China is going to build 800,000 new charging points this year in support of the booming new energy vehicle (NEV) market. The figure includes 100,000 public chargers and 700,000 non-public chargers. The latter category consists mainly of company-charging points, and charging points for taxi's, buses and commercial vehicles.
In 2016, China also added 100,000 public charging points, and it has a total of about 150,000 public charging points right now.
The new points will mainly be installed in cities and on highways. China's National Energy Administration (NEA) claims that in Beijing and Shanghai there is always a charging facility within a radius of five kilometers and that 14,000 kilometers of highway have access to fast-charging stations.
The pace of construction will continue to at least 2020 when China wants to have enough charging capacity to support a fleet of five million electric vehicles.
New Energy Vehicles include electric vehicles (EV) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV). Last year 507,000 NEVs were sold in China and this year the country targets 800,000 units.
The 2017 sales number consists of 350,000 passenger cars, the rest is made up of buses and various commercial vehicles - this part of the NEV boom in China goes largely unnoticed but its growth is expected to surpass NEV passenger cars.
Big cities like Beijing and Shanghai are adding electric and plug-in hybrid buses to their fleets in record numbers, and many city-based transport companies are going electric as well, using vehicles ranging from tricycles, minivans to mid-sized trucks.
The lack of charging points has long been hindering NEV sales in China. Even when the government started handing out generous NEV subsidies some five years ago they somehow neglected this problem. In late 2015, there were only 30,000 charging points in China. It was only in early 2016 that the government got serious about charging, and they seem almost fanatic now, setting the stage for a new phase of the NEV revolution.
