What is it?
The Rural and Island Infrastructure Fund is a grant scheme (funded by Transport Scotland and delivered via the Energy Saving Trust) aimed at improving publicly accessible electric-vehicle charging infrastructure in rural and island areas of Scotland, where private investment is less likely to happen.
Key features:
It supports publicly accessible charge-points only, to support both residents and visitors of rural areas.
It has defined tiers of grant-support depending on the power output of the charging point.
It focuses on sites located in very remote small towns, accessible rural, remote rural or island postcode areas (as per the Scottish Government’s 8-Fold Urban/Rural Classification categories 5-8).
Who can apply?
Eligible applicants include land-owning businesses or registered charge-point operators (CPOs) who:
Own or have permission to complete works on privately-owned land in a qualifying rural or island postcode.
Hold a UK bank account for business purposes.
Are registered as a business.
Applications can come either from the landowner (as the grantee) or from a CPO on behalf of the landowner, provided the necessary permissions are in place.
Check out the full funding eligibility here.
How can LENZA help?
LENZA users can easily identify potentially suitable sites that may qualify for funding, and use this intel to contact the relevant landowners or businesses.
While the Scottish Government’s 8-Fold Urban/Rural Classification dataset isn’t one of the pre-set datasets on LENZA, you can easily upload it yourself by following this guide:
Download the file (linked at the bottom of this article).
Login to LENZA and head to the Data Explorer.
Click on the ‘Upload Data’ button:
Drag the file into the box, and wait for the file to upload.
Click on the ‘Local data’ folder to view your dataset. It may take some time to process, so please be patient.
Once it’s ready to download, you’ll see the download icon appear. Click on the icon to get the data to appear on the map.
The full dataset will appear orange at first. You’ll need to head over to the ‘Layers’ tab, and click on your dataset.
Click on the three dots next to ‘Fill Colour’:
To view the data based on the 8-Fold Classification, select this field here:
Almost there! Just change the colour range to be eight colours, and select a new set of colours from the menu:
If you’d prefer, decrease the opacity of the dataset to reveal the base map underneath:
That’s it! Hit ‘save config’ at the bottom to ensure you don’t need to set up the colouring again.
To share the dataset with other users, you can simply click on the ‘i’ icon next to the dataset name, and toggle ‘share dataset with other users’. This will cause the dataset to appear for all users at your local authority.
Identifying areas suitable for funding:
Suitable sites must be located in very remote small towns, accessible rural, remote rural or island postcode areas. You can leverage the Scottish Government’s 8-Fold Urban/Rural Classification data to easily spot these areas, by filtering the data to only show you areas classed as categories 5-8.
Once the data is downloaded and configured, head to ‘Filters’:
Add a filter to the SGUR dataset, and select the field ‘ur8class’:
Adjust the slider bar (or enter numbers into the boxes) to filter the data to only show you areas classed as 5-8:
Done! The data on the map will now highlight only areas in suitably remote locations.
Additional useful datasets
You may want to layer on existing transport datasets from LENZA. The following datasets may be useful:
Zapmap - Charger Devices
Walking Distance from EV Charge Points
EVCP Pavement Suitability
Network Topology
Secondary Substation Supply Areas