Germany will miss 2030 e-car target due to lack of charging points – consultancy

Germany will manage only to get just over 10 million electric cars on the road by 2030 instead of the targeted 15 million due to insufficient charging infrastructure, argues a report by business consultancy PwC. “The sluggish expansion of the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles jeopardises the government’s climate targets,” the consultancy said. “PwC expects only about 10.5 million BEVs registered on German roads in 2030.” The report said that as many as 15.8 million battery-electric vehicles would be needed to reach the country’s emissions reduction targets in the transport sector. Germany had 60,400 public charging points in May and currently adds around 330 per week, PwC said. “Without accelerating the pace of expansion, Germany is heading for a massive charging gap, both in the public and private sectors.”

The report said Germany will have only 210,000 public fast charging points by 2030, instead of at least 340,000 needed to supply 10.5 million e-vehicles. “To meet the climate targets with 15.8 million e-cars, as many as 520,000 public charging points would be needed.” The authors warn there could also be a large gap in private charging points, of which 5.6 million would be needed. Bureaucratic approval procedures and coordination problems between different players in the sector are among the reasons for the sluggish charging expansion rate, the study says. More entry-level electric car models will also be required to reach the climate targets, but carmakers and suppliers struggle with semiconductor supply shortages and rising raw material prices that undermine the profitability of e-cars, according to the authors.

There are widely differing estimates of how many charging points will be needed in Germany. Earlier this month, the country’s energy industry warned that plans for the rollout of charging infrastructure are greatly exaggerated. On Wednesday (29 June), the head of industry association BDEW, Kerstin Andreae, said that "the expansion of the charging infrastructure is making good progress," having picked up speed in the last one and a half years in particular. The number of public charging points has increased by almost 50 percent between the beginning of 2021 and now. "A lot has also been achieved in terms of area coverage: the maximum distance of 50 km between fast chargers along the motorway set by the National Platform for the Future of Mobility has practically been achieved throughout Germany," Andreae said.

The government currently aims for one million public charging points by 2030 to enable its target of having 15 million e-cars on the road by that date, but demand for between 100,000 and 250,000 public chargers is much more realistic as most people are expected to charge at home or at work, and also because the share of rapid chargers increases, the BDEW said.