© Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy; based on dated provided by BDEW
Electric mobility: infrastructure expansion greatly accelerated
Infrastructure for electric cars is being developed at greater speed: over the past year, the number of public charging points in Germany has risen from around 12,700 to approx. 16,100. This marks an increase of just under 27%. These are figures from the German Association of Energy and Water Management (BDEW), which collects data about public and part-public charging points in a charging points register. More than three quarters of the charging points are operated by energy companies. Germany’s network agency, the Bundesnetzagentur, also records all new charging points in a Germany-wide map of charging points.
EU Commission recommendation exceeded
At the end of 2018, a total of 150,000 (plug-in) electric cars were registered with Germany’s Federal Motor Transport Authority. With 16,000+ charging points in the country, this means that Germany has exceeded the European Commission's recommendation of providing at least one charging point for every ten electric cars. According to the German Association of Energy and Water Management, "Infrastructure expansion will keep pace even with the growing number of electric cars."
The Federal Motor Transport Authority is seeing an upward trend in the number of electric cars being registered. Of the approx. 3.5 million new passenger cars registered last year, 36,000 were electric cars – an increase of 44% over the previous year. In addition, almost 31,500 plug-in hybrids were newly licensed (+6.8%).
Hamburg has highest number of charging points per million inhabitants
Most of the publicly accessible charging points where drivers of electric vehicles can recharge their batteries are in Bavaria (3,618), North Rhine-Westphalia (2,739) and Baden-Württemberg (2,525). This map of Germany shows the location of charging points across all of the Länder. When it comes to the number of charging points per capita in each Land, distribution figures are different again: with 461 charging points per million inhabitants, Hamburg comes in top, followed by Bavaria with 280, and Baden-Württemberg with 231. At the lower end of the scale, the Saarland offers 69 charging points per million inhabitants, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania 78.
The German government wants to expand the charging infrastructure available for electric vehicles even more. The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy has set aside €176 million in funding for this task up to 2020. Key aims here are to create charging facilities for private-vehicle owners who cannot park and charge at home, and to motivate companies to set up charging facilities for company vehicles and private vehicles owned by employees. For more information on Federal Government incentives for expanding the charging infrastructure and purchasing electric vehicles, please click here.