EV charging infrastructure in 2024
Progress, but nowhere near fast enough
This is the first post of many to come in our Elby publication here on Medium. Follow along for insights on all things EV from policy to infrastructure to new cars.
If you’re an EV owner, chances are that EV charging occupies a significant part of your mind. You always need to be one step ahead: “Am I going somewhere tomorrow?” If yes, “does the car have enough charge to go there?” and “how will I charge on the way?” Granted, EV charging infrastructure is still in its very early days: Still awkward, cumbersome, something you have to think about. It doesn’t have to be that way, and that’s what we here at Elby is setting out to change.
This post will be a primer on EV charging infrastructure where we’re going to draw highlights from two major reports that were recently published IEAs Global EV outlook 2024 and ACEAs Charging ahead report
Let’s start by looking at EV adoption globally.
EV adoption
Today there are currently 28M EVs on the road and a little less than half that is plugin hybrids (12M). Those 40M vehicles account for roughly 3.2% of total vehicles on the roads today (so ~1% hybrids and 2.2% EVs). Even though EVs are all over the news and everybody hails the speed with which they scale, we’re still in early days when it comes to adoption.
In the following, we consider only BEV, i.e. “full EVs with no ICE” so whenever I mention “EV” I mean BEV, but it’s worth knowing that hybrids are growing too albeit, fortunately for the climate, slower.
While the number of EVs are growing significantly, as with all things, the future is not evenly distributed: 95% of the growth in EV sales in 2023 happened in China.
In 2035 that number is expected to have grown to 440M vehicles or 29% of all vehicles will be EVs. To me that number is scary. It’s scary that we in 10 years with multiple countries banning sales of EVs aren’t at higher rate of adoption than 29% but that’s still a quite significant number of vehicles on the road.
Crucially for EV charging infrastructure which is the main topic of this post, what does the battery ranges of these vehicle sales look like? The graph below gives that picture.
While it’s clear that battery range is increasing, it’s increase is “only” a moderate ~75% in 8 years on average. And interestingly, for small cars (which is crucial to EV adoption across all income ranges) it’s pretty static.
Another key factor of EV adoption is price parity with comparable ICE cars. While Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of EVs generally favor EVs (but is somewhat dependent on country) the price gap still speaks for it self. The graph below shows the price of small, medium and SUV car sizes for EVs vs ICE in 2018 and 2022. While clear that EVs are dropping in price rapidly and small EVs in China are cheaper than their ICE counterparts, price parity hasn’t been reached globally yet. But looks like it’s only heading in one direction.
Now we turn to look at how all those 28M EVs are charged today and how the 440M EVs will be charged in the future.
Private charging infrastructure
First of all, there are almost 10x more private charging points than public charging points as can be seen in the graph below. The public charging points are the dark blue and green parts of the graph at the top.
Note that “Private other” is charge points that are neither publicly accessible nor charging points at private residences so I’m assuming that this covers charge points at privately managed parking garages, offices etc. This means that out of the 28M EVs almost all has access to home charging. From a user experience perspective this makes total sense. Having an EV as a garage owner is a no-brainer (provided you can afford one). It’s cheaper, it’s a better ride, it’s cleaner, lower TCO and you never have to visit a gas station ever again. But as a so called “garage orphan” (people without a garage, like in the cities) the choice might not be as obvious. As someone with two small boys I can easily envision the horror of walking 500m from the nearest charging island with hands full of groceries and them screaming at each other… and me. Not ideal for sure.
It should be noted that the distribution of garage owners vs garage orphans seem to vary quite a bit by geography as a survey in 2023 showed that as much as 44% of EU EV owners are garage orphans.
So how does the distribution of private and public charge points develop by 2035? In the next 12 years we still expect home charging to be the way that more than half of EV owners charge their car. Private charge points are expected to grow 14x, while public chargers grow only 6x.
Public charging infrastructure
Now looking at public charging infrastructure. The message is pretty clear from consumers to car manufacturers to the experts at IEA: Succesful and fast roll out of public charging points is crucial to increase EV adoption. Public charging infrastructure plays the crucial role that it kills range anxiety which is a major factor when people are deciding whether or not to buy an EV. People need to be 100% sure that wherever they go they can always charge their car at the speed they need to. This means that on the public side, both fast and slow charging is required.
The first graph shows how the public charging infrastructure has developed over the past years. 2023 was a very good year, where the amount of charge points jumped from 2.7M to 3.9M. In 2023 we have a total of 1.4M fast and 2.5M slow chargers globally.
But as always the future is not even distributed as a whopping 2.7M 😳 of those charge points in 2023 are located in China. This leaves a measly 1.2M charge points for the rest of the world. EU27 for instance has only 592.000 charge points. US comes in at 183.000 charge points. My home country of Denmark has a meagre 17.000 charge points.
In the future, IEA predicts that we will reach 24.4M charging points in 2035, which corresponds to an increase of 6.2x from 2023.
