EV Charging — Differences around the Globe
The electric vehicles are here to stay and with it, the world is changing in order to make this jump faster and less painful. But these changes aren’t homogenous around the world. According to Bloomberg, there are some major differences in how countries are dealing with one of the last remaining barriers to widespread EV adoption, the Charging Points.
The leader of these adoptions is non-other than China. Yes, China is the biggest adopter of EV’s Charging Points in the world, growing from 300,000 EV charging outlets available to public use in 2018, to 516,000 in 2019 and 800,000 EV at the end of 2020.
Just in December 2020, China installed 112,000 public charging points, which is more than the entire U.S. and Germany public charging network together (89.200 EV and 21.650 EV charging points respectively in 2020 — total 110.850 EV charging points).
But let’s not extrapolate from the December numbers alone. Even representing almost two-thirds of all public charging points installed globally, a deeper analysis of China shows us that the numbers are usually lower. The second-highest month of 2020 for charging installations — October — just represented 63,000 EV charging installations.
What makes China so fast? Two things — one, the strong policies and incentives of some cities, aimed at limiting the sales of new internal combustion vehicles and two, the characteristics of these high-rise cities that offer less detached homes with driveways or garages where easy home charging options could be implemented.
Comparatively, the U.S. has tens of millions of garages with a socket to charge the car at home, while China just has 900,000 homes and workplaces with charging points installed.
So what’s the conclusion? For now, China is leading the EV charging outlet networks race but still has a long way to go. It will need many more EV charging outlets and other solutions to feed their growing electronic vehicle population in their massive cities.
For the U.S. and Europe, even though tens of millions have garages with EV charging systems, the public EV charging network still has a lot to improve. Some people, especially in the U.S. affirm having “Range Anxiety”, which is considered to be one of the major barriers to large-scale EV adoption. To overcome this fear the governments will have to focus not only on incentives for EV’s but also on building a strong EV charging network.
