The world is on a transition to electric vehicles, the only question is timeframe. A new report from Columbia University shows the world now has a staggering 1.5 million charging stations for electric vehicles.
What’s possibly more amazing is that China has 808,000 EV chargers, screaming ahead of the US with an estimated 500,000. In terms of total electric vehicles sold, the report shows China has around 2.6 million, while the US has less than half that at 1.1 million.
This accelerated transition to electric vehicles in China is easy to understand when they have some of the worst pollution in the world.
As a strategy to encourage vehicle owners to choose electric, Shanghai has made registering an internal combustion engine (ICE), prohibitively expensive, wth licence plates costing a massive US$12,000, while plates for an EV are free. Cars with EV plates may also have privileges like accessing restricted traffic zones.
One noteworthy takeaway is that China has one nationwide EV fast-charging standard, known as China GB/T. The US has three EV fast charging standards: CHAdeMO, SAE Combo and Tesla.
While we’ve seen charging standards evolve over the past few years, that technology development isn’t stopping with China aiming to deploy a new fast charging stations based on the GB/T standard. Scheduled to be released in 2019 or 2020, it’s expected this will deliver up to 900kW for larger commercial vehicles. To put that into perspective, the fastest chargers we have in Australia right now are the CCS Type-2 which are capable of 350kW.
The report is incredibly detailed and well researched, I encourage anyone with an interest in EVs to go take a look.
More information Columbia University via TechnologyReview.
