In a push to electrify their nations’ car fleets, governments around the world are trying to roll out and scale their public charging infrastructure swiftly enough to service new battery-powered cars. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law devotes US$5 billion to building a nationwide network of EV charging ports along major travel corridors in the US, while Germany has spent or pledged US$6.4 billion to support the charging industry.
Range anxiety is a thing of the past for electric vehicle owners in the Chinese province of Guangdong.
The coastal region, which borders Hong Kong, has built hundreds of thousands of public charging points — the EV equivalent of gas pumps — over the past few years. With 345,126 public chargers and 19,116 charging stations as of the end of September, Guangdong has the largest EV charging network in China, one that has more than doubled from a year ago, according to the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance. That’s around three times as many public chargers in the whole of the US, according to BloombergNEF data.
