Recently it was revealed that the Chinese province of Guangdong has EV charging stations equivalent to gas pumps. It is much higher in numbers than the number of charging stations in the US. Over the past few years, the coastal region borders of Hong Kong have built 345,126 chargers by the end of September. It is around 19,116 charging stations, making it the largest EV charging network in China. It has more than doubled from a year ago.
The numbers are around three times as many public chargers in the US. In a push to electrify their nations’ car fleets, governments around the world are trying to roll out and scale their public charging infrastructure swiftly enough to service new battery-powered cars. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law devotes $5 billion to build a nationwide network of EV charging ports along major travel corridors in the US, while Germany has spent or pledged $6.4 billion to support the charging industry. But both the US and Europe have fallen well behind China in building out their networks. A BloombergNEF analysis counted 112,900 public chargers deployed across the US and 442,000 in Europe by the end of 2021, compared with 1.15 million in China.
Growing industry
In just the past 12 months, China added 592,000 public chargers, more than the total number the Biden administration wants by 2030. The government plans to build enough charging stations for 20 million electric vehicles by 2025, according to a January document by the National Development and Reform Commission and nine other ministries. These charging pylons are installed by third-party utility operators, and state-owned electric companies, the two biggest of which are State Grid Corp. of China and China Southern Power Grid, as well as EV automakers like Tesla and China’s Nio and Xpeng. Tesla operates more than 8,700 Supercharger stalls across 370 cities in China, roughly a quarter of its global Supercharger network.
China’s efforts to forge a green infrastructure are paying off: domestic demand for cleaner cars now dramatically dwarfs that of Europe and the US. A quarter of all new cars purchased in China are new-energy vehicles, and NEV sales are forecast to hit a record 6 million this year. In Guangdong, ubiquitous charging is also boosting electric car ownership. EV sales jumped 151% in the first half of the year, according to the Guangdong Bureau of Statistics. The province now has over 1.4 million electric vehicles, the highest share in the country, according to the National Monitoring and Management platform for New-Energy Vehicles. Guangdong’s provincial government is also doubling down on EV manufacturing.
Credits – BS
