The Bill Comes Due

The global view

This was the week the charging industry discovered that building infrastructure is the easy part — paying for it is where things get interesting. In China, leading charging module manufacturers hiked prices by 15%, citing surging costs for silicon carbide chips, PCBs, and copper. The timing is exquisite: over 80% of Chinese CPOs already operate at a loss, and the government just reconfirmed a target of 40 million charging facilities by 2030. Ambition, meet margin compression.

Across the Atlantic, the US entered what analysts are calling "Charging 2.0" — a polite way of saying deployment fell 10% year-on-year while sessions rose 29%. Fewer new ports, more people using them. Meanwhile, Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill reportedly cancelled or delayed $82.8 billion in clean energy projects, including EV infrastructure. The UK, never one to miss a chance to complicate its own EV transition, confirmed a mileage-based tax on electric vehicles from 2028 — the third policy curveball in as many years for an industry already reeling from the weakened ZEV mandate.

The counterweight? Germany passed binding legislation requiring chargers in new buildings. India committed to 50,000 new charging points across Delhi and Tamil Nadu alone. And BYD announced plans for 6,000 fast-charging stations outside China by March 2027 — because when your overseas deliveries jump 82.5% year-on-year, you'd better make sure your customers can plug in when they arrive. The money story is shifting: from "how do we build it" to "who actually pays, and how much."

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Europe

The Eviny-Mer merger we flagged last week is now official. Eviny Fast Charging and Statkraft's Mer will combine under the name Eviny Elektrifisering, headquartered in Bergen, with Eviny holding 57% and Statkraft 43%. The result is the Nordic region's largest fast-charging provider, serving over one million customers. Mer's German public charging business will be folded in later, pending antitrust clearance. As our Pulse-based valuation of the deal suggested, the operational synergies are real — but the question of whether the deal terms reflect actual network value remains open.

Germany, meanwhile, did something rare: it passed a law that might actually accelerate charging deployment. The revised GEIG now requires at least one charging point in every new residential building with more than three parking spaces, and from January 2027, existing non-residential buildings with over 20 spaces must install chargers or conduit. Half of all parking spaces must be pre-wired. It's the most concrete building-level mandate in Europe — and it shifts the infrastructure burden squarely onto property owners.

The UK confirmed a mileage-based EV tax from April 2028: 3 pence per mile for BEVs, 1.5p for PHEVs, layered on top of standard road tax. After 5,000 consultation responses and near-universal industry opposition, the government made only minor concessions — dropping extra mileage checks for newer vehicles and adding fleet reporting options. The silver lining? A parallel planning reform will streamline cross-pavement charging for homes without driveways, potentially cutting EV running costs to 2p per mile for millions of terrace-house dwellers. One hand taxes, the other unshackles — classic Westminster choreography.

EO Car Chargers, the UK-based home charging company, collapsed into administration after a failed sale process that approached roughly 90 parties and drew almost no interest. Despite a £10 million recapitalisation and pivot to its EO Cloud software platform, persistent losses from international over-expansion proved fatal. Another data point for the thesis that execution, not ambition, determines survival.

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North America

The US added 4,382 DC fast-charging ports in Q2 2026 — down 10% year-on-year. First-half additions fell 7.4%. But here's the twist: charging sessions jumped 29%, and 72% of new ports now support at least 250 kW. Tesla led with 1,185 new ports, or 27% of the total. The industry is calling it "Charging 2.0" — the shift from carpet-bombing geography with pins on a map to building fewer, better, busier stations. It's the maturation arc every infrastructure market goes through, but the timing is awkward when federal support is evaporating.

About that evaporation: a BlueGreen Alliance report tallied $82.8 billion in cancelled or delayed clean energy and EV projects linked to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rolled back Inflation Reduction Act incentives including the $7,500 EV tax credit. A further $695 billion in investment is reportedly at risk. Whether or not the methodology holds up to scrutiny, the directional signal is unmistakable: the US is actively shrinking the policy runway for EV infrastructure.

On brighter ground, the Port of Los Angeles launched a $75 million programme for battery-electric Class 8 drayage trucks, offering up to $300,000 per vehicle. It's a reminder that while federal policy retreats, port authorities and state agencies are still writing cheques — because zero-emission freight isn't optional when your neighbours are breathing the exhaust.

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China

China's 15th Five-Year Plan for Expanding Consumption locked in the numbers we first reported on July 3: roughly 40 million charging facilities by 2030, including 9 million public piles with 500 million kW of capacity, supporting over 100 million EVs. The scale remains staggering — China's April charging consumption alone hit 14.5 TWh, equivalent to 70% of Spain's entire monthly electricity use.

