EU must step up e-car charging station expansion thirtyfold – institute
Clean Energy Wire
To achieve its target of having 3.5 million e-car charging stations, the EU will have to increase the rate of expansion thirtyfold at the very least, the industry-sponsored German Economic Institute (IW) said. But expansion has stalled for years, writes Thomas Puls, IW senior economist for transport and infrastructure. In 2020 there were 225,000 public charging points in the EU, but 70 percent of them were in just three countries: the Netherlands, France and Germany. In addition, only 25,000 points offered a charging capacity of more than 22 kW, which qualifies them as a truly suitable public charging points, according to Puls. From 2019 to 2020, only 10,000 started operation. "The pace of expansion would therefore have to be increased more than thirty-fold to reach the Commission's target - at least," Puls says.
The take-up of electric vehicles has increased rapidly in Europe since last year, at least partly due to generous government subsidies. In its "Fit for 55" package of measures to reduce emissions, the EU Commission proposed a ban on the sale of new polluting cars from 2035.
