ACEA: EU needs eight times as many charging points to meet demand

The European Union needs to install eight times as many charging points per year to meet demand as it did last year. This is according to calculations published today on its website by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA). More than 150,000 charging points were installed in the EU last year, bringing the total to over 630,000.

Last year’s figure is too low to meet the European Commission’s (EC) target of having 3.5 million charging points in the EU by 2030. According to ACEA, around 410,000 would need to be installed annually.

Demand is rapidly outstripping supply, ACEA warns. Between 2017 and 2023, sales of electric vehicles in the EU grew three times faster than the installation of charging points.

„We are very concerned that the rollout of infrastructure in recent years has not kept pace with sales of battery electric vehicles,“ said ACEA Director General Sigrid de Vries.

„There is also a risk that this ‚infrastructure gap‘ will widen further in the future – by much more than the European Commission estimates,“ de Vries said.

ACEA estimates that 8.8 million charging points will be needed by 2030 to meet demand. That means 1.2 million would need to be added each year, eight times more than were installed last year.

„To bridge the infrastructure gap and meet climate targets, investment in public charging infrastructure needs to be increased urgently,“ de Vries said.

According to statistics from the Czech Centre for Transport Research (CDV) and the Ministry of Industry and Trade from early December last year, around 390 new charging stations opened in the Czech Republic last year. This brought the total in Czechia to 2,313 stations with 4,313 charging points, ranking the country 13th in the EU.