But the economics just got harder. Leading module makers including UUGreenPower and Tonghe Technology raised prices by 15%, blaming surging costs for PCBs, silicon carbide chips, and copper. Since charging modules account for 45-55% of DC charger hardware costs, the increase will cascade through equipment makers to operators — over 80% of whom already run at a loss with station utilization averaging just 6.2%. The maths is brutal: build 40 million facilities with rising hardware costs and falling unit economics. Something has to give, and it's probably consumer charging prices during peak hours.

CATL added fuel to the hardware arms race with an 8C ultra-fast charging battery for light commercial EVs that charges from 20-80% in under seven minutes, backed by plans for 4,000 integrated charging and swap stations across 190 Chinese cities this year. Meanwhile, BYD confirmed plans for 6,000 fast-charging stations outside China by March 2027 — 3,000 in Europe, 2,000 in the Americas, 1,000 in Asia-Pacific. With 471,000 overseas deliveries in H1 2026 (up 82.5%), BYD is building the refuelling network to match its export machine.

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India

India announced enough charging targets this week to wallpaper the Taj Mahal. Delhi's EV Policy 2026 — which we first covered in June — is now active, targeting 30,000 charging points backed by ₹15,000 crore in funding, with 30% earmarked as DC fast chargers on highways and metro stations. The ambition is real, but so is the track record: a 2024 study found 84% of Delhi's existing public chargers non-functional, with pricing ranging from ₹10 to ₹100 per unit. Deployment without reliability is just decoration.

Tamil Nadu followed with 20,000 stations by 2031, borrowing Kerala's cost-effective pole-mounted charger model and Karnataka's PPP playbook. The state currently runs one public charger per 254 EVs — better than the national average, but still lagging Karnataka's 1:104 ratio. India's central government also tasked state-owned BHEL with building India's first indigenous 360 kW fast chargers for electric trucks and buses — a strategic move to reduce dependence on ABB and Delta, though sourcing specialised semiconductors domestically remains the hard part.

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Rest of Asia

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung made the week's most eye-catching proposal: make daytime EV charging nearly free by routing surplus off-peak electricity to chargers. From August 1, the government will overhaul public charging pricing with a five-tier system and cut slow-charger rates by about 9%. It's an elegant idea — use the grid's overcapacity as an EV adoption subsidy — though the details of "nearly free" tend to get expensive when you scale them to millions of vehicles.

Following up on last week's coverage, Grab confirmed its Vietnam charging push will grow from 400 to over 6,000 ports by 2028, with nearly half in Hanoi. The network is brand-agnostic — a pointed contrast with VinFast's dominant but exclusive 150,000-port network. Singapore's largest commercial EV charging hub opened in Jurong with 46 fast-charging points, boosting the city-state's heavy-vehicle charging capacity by 30%.

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Oceania

Australia's EV market crossed what analysts are calling a tipping point: EVs and PHEVs hit 35.8% of new passenger car sales in June 2026, up from 11% a year earlier. Chinese brands now dominate the EV supply side. But the infrastructure story lags — Australia ranks near the bottom globally for chargers per EV, ahead of only New Zealand.

Jet Charge CEO Tim Washington made the case that quality beats quantity, arguing Australia can leapfrog front-runners' mistakes by prioritising reliability over raw deployment numbers. It's the same "Charging 2.0" message emerging from the US data — but Australia is trying to learn the lesson before making the mistakes, rather than after. Whether it can is another matter entirely.

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South America

Colombia emerged as this week's quiet mover: Cali-based Inpel plans 400 public charging points across the country over two years, targeting an infrastructure gap as pure-electric car sales surged 235% year-on-year. A 50% income-tax deduction and zero VAT on charging equipment through 2027 are doing the heavy lifting. In Brazil, Fluke launched the FEV500 portable analyser for DC fast chargers — a tool that validates stations without requiring an EV on site — targeting a market that hit a record 38,516 EV registrations in April.

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Africa

East Africa delivered the week's most grounded story — literally. Electric truck drivers in Rwanda report their vehicles match diesel payloads at 35-40 tonnes while cutting operating costs roughly in half: a Kigali-Rubavu round trip costs under Rwf300,000 in electricity versus Rwf580,000 in diesel. Kabisa has deployed e-trucks on routes spanning five countries and up to 4,730 km, with fast chargers along East African corridors cutting charge times to about two hours. While Europe debates CPO profitability and China wrestles with module costs, East Africa is answering the simplest question in the business: does it save money? Yes. Next question.

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