Behind the continuous increase in the penetration rate of new energy vehicles, the mileage anxiety brought to consumers by the imperfect infrastructure of charging piles is still a problem in the industry.
According to public reports, during the recent Spring Festival holiday, due to the surge in highway traffic, new energy vehicle charging queues appeared in some service areas, and the queue time of several hours at every turn once again aroused public attention.
On February 13, Qin Feng (pseudonym), a senior industry insider, said in an interview with Times Finance that the reason why new energy vehicles queued up to charge at charging stations in high-speed service areas during the Spring Festival was mainly caused by too large traffic and surge in demand. Another industry insider said that the main reason for the queue charging situation is that the charging pile and other energy replenishment infrastructure is not perfect, and the development speed cannot keep up with the growth rate of new energy vehicle sales.
"Brands that do electric vehicles must do charging facilities, and brands that do charging facilities should be open to the public as much as possible." Recently, NIO President Qin Lihong publicly appealed. According to it, during this year's Spring Festival, NIO charging pile charging service orders exceeded 900,000 times, of which only 24% of the power service came from the owned brand, and the remaining 76% of the electricity mainly served third-party car brands such as BYD, Tesla, and Xpeng.
For NIO being "electrified" by other brands, Wang Hai (pseudonym), a new energy vehicle owner familiar with the NIO brand, told Times Finance that it is mainly because the NIO charging station is completely open to the public, and the charging speed of the NIO charging station is fast, and there are also people patrolling and maintaining, and the equipment is well maintained. On the other hand, this also reflects that the charging stations and charging piles of some automobile brands are far from being able to meet the changes in the market ownership of their products.
It is worth mentioning that behind the constraints of public charging pile infrastructure, some car owners are constantly trying and promoting private charging pile sharing, and they can also obtain certain benefits when it is convenient for others. Qin Feng believes that the private pile sharing model will effectively improve the utilization of resources, promote the development of the industry, and to a certain extent, solve the dilemma that some communities or some new energy vehicle owners cannot install private charging piles.
The ratio of public fast charging piles to piles may reach 12:1
At present, the development and construction of new energy vehicle infrastructure such as mainland charging piles has a long way to go.
According to the difference between charging method, charging power and on-board charger, charging pile can be divided into "AC charging pile" and "DC charging pile". DC charging pile has more power and faster charging speed, commonly known as fast charging pile, mostly distributed in high-speed, urban charging stations; The AC charging pile power is smaller, the car takes about 8 hours to fully charge, commonly known as slow charging pile, with simple construction, small load and portable characteristics, generally distributed in the community, mostly private charging piles. According to the classification of service objects, charging piles can be roughly divided into public charging piles (for all social vehicles), special charging piles (for specific social vehicles, such as buses), and private charging piles (built to meet personal charging needs, mostly distributed in community parking lots).
According to the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance (hereinafter referred to as the China Charging Alliance), as of January 2023, the cumulative number of charging infrastructure in the country was 5.411 million units. According to data from the Ministry of Public Security, by the end of 2022, the number of new energy vehicles in mainland China reached 13.1 million. According to this calculation, on the whole, the ratio of new energy vehicle piles in mainland China is about 2.42:1, which is slightly lower than the 3:1 in 2021, but in fact, there is still much room for improvement in the ratio of public charging piles that undertake most of the tasks of replenishing the energy of new energy vehicles in society.
According to data from the China Charging Alliance, of the current 5.411 million charging infrastructure, 3.573 million are private charging piles built with vehicles, while 1.839 million are public charging piles, including 783,000 DC charging piles (fast charging piles).
If the owner of the private pile does not occupy the public fast charging pile, then the current public fast charging pile has a vehicle pile ratio of about 12:1. If the poor maintenance, damage rate, distribution and other conditions of public fast charging piles are taken into account, the ratio of vehicle piles in urban areas may be higher than 12:1. In this context, once it is the peak period of replenishment or holidays, there may be a situation where it is difficult to find or queue for hours at every turn.