If we compare these numbers to the amount of EVs on the road we can calculate that in 2023 there are 7.1 EVs pr public charger and in 2035 that number grows to 18 EVs pr public charger 😬 on average globally. This means that the scaling of public charging infrastructure isn’t even close to the speed with which EVs are adopted.
Even though the growth in charging points historically and projected looks impressive, we’re really lacking incredibly far behind. ACEA (the European Automobile Manufacturers Association) recently released this graph.
Which shows that although charge points have increased rapidly, the number of EVs on the road today has increased even crazier. This leads them to conclude that we need another 8x more public charge points installed every year than what was done in 2023 in order to keep up with demand. 8x! 🤯 To put that into perspective ACEA predicts that from today and until 2030 EU will need to install 22.438 charging points per week 🥵. Where the heck are they going to come from? If you’re an EV owner, this is not very good news. If you’re a charge point provider like us then it’s great news as it really underlines how big this market is.
Turning away for a second from the lack of charging points, let’s look at what EV charging looks like in different countries. According to ACEA 3 countries in EU are doing particularly well. In fact 3 countries are housing 61% of all EU public charge points: Netherlands, France and Germany. In addition and unsurprisingly, ACEA has identified a strong link between the availability of public charging infrastructure and growth in EV sales, meaning that the more public charge points are available, the higher EV sales are.
Charger availability and speeds are apparently quite different depending on which country you’re in. The bar chartbelow shows the amount of EVs pr charge point and the red dot shows the amount of KW of charge power available pr EV (more on that in a sec).
From an EV owner perspective the blue bar should be as small as possible and the red dot as high as possible. In an ideal world, you would want ~1 charger pr vehicle, in this way EV owners will know they can always charge their car. However, this depends on the country’s charging strategy. New Zealand and Australia for instance prioritizes investments in fast chargers and not slow chargers, meaning that their chargers pr EV is high, but KW pr EV is about the same as the many of countries. Norway is known for having a very high level of EV penetration with monthly sales numbers typically in the 90% range so it’s interesting to see that they both have a very high amount of EVs pr charger and a somewhat elevated KW pr EV, which could indicate a growing lack of chargers. If we look at Korea, which looks to be a great country to have an EV in, lots of power available and few EVs pr charger. Unfortunately, this is not because the infrastructure is huge, but rather because the number of EVs is small. So it’s important to keep the number of EVs in the country in mind when looking that this graph.
The growth limiters of EV charging infrastructure
To wrap this up: While EV charging infrastructure is expanding rapidly, it’s clear from the reports from two of the most respected experts in this field, IEA and ACEA, that EV charging infrastructure is not growing at the pace it should. ACEA maybe slightly more concerned about the speed than IEA, but overall they tell the same picture. We need to speed up deployments in public charging infrastructure — A LOT.
There are many issues that may be hindering the scale of public charge points, this is a short list of the major things that come to mind. We will go into much greater detail about this in a future post:
Public tenders: According to the EU AFIR regulation all public charge points must go through a public tender process which takes too long and is causing the rollout of charging infrastructure to be reactive instead of proactive. The companies involved in the bidding process needs to be absolutely sure that they can get their money back on the huge investment it is to put up just a slow charger today. IEA recommends in their report that tender contracts should run for at least 15 years in order for the charge points to become profitable. 15 years!!
Infrastructure upgrades takes time: Installing a new charger today not only has to go through a public tender process, but also has to connect to the existing grids. This requires a road work crew, diggers, electricians to set up and install new charge points with costs usually ranging around 14–28.000€ pr charge point. Not only are this cost almost unbelievably high, but the time it takes to perform such an install, before permits, crew, diggers etc are booked and ready to work can be months.
Grid upgrades: This applies especially to fast charging, which we’re going to dive into in a later post, but according to ACEA grid upgrades for 240B€ is needed by 2030 to support all this charging. This can and probably will hold back the roll out of conventional public charging infrastruture.
Obtrusive: Public charging infrastructure is big, bulky and in the way. Naturally, wherever people can resist it they will.
We can’t roll out public charging infrastructure the way we’ve been doing it so far. It’s time for something new.
A new category of EV charging: Private public charge points
Our good friends at Monta was the first in our region to see this: If we can make some of the private charge points at offices, parking spaces, all those in the “private — other” category from figure 7 could suddenly be made public and thus go from being private, to be available public charge points.
At Elby, we go for the whale.
If we can get private individuals and private companies to put up public charging infrastructure on their private property (this is key), then we can scale this thing into oblivion. Because then we will avoid public tenders, avoid infrastructure upgrades, avoid grid upgrades (especially with smart charging), and with some clever design we can make sure it blends into the city environment as the citizens deserves. In fact, we strongly believe this is the only way we can meet ACEAs numbers.
References
IEA Global EV Outlook 2024, https://www.iea.org/reports/global-ev-outlook-2024
ACEA Charging Ahead 2024, https://www.acea.auto/publication/automotive-insights-charging-ahead-accelerating-the-rollout-of-eu-electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure/
