Sales of plug-in cars have grown much faster in recent years than the installation of charging stations. That is why eight times as many charging points must be added every year until 2030, according to the industry club.
Last year, 150,000 public charging stations were installed, bringing the total to 630,000. According to the European Commission, there should be 3.5 million charging points by 2030. To achieve this, almost three times as many charging points must be installed every year.
The ACEA aims even higher. The trade organization estimates that 8.8 million charging points will be needed by 2030. To achieve that goal, 1.2 million charging stations would need to be installed per year, eight times the installation rate in 2023.
The existing charging points are certainly not evenly distributed across the EU. 61 percent of all charging stations in the EU are in the Netherlands, France and Germany. The Netherlands has 144,453 charging stations, 52 times as many as Romania, which is much larger. In countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Cyprus and Malta there are only a few hundred charging stations.
“We need mass adoption of electric cars in all EU countries to meet Europe’s ambitious CO2 reduction targets,” said Sigrid de Vries, director at ACEA. “This won’t happen without the widespread availability of public charging infrastructure throughout the region.”
“There is no easy access to public charging points nice to havebut an essential condition for decarbonising road transport,” she warns. “Investments in public charging infrastructure must be urgently increased if we are to close the infrastructure gap and meet climate targets.”