More importantly, with the passage of time, not only the penetration rate and ownership of new energy vehicles are constantly increasing, but the market also has a rapid iterative demand for the power and technology of charging piles, while the charging pile technology of some charging stations is still stuck in several years ago, which cannot keep up with the development needs of the industry. At the end of 2020, the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in mainland China was about 5%, but by the end of 2022, this figure increased to 27.6%, and the annual sales of new energy passenger vehicles was 5.674 million units.
Source | Internet
Taking the data disclosed by NIO as an example, in the list of non-NIO brands that serve 76% of its charging pile, BYD and Tesla are in the top two. It is worth noting that BYD and Tesla are the two automobile brands with the largest sales and ownership of new energy vehicles in the Chinese market, and the data shows that the two new energy vehicle leaders sold a total of about 2.24 million units in the Chinese market last year, accounting for about 39% of China's total new energy vehicle sales.
In fact, public information shows that in addition to NIO, Tesla, Xpeng, Extreme Krypton, Volkswagen, etc. have taken the charging network as an important part of their own ecology. However, Tesla has not yet opened its charging piles to other car brands, and public data shows that as of the end of January, Tesla has built and opened more than 1,500 Supercharger stations, more than 10,000 Supercharger piles, more than 700 destination charging stations, and more than 1,900 destination charging piles in Chinese mainland.
Another new energy vehicle giant, BYD, has little layout in public fast charging stations dedicated to serving passenger cars. Regarding the layout of charging piles, Times Finance sent an interview to BYD on February 13, but there was no response as of press time. According to Xpeng Motors' official data, as of December 31, 2022, Xpeng's self-operated charging stations have accumulated more than 1,000 stations, including more than 800 supercharging and 480kW ultra-fast charging stations, and more than 200 destination stations. According to NIO's official data, as of February 10 this year, NIO has deployed 1,243 supercharging stations, 6,309 supercharging piles, 1,084 destination charging stations, 7,365 destination charging piles, and access to more than 630,000 third-party charging piles.
Some insiders said that Tesla has not yet opened charging stations or for the sake of better serving its users, while BYD may have considered capital costs. It is understood that the fast charging station is a heavy asset, not only the early stage needs to invest a lot of money and costs, the later maintenance cost is not small, and the speed of capital return is slow, in the construction and operation of charging piles, the general cost recovery cycle fast and slow charging is about 5 years. According to media reports, Xpeng Motors, which actively deploys its own fast charging pile, also admitted that the layout of the fast charging pile is more for the convenience of energy replenishment for car owners, and is prepared for the initial inability of the charging network to be profitable.
Source | China Charging Alliance
Although car companies have invested a lot in the energy supply ecology, according to data from the China Charging Alliance, as of January this year, most of the public charging piles in the market are still invested and built by third-party operators such as special calls, star charging, State Grid, and Xiaoju charging, while NIO, Volkswagen Caimais, and Xpeng are two orders of magnitude worse than the former's charging piles.
However, although the number of third-party operators is quite large, the distribution is not reasonable, and many are located in sparsely populated or unlikely to charge. In October last year, Zhang Fan, director of the China Charging Alliance, said in an interview with the media that the current domestic charging facility network has achieved a high proportion of coverage, and the industry should pay more attention to how to make a scientific and reasonable layout in the future. At the end of January this year, Tong Zongqi, deputy secretary-general of the China Charging Alliance and the Charging and Swapping Branch of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers, said in an interview with the media, "At present, the average social utilization rate of charging piles in cities is less than 10%, and the average social utilization rate of highway charging piles is lower, which may be less than 1%. ”
Private pile sharing earns 2,000 yuan a year?
In addition to public charging piles, "private charging piles are difficult to enter the community" has also attracted many concerns in the industry in recent years.
According to data from the China Charging Alliance, by the end of 2021, the Alliance had sampled information on about 1.851 million vehicles through vehicle companies in its members, of which 1.47 million were equipped with charging piles, and nearly 400,000 new energy vehicles were not equipped with private charging piles. The main factors of the Group's users not building charging facilities with their vehicles, accounting for 48.6%, 10.3% and 9.9% respectively, were the main factors that did not build charging facilities with their vehicles. Users use dedicated stations for charging, there is no fixed parking space at the workplace, and it is difficult to install and other reasons account for a total of 31.2%.
