Germany’s e-car charging infrastructure grows over a third in 2022, capacity rising even faster
Clean Energy Wire
The roll-out of electric vehicle charging infrastructure has made good progress in 2022, with the number of public charging points growing 35 percent to more than 80,500, energy industry association BDEW said. The installed charging capacity even grew more than 40 percent, from about 1.7 gigawatts (GW) to nearly 2.5 GW, due to a high number of ultra-fast charging points being deployed. Under the current EU scheme, the installed charging points could theoretically service up to 2.5 million fully electric vehicles, while only about one million e-cars are currently registered in the country, BDEW said. “The figures clearly show there has been an enormous technological leap forward in the charging capacity,” said BDEW head Kerstin Andreae. As the average capacity of available charging points has grown from about 20 kilowatts (kW) to 30 kW within the past five years, e-cars can now be charged faster and more can be supplied per day, Andreae added. “This makes it clear that simply counting the number of charging points does not do justice to the technological development,” she said, adding that the installed capacity should be seen as the key indicator for assessing the charging infrastructure’s potential. Given the expected progress of capacity per charging point in the coming years, the goal of installing one million charging points by 2030, as formulated in the German government’s coalition treaty, “has become technologically outdated,” Andreae added. Focussing on the number of charging points alone would not reflect true charging capacity, she argued.
The German government in late 2022 announced a ‘Charging Infrastructure Masterplan’ that is meant to lay the groundwork of reaching one million charging points by the end of the decade. In a bid to reduce its stubbornly high transport sector emissions, the government aims to have 15 million fully electric passenger cars on Germany's roads by 2030, for which the supply of electric cars and a lack of charging points are considered as the biggest challenges.
