Depending on the region, the differences in public charging infrastructure are still large. The automotive industry is calling for a higher pace of expansion. Some experts, on the other hand, prefer to focus on private sockets.
When Rainer Kling drives through the streets of his home town, he discovers a charging station on almost every corner. “There’s a car there, then you have one here. And when we drive around the curve, there’s another one here too,” Kling points out from his red Renault. However, the pensioner from Schmitten in Hesse is not referring to public but to private charging stations, the so-called wall boxes, which anyone can have installed. “Here in Schmitten, it’s definitely the case that the home wall box is crucial,” says Kling.
His observation from the commuter belt of Frankfurt am Main can be transferred to the whole of Germany: Many drivers of electric cars now have their own charging station at home. This is not surprising, because the federal government had been financially subsidizing such wall boxes on residential buildings since autumn 2020, with up to 900 euros per unit, via the state credit institution for reconstruction (KfW). The grant has now expired.
Boom in private wall boxes
According to statistics from the National Center for Charging Infrastructure, exactly 688,562 of the subsidized charging stations have been put into operation to date. A further 285,887 wall boxes are still being planned. But it was not only private individuals who benefited from state funds. KfW also launched a funding program for municipal and company car fleets. If you add everything up – including an unknown number of non-subsidized wall boxes – you probably come up with more than a million private and commercial charging stations for electric cars in Germany.
This means that there is presumably one charging point for every purely electric car in Germany. Because the Federal Motor Transport Authority put the number of electric cars registered in Germany as of January 1, 2023 at 1.01 million. There are also almost 865,000 plug-in hybrids.
Discussion about public charging infrastructure
In the public discussion, however, private wall boxes often only seem to play a subordinate role. In its charging station ranking, for example, the automobile association VDA only focuses on public infrastructure. At the end of April, the association published its new annual evaluation. Conclusion from VDA President Hildegard Müller: The expansion of the charging infrastructure is still lagging behind. “Germany finally needs more speed and determination when it comes to expansion,” said Müller.
The statistics of the Federal Network Agency, which the VDA evaluates in detail per region, recorded 80,541 public charging stations at the beginning of the year. On average, around 23 electric cars – pure electric cars and plug-in hybrids – share a public charging point. However, the differences within Germany are enormous: while in the city of Emden there are 5.9 e-cars per public charging station, in Offenbach 116.9 e-cars have to fight for a charging point in the city.
Expansion goal of federal government in danger
In an interview with the Hessian radio reminds VDA President Müller of the federal government’s goal: by 2030, 15 million electric cars should be driving on Germany’s roads and one million public charging stations should be available. “I don’t want to just hold on to this one million,” says Müller. “But it is clear that if we continue at this speed, it will definitely not be enough.”
Of course it would be wonderful if the number of private wall boxes increased. “But if the new normal is to be the electric car, then that’s going to happen in the big cities, where people live in rented apartments and don’t have their own parking spaces,” says Müller.
Charge at home and at work
Till Gnann, who works at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research in Karlsruhe and coordinates the electromobility department there, sees things a little differently. “The question is: do I really need that much public charging infrastructure?” the expert points out. With charging options at home and at work, you can achieve just as much or more.
In his presentations, Gnann likes to back up his arguments with numbers like these: Around 60 percent of all car drivers have their own garage. And half of all cars in Germany are in communities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.
Trend towards higher charging power
The Fraunhofer expert therefore does not see the big city problem addressed by VDA President Müller as a decisive hurdle. Especially since, in his opinion, the charging capacity per column will increase in the future, especially with regard to the expansion of so-called fast charging columns with an output of up to 350 kilowatts. “The higher my output that I have installed on the vehicles, the more vehicles I can also channel through to the charging stations,” says Gnann. In the future, he can imagine ratios between public fast charging stations and e-cars of 1:100 to 1:1000. With 15 million e-cars in 2030, according to the federal government’s goal, that would be significantly fewer than the planned one million public charging stations.
However, he admits that there are still too few fast charging stations, especially in urban areas. “At the moment they are still primarily on the Autobahn, and until they are available across the country in Germany, that will remain a certain obstacle,” he says.
search for nationwide concepts
Rainer Kling, the passionate electric driver from Schmitten, doesn’t think a nationwide network of fast charging stations is the best option for city dwellers. On the one hand, the price is still too high – fast charging stations sometimes cost significantly more than the less powerful AC stations. In addition, you would have to wait half an hour several times a week to fully charge it. “Fast charging is a concept for long journeys,” he says, not for basic needs.
Instead, he would like a kind of residents’ shop in the metropolitan areas. “For example in the parking lots of shopping centers or supermarkets: that they can be used for charging at night when they are equipped with wall boxes,” says Kling. In his opinion, these would be concepts that could work for all those who, exceptionally, do not have a private wall box at home.