chris Gales
Chris Gales leads CEHG. He converts complex technical and commercial choices into clear decisions and dependable outcomes for utilities running connected device estates at scale.
He writes these field notes from the practice — on bearer migration, smart metering architecture, procurement and operations — to help estates start counting down early.