McKinsey says Europe’s public EV charge points must quadruple by 2025

New research by global management consultant McKinsey says Europe needs the number of public electric vehicle charging installations to quadruple by 2025, demanding huge investment from charge point manufacturers and closer coordination between charge point operators and electric utilities.

The number of plug-in cars over the last five years has increased 10-fold, but the number of public chargers has risen by just two and a half. Early adopters of EVs typically had off-street parking and home charging, but even by 2021 42% of European EV owners living in cities relied on public chargers with no access to home charging.

As EVs become mainstream McKinsey calculates the EU-27 will need at least 3.4 million public charge points by the end of the decade, broken down to 2.9 million for cars, 400,000 for light commercial vehicles and 100,000 for trucks and buses.

McKinsey describes current installation rates across Europe as “far behind the target rate”. And in total, McKinsey calculates that the cumulative cost of building this infrastructure could cost €240 billion by 2030.

The consultant also forecasts that homeowners, apartment building managers and workplace parking operators will have to install an additional 29 million private charging stations by 2030.

Developments of this scale will require reinforcements to national electricity grids, particularly upgrades that distribute power from substations to end users.

“For commercial vehicles, new chargers could draw as much as one megawatt of electricity. These sorts of locations will require grid upgrades or backup storage solutions: a highway rest stop simultaneously servicing 20 trucks and ten cars with fast chargers could experience peak electricity demand of about 20 megawatts—equivalent to that of a city with 20,000 inhabitants,” said McKinsey.

If EVs are to deliver policymakers’ decarbonisation objectives, electricity generators will need to invest in more renewable energy. McKinsey’s analysis forecasts that the electricity demand directly related to EVs will increase from nine terawatt hours in 2021 to 165 terawatt hours in 2030, a rise from less than 1% to nearly 6% of the EU27’s total electricity consumption.

Smart charging will help to manage demand and there are particular opportunities for fleets whose vehicles are parked at a depot or workplace for extended periods.

“A first development phase, which could be widely under way by 2030, would involve unidirectional smart charging: the charging times of EVs would be centrally controlled to reduce peak loads,” said McKinsey. “In a second stage, bidirectional smart charging would use vehicle batteries as intermittent storage within the grid: batteries could be charged or discharged depending on levels of energy generation and demand.”

Across the EU as a whole, EVs could have up to 3 terawatt hours of battery capacity by 2030, equivalent to 40% of the EU’s average daily energy demand, said McKinsey.