Source: Energy & Management Powernews, June 17, 2022
A look at Sweden could fertilize the discussion about the expansion of chargepoints. There, a parking garage with 800 charging points has opened, four times the German best.
It's numbers that can cause giddiness in the electric vehicle camp in this country. Stockholm wants to provide more than 100,000 charging points for e-cars in its metropolitan area alone with about 1.6 million people by 2030. Preferred locations for electric charging are parking garages and other public parking spaces; most recently, a parking garage in the Swedish capital completed its second expansion stage, now with 800 charging points.
At the end of the project in 2026, the new parking building in the Hagastaden district is expected to have 1,000 parking spaces, all of which will be equipped with charging technology from global market leader CTEK. CTEK celebrates the joint project as the "largest electric parking garage in Europe" and now wants to gain a foothold in Germany.
Here, parking garages are in operation or in planning, some of which are equipped with electric charging points and - as in Heilbronn from 2023 - come to a maximum of around 200 charging points. That would be a fifth of the Stockholm model. In Nuremberg, the municipal utility N-Ergie has been operating a "parking garage of the future" with 128 charging points since July 2021. Frankfurt wants to reach 300 points in eleven underground garages and parking garages in 2023.
Berlin lags behind in expansion targets by a hundredfold
The difference in ambition in expansion becomes even clearer when it comes to comparing the Stockholm targets and those of the German capital. While the Berlin Senate wants to create at least one charging point per ten electric cars by 2030, Stockholm is working in parallel toward one charging point per 16 inhabitants. Alone the different reference value underlines the far larger ambitions of the Swedes.
Also with the development speed worlds lie between Stockholm and Berlin: At the Spree with its approximately 4 million humans would have to develop until 2030 approximately 237,500 new load points, in order to come in relation to the per capita offer of Stockholm. However, the Senate's December 2021 plans call for only 2,000 new points to be built by the city within eight years and another 1,000 existing charging points to be taken over from other operators. Thus Stockholm reaches in the same period approximately the hundredfold at addition.
Before this background the warning of Kerstin Andreae, Germany strives with the development plans of the Federal Government on an "oversupply" at publicly accessible load stations to, loses at sharpness. The CEO of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) believes that one million public charging points, as set out as a target in the "Master Plan for Charging Infrastructure II" for 2030, is oversized. Rather, Andreae believes that 100,000 to 250,000 points nationwide would be sufficient. Currently, e-car drivers in Germany can access a good 60,000 points.
Charging potential in parking garages "to be tapped quickly"
According to the approach of the BDEW, for which the economic viability of the charging stations of its member companies are in the foreground, either exactly the number of Stockholm charging stations or about twice that number would thus be sufficient for all of Germany in 2030. Reiner Priggen takes a different view from the energy industry association in this case. He sees the Stockholm way "as an excellent stimulus for our major cities," according to the chairman of the State Association of Renewable Energies in North Rhine-Westphalia (LEE NRW).
Taken as an example for the district city of Essen, which is also fondly referred to as the energy capital of Germany, the Stockholm example would make it necessary to expand to a good 36,000 charging points by 2030. Essen has a population of slightly less than 600,000. According to the charging point register, a web service provided by the BDEW company Energie Codes und Services GmbH, Essen currently has fewer than 1,000 public charging points.
Priggen basically sees a "very laborious process" to equip public spaces with charging options. Therefore, he expects charging stations in parking garages to have "a much greater potential that can be tapped quickly." According to the statistics platform Statista, which compiles figures from the electromobility service provider Chargemap, around one in four charging stations can be found in parking garages or public parking lots (as of November 2021). However, projects like Stockholm's also come at a price. There, the municipal parking management company Stockholm Parkering is spending 67 million euros on the underground parking garage Hagastaden, 2 million euros of which are to be spent on the charging infrastructure alone. In the case of the neighborhood garage in Heilbronn, the municipal utility company in charge of the project last calculated total investment at 18.1 million euros. Depending on the expansion schedule, a multiple of tens of millions would be required for a sufficient number of "electric parking garages". A Herculean task for municipal utilities and the public sector, provided that the private sector does not queue up for such projects - which is not to be assumed.
Author: Volker Stephan
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