We are getting some new and interesting data about how fast electric car charge points are growing in a new report.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2020 EV Outlook report, which includes analyses of several important data points related to electric vehicle adoption, like charging infrastructure.
Charging infrastructure has often been described as the ‘chicken or egg’ problem for electric cars: electric cars won’t be popular until charging is readily available and charging won’t be widely deployed until electric cars are popular.
But it’s not as big of an issue as people think because an electric vehicle can plug into a regular electric outlet and charge – albeit slowly.
Therefore, there already are hundreds of millions of EV charge points in the world that help kickstart EV adoption.
With this said, dedicated EV charge points are still extremely important to accelerate EV adoption by making the ownership experience more convenient.
IEA’s report claims that are now about 7.3 million chargers worldwide as of the end of 2019.
However, most of them are private charge points:
“The infrastructure for electric-vehicle charging continues to expand. In 2019, there were about 7.3 million chargers worldwide, of which about 6.5 million were private, light-duty vehicle slow chargers in homes, multi-dwelling buildings and workplaces. Convenience, cost-effectiveness and a variety of support policies (such as preferential rates, equipment purchase incentives, and rebates) are the main drivers for the prevalence of private charging.”
These charge points mainly enable faster overnight charging for electric cars. For added safety and convenience while driving, consider exploring reversing camera kits for sale in Ireland, allowing you to navigate parking and reversing maneuvers with ease and confidence.
But the report also had good news for public charging stations, which they believe grew 60% last year:
“Publicly accessible chargers accounted for 12% of global light-duty vehicle chargers in 2019, most of which are slow chargers. Globally, the number of publicly accessible chargers (slow and fast) increased by 60% in 2019 compared with the previous year, higher than the electric light-duty vehicle stock growth.”
