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Government sponsors 1000 new EV fast charging stations, but operators have a location problem

2021-05-24T20:02:20.598Z


In order to improve the charging infrastructure for electric cars, the federal government wants to fund around 1000 new fast charging stations by 2023. The Dutch operator Fastned would be ready, but he has a very German location problem.


Enlarge image

Planned Fastned quick charging station with an attached shop:

In Germany, his company can hardly get anywhere near such locations, says CEO Michiel Langezaal

Yellow roofs, often equipped with solar cells, including mostly over a dozen plugs for quick power draw: the electric car filling stations of the Dutch provider Fastned can also be spotted easily from the motorways.

The now listed specialist for fast charging of e-cars has been around for almost ten years.

Fastned operates over 100 "charging parks" in the Netherlands, as CEO

Michiel Langezaal

(40) calls his company's fast charging stations.

According to its own information, Fastned already earns money in some particularly popular locations, such as near airports.

Enlarge image

Fastned CEO Michiel Langezaal

Fastned is also already present in Germany.

The Dutch are currently offering fast charging options of up to 300 kW per charging point at 19 German locations.

A good 10 more are to be opened in the coming months.

But the Dutch have a structural problem: For attractive locations on German motorways "there is no public, transparent market access" complains Fastned CEO Michiel Langezaal to manager magazin.

The German federal government is currently trying to catch up with fast charging stations.

With government funding, charging stations with an output of over 150 kilowatts are to be built at 1,000 additional locations by 2023.

The Bundestag laid the foundation for corresponding tenders on Thursday evening with a law.

"The next fast charging station must be reachable in a few minutes," said Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer (CSU).

"If you can operate hundreds of cars a day, you also make a business"

The Greens criticize the program as too late and unrealistic, and they also consider the minimum performance limit set by Scheuer to be too low.

That will be out of date in a few years, criticized Greens parliamentary deputy Oliver Krischer.

According to the Ministry of Transport, there are currently only around 800 charging points with more than 150 kilowatts - around 2.4 percent of all publicly accessible charging stations in Germany.

The economy complains that charging stations cannot yet be operated economically.

That is why the law plans long-term contracts with the companies that are to set up and operate the "fast charging hubs" following a Europe-wide tender.

Fastned CEO Langezaal believes that there is no money to be made with charging stations.

At attractive locations, the construction costs for the pillars can be recovered within a few years.

You have to think a little bigger than many of the current fast-charging providers, he says in an interview with manager magazin.

In the future, stations with 12 or 16 charging points will be more attractive for e-car drivers, he says.

Because there, e-car drivers would have a better chance of finding a free charging station than if there were only a handful of CCS quick-charging plugs.

"Anyone who can operate hundreds of cars per day at one location is doing business," he says.

Why Tank & Rast also offers charging stations

But getting to the best locations on German autobahns is very difficult. Because currently the access to these key locations is in the hands of the Tank & Rast GmbH, the successor of the former federally owned "Society for ancillary operations of the federal highways". Tank & Rast holds the concession for almost all motorway service stations and their filling stations in Germany. The company decides on its own, so to speak, about where electric car charging stations can be built, mostly next to a conventional filling station.

Langezaal believes that it is good that the federal government now wants to state subsidies for the construction of fast charging stations. If there is to be real competition, however, there must also be more open access to the market and a different form of location allocation - for example in the form of a public tender. "Tank & Rast single-handedly decides which of the 360 ​​locations on German autobahns will have a charging infrastructure," said Langezaal. The German federal government should also decide whether there should be additional new locations - and then advertise them publicly.

The Federal Cartel Office is investigating whether the current location allocation practice by Tank & Rast is possibly anti-competitive. "Germany would be much better served with 500 or 800 service areas on motorways instead of currently not even 400," says Langezaal.

It is true that politicians have now enforced that the de facto monopoly of Tank & Rast at conventional filling stations is not also transferred to charging with electricity.

In the future, fast charging infrastructure on federal highways can also be installed at unmanaged rest stops.

For this, however, locations must first be created or assigned.

And whether these will then be attractive for electromobile users and thus for the operators of fast charging stations is still questionable: After all, unmanaged means that there are no kiosks or restaurants, but toilets.

Fastned relies on transparent charging prices

"If the right locations are available, we will build charging stations with dozens of fast charging points along the motorway," announced Langezaal. Unlike some other fast-charging providers, Fastned has a fairly transparent price system: a kilowatt-hour of electricity costs 59 cents across Europe for guests and registered Fastned members - and 35 cents for Fastned customers with Gold Member status who pay 12 euros per month for their membership.

In the case of the fast charging provider Ionity set up by German car companies, it has been at least 79 cents per kilowatt hour since February, unless you use a card from a charging network provider such as Shell Recharge. If you charge at Ionity via charging apps such as Plugsurfing, you sometimes pay significantly more. Other charging station operators, on the other hand, rely on a flat charge or a combination of cents per kilowatt hour and per minute of charging. None of this is transparent for e-car drivers, which is unlikely to be conducive to the popularity of electric cars in the medium term.

It remains to be seen whether the federal government will actually move away from the previous location allocation practice.

Fastned is not only expanding in Germany for a long time.

In Great Britain the company is now building a so-called "Superhub", which will offer 14 300 kW fast charging stations from the Dutch and 12 Supercharger charging points from Tesla in one place.

After announcing the cooperation between Fastned, Tesla and the green electricity subsidiary of the French utility EDF, the Fastned share rose by almost seven percent.

wed with material from dpa-afx

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-05-24

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