In this context, the private pile sharing model is gradually emerging. Zhang Qiang (pseudonym) worked together with neighbors in the community to solve the embarrassment of "buying a new energy vehicle but not having a charging pile" through the sharing model.
Zhang Qiang told Times Finance that his community was completed in 2010, but all the owners did not have fixed parking spaces and shared electricity meters. This means that if you want to build a private charging pile in the community, you need to overcome a lot of difficulties, so in the early stage of purchasing the Volkswagen ID.4X, Zhang Qiang has been charging at public charging stations near the community. According to Zhang Qiang's observation, at the beginning of 2022, there were already 5 pure electric vehicles in his community, and at that time, these owners began to apply to the power supply company and the property to install charging piles, but the three parties did not negotiate, and the obstacles included the lack of fixed parking spaces, the problem of sharing electricity meters, and the lack of understanding of some owners. By the middle of 2022, three more owners in the community had bought new energy vehicles, and the demand for installing private charging piles was becoming more and more strong, so Zhang Qiang and another owner summarized the needs and started several months of coordination and communication with the owners' committee, property and power supply companies. In the end, Zhang Qiang and others succeeded, on the condition that the community specially installed electricity meters for charging piles, the cost of electric piles was shared equally by new energy vehicle owners, and the public parking spaces where charging piles were installed did not restrict the use of fuel vehicles.
It is worth mentioning that the sharing mode can not only help Zhang Qiang overcome the constraints of the external environment to a certain extent, but also obtain benefits for the charging pile "pile owner" while improving resource utilization.
Wang Hai also told Times Finance that according to his understanding, some friends and car friends around him have earned more money by sharing private piles than the cost of purchasing electric piles at that time, and many car friends have specially bought electric piles to make money through the sharing model.
As an industry insider, Qin Feng is no stranger to private pile sharing, as early as four years ago, he shared one of his charging piles, "For more than four years, other car owners have charged almost 20,000 degrees of electricity in my charging pile through the sharing mode, which can basically bring two or three thousand yuan of income per year." Qin Feng said that it built a new charging pile in July last year, which was also used for sharing, setting the service fee per kWh to 0.6 yuan, and it has been 7 months now, the new pile has accumulated 2900 kWh of electricity, and the cumulative income is 1740 yuan.
Shao Danwei, founder of Star Charging, previously said in an interview with CCTV that private cars actually only need 8 to 10 hours to charge, and charging once a week can basically meet the use of urban areas, which is 7 days a week by 24 hours, which means that more than 90% of the time is idle. If you can share it, you can get considerable benefits, and it will also help to improve the efficiency of the whole society.
In January this year, Shen Fei, senior vice president of NIO Energy, mentioned in a post posted by the NIO community that (private pile sharing) revenue and utilization rate are directly related. For example, the charging price is generally composed of electricity fees and service fees, assuming that the electricity fee at night is 0.3 yuan, and the outside charging is 1.3 yuan, and the difference in price part of the pile owner and user benefits half, that is, each kWh earns 0.5 yuan. If the average single charge is 40 degrees, twice a week, the annual income is about 2,000 yuan, and when earning so much money, it also saves users another 2,000 yuan. "Listening to the teammates, some users specially purchased a slightly larger 20kW charging pile, went back to share it, and specially used the taxi master to charge it every day, and both parties were very happy."
According to data from the China Charging Alliance, as of January this year, 76,288 private piles have been shared at the same level, of which 73,946 are Star Charging, accounting for 96.9%. However, on the whole, the proportion of private piles that have been shared is about 2.1% of the total number of private piles, and there is still a lot of room for development.
Source | China Charging Alliance
Qin Feng believes that the private pile sharing model is an effective way to improve the utilization of resources and promote the development of the industry, and the reason why it accounts for a relatively low proportion of the total number of charging piles is that the degree of transmission is not high, and many private pile owners do not realize that their electric piles can also be shared, and need to increase promotion. Another industry insider said that if there is only a centralized charging station, there will be a great waste of time and resources, and the shared charging pile can be promoted in the community or the owner who has installed a private charging pile can be encouraged to share for a fee, requiring that the household charging pile must have the function of remote control and sharing charging.