Charged up at pole position

Beijing-based State Grid Corp of China, which operates the majority of power distribution networks, has set up 6,286 charging stations and 56,000 charging poles spanning 31,000 kilometers of highways and more than 150 cities.

It is now the world's largest EV charging network. It said it will install 120,000 public charging piles by 2020, covering the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, Shandong province and the Yangtze River Delta, as well as major cities in other regions, enabling smoother intercity travel for EVs.

By the end of 2017, China had 214,000 public charging poles and 232,000 private ones, figures from the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance showed.

Given that there are 1.72 million EVs on China's roads, the average works out to one charging pole for four EVs, probably the best in the world.

Jiang Bing, chairman of the State Grid EV Service Co, said the company's intelligent-vehicle online platform is now connected to 19 pole operators, including China Southern Power Grid Co, Qingdao Teld New Energy Co Ltd, China Potevio Co Ltd, Wanbang Charge Facility Co Ltd, Star Charge and Shenzhen Clou Electronics Co Ltd.

"We aim to link 3 million charging poles to the platform by 2020," he said.

Li Li, energy research director at ICIS China, a consulting firm focusing on China's energy market, said the convenience of driving an EV is determined by the layout of a city's public charging poles. Many major cities including Beijing, Shenzhen and Taiyuan allow drivers to easily access charging facilities; however, there is still much room for improvement in EV charging infrastructure construction in other cities, she said.

"Charging infrastructure has always remained a bottleneck for EV development. It'll be too slow to rely on only one or two companies to build the chargers. The sector should encourage more private capital to enlarge the EV fleet so that the chargers' utilization rate is high enough to generate profit."