Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Strategy - Is Enough Being Done?
When, in the near future, all cars and an increasing share of trucks and buses will be electric, countries will need large charging infrastructures.
All electric vehicles will need to be charged almost on a daily basis.
What will countries need to do to build the infrastructures necessary?
What resources and activities will be needed?
Find out more in the following video (if you prefer you can read the video transcript further below):
Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Strategy - Video Transcript
This video will be about electric vehicle infrastructure strategy.
The EU and the UK government have decided to ban the sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035, and the same decision has been made by air regulators in California.
This means that from now on and until 2035 and beyond, a growing share of electric vehicles will be used all over the world.
And these will need extensive charging infrastructures.
For these structures to become user friendly several different charging solutions will need to be included in these systems and for the development of these charging systems to be possible, governments will need to develop strategies.
Growing vehicle fleets will need to be charged on a daily basis, and many vehicles will need to be charged regardless of where they happen to be when they run out of electricity.
There may even be a need for extensive electric road systems. These are electric tracks in the road surface for dynamic charging on the go. With electric road systems cars and trucks and busses can charge while they are driving.
At present, there are only 2% electric cars in the EU and 5% in the UK. And many of those are hybrids with a relatively short distance on the battery. Some EU countries have a larger share, like Sweden and the Netherlands, and no country, not even Norway, which is the global leader in terms of the size of their electric vehicle fleet, has arrived at a situation where the majority of cars or transport vehicles are electric.
Already at this point there is a shortage of installation capacity, installation workers and project managers for installation projects.
So the development of the charging infrastructure lags behind.
McKinsey, the consulting company, have estimated that 10,000 fast chargers will have to be installed very week until 2030. At present, 1600 fast chargers are installed in Europe per week. So this means that there is a backlog of a very large number of chargers already at this point.
Developing large scale systems for electric vehicle charging will be very different from building a few chargers here and there.
To turn the dream of electromobility into reality large amounts of money will need to be invested in infrastructure and these investments will need to be made before the volume growth of electric vehicle fleets, because cars will need to be charged from day one when they are bought by their users and owners.
In Norway, they have 20% electric cars. But this country also has a situation that is dramatically different from all other countries in Europe. They have twice as much electricity as Sweden, four times as much electricity per person as Germany and six times the electricity per person compared to the UK.
Norway is also an oil rich country with a small population.
The government can afford to subsidize the purchases and the use of electric vehicles because every electric vehicle saves oil that can be sold by Norway, Norwegian oil companies in export markets so they can finance their growth of electric vehicles through a large export of oil.
These aspects combined indicate that Norway enjoys very favorable conditions compared to other countries.
To satisfy the growing charging needs countries will also need to expand power generation, reinforce power grids and train large numbers of individuals to be able to work in the expansion projects for these systems on the national, regional and local levels.
At present, infrastructure growth is slow in most countries and it needs to speed up in order to meet the targets to ban the sales of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035.
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