Europe needs an ambitious charging strategy for 130 million EVs by 2035: Study

Europe will require to come up with an ambitious charging infrastructure strategy to cope with the growing fleet of electric vehicles in the continent that is expected to increase to 130 million by 2035, claims a study by EY and Eurelectric. The study points out that governments and other agencies need to push aggressively to meet the rising demand for public EV charging infrastructure.

The study forecasts that Europe will require 65 million EV chargers by 2035 to support the 130 million electric vehicles in the continent. Among these, nine million would be public EV chargers, while 56 million will be residential EV chargers. Currently, Europe has around 3.3 million electric vehicles.

The rising demand for electric vehicles is so high that one in every 11 cars sold in the European Union in 2021 was fully electric, marking a 63 per cent growth compared to 2020. To support them, the continent currently has around 3.74 lakh public chargers.

However, the distribution of them is uneven as two-thirds of these are concentrated in just five countries - Netherlands, France, Italy, Germany and the UK. Some other European countries do not have a single charger per 100 km of road. The study claims that this polarisation between economies risks destabilising the electrification of the vehicle fleet. It further says that to keep up with demand, Europe needs half a million public chargers annually through to 2030 and one million a year after that.

The major challenges in front of building a robust public charging infrastructure include planning and permitting issues, which are massively delaying the process, creating bottlenecks for EV growth in Europe. The report also says that rising EV sales will push up European electricity demand by 11 per cent every year.