The Megawatt Came to Berlin. The Money Went Grocery Shopping.

The global view

The megawatt left China this week. Alpitronic wheeled a 1 MW cabinet onto a Berlin show floor and pushed more than 600 kW into a Mercedes-AMG. ChargePoint, whose CEO told us a fortnight ago that the megawatt race was overblown, demonstrated a 600 kW charge of its own on the same call that reported zero cash burn. Geely, not to be outdone by anyone, is building 1,800 kW to beat BYD's 1,500.

Follow the capital and it went somewhere less photogenic: car parks with a trolley bay. EVgo will put 500 kW Tesla hardware outside Meijer, Kroger and Regency Centers, Walmart opened its 100th site with federal money still frozen, and India's ChargeZone signed over $1 billion in fleet energy contracts before pouring a single new slab. The hardware is chasing peak power. The money is chasing dwell time and contracted kilowatt-hours, which is what our location score has been saying since June.

Then the trucks, again. Last week we did the arithmetic on Europe's gap between 35,000 required megawatt points and 730 built. This week BCG's pre-IAA study supplied the demand side: China is already near 30% battery-electric share in medium and heavy trucks, Europe's organic demand reaches 48% by 2035 against a 60-65% mandate, and the US stays under 5% by 2030. Europe may build the chargers and still be waiting for the trucks.

Europe

Start with the cabinet. Alpitronic's HYC1000 feeds up to eight dispensers from one 1 MW power unit, allocating in 62.5 kW steps, with MCS dispensers rated to 1,500 A. The headline number is the megawatt, but the product is the arithmetic underneath it: eight cars at 125 kW, or one truck at everything, from the same grid connection. That is the plugs-versus-power trade-off we ran on 8,966 European sites last month, now sold as a cabinet.

ChargePoint's fiscal Q2 is the more interesting reversal. Revenue of $116.1 million was up 18%, the adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed 78% to $4.8 million, and the 525 kW cabinet promised for early 2027 now has a 600 kW Eaton-built sibling called Express Solo shipping to early-access customers. Overblown lasted fourteen days. Note that both demos, in Berlin and on ChargePoint's call, quote roughly eleven minutes from 10 to 80%: the car sets the time, the cabinet only sets the queue.

Fastned, which we praised in August for €184,000 of operational EBITDA per station, has raised €75 million from Schroders Capital and given it a supervisory board seat. Our arithmetic puts the placement at about €36.90 per depositary receipt. The stated goal is 1,000 stations by 2030, which from Q2's 442 works out at roughly 130 new sites a year; the 48 sites signed in Q2 alone, annualised, already clears that.

Meanwhile the other AFIR deadline is coming into view. From 1 January 2027 every public charger above 50 kW, including those installed before 2024, must take a bank card at a terminal. AFIR's other payment mandate, Plug&Charge, went live in January and nobody can say where it works. The card reader, at least, is visible from the car.

And Herbert Diess, now chairing The Mobility House, says a €2,000 bidirectional wallbox will pay for itself within a year from 2027, and calls a German ministry plan to cap feed-in at half of installed capacity a mistake. On the cap we agree with him. On the payback, our deep dive published Tuesday found a few hundred euros a year per car, mostly as a lower bill, with the frequency-market slice heading for the floor. One-year payback needs several times that.

North America

EVgo is going to the supermarket with Tesla's hardware. Its branded 500 kW V4 sites start this autumn at grocery-anchored locations: up to 480 stalls across 60 Meijer stores, 150-plus Kroger stalls a year through 2035, and now more than 400 stalls with Regency Centers. The network stood at 5,380 stalls and $61 million of Q2 charging revenue. When we scored Lidl against McDonald's and the Autobahn, the supermarket had the most top-tier sites. EVgo appears to have read the same data.

The retailers themselves are not waiting for Washington. Walmart opened its 100th site in Monument, Colorado, with more than 200 in the pipeline, while Buc-ee's, Sheetz and Wawa build on their own forecourts. With the $5 billion NEVI programme still frozen, Paren counted 4,382 new US ports in a quarter and June sessions up 29%. Federal money stopped; the network grew anyway, because the people building it own the car park.

Trucks got a port and a corridor. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey launched a $45 million drayage programme, most of it vouchers, with $5 million for up to five charging hubs near the terminals. The BC2BC corridor we covered last week now has coordinators in CALSTART, CalSTA and UC Davis and a claimed 10,000 trucks a day. Its budget line is where we left it: unconfirmed. BCG's forecast of under 5% electric truck share by 2030 without a federal mandate suggests the trucks may be too.

China

BYD's 1,500 kW is now the number to beat, and Geely wants to beat it by 300. The group is developing an 1,800 kW station with on-site battery buffering, and its UK boss floated a brand-agnostic Geely charging network in Britain after starting with partner sites. The car side is already there: a production Lynk & Co 10 accepted a CATARC-verified 1,093 kW and reached 80% in five and a half minutes. BYD, whose 10,000th flash station we covered two weeks ago, now claims 20 to 97% in twelve minutes at minus 30°C, and its city count has crept from 325 to 332.

The number that matters came from an oil company. A Sinopec research executive told APPEC that EVs will remove about 1.2 million barrels a day from Chinese demand this year, roughly 15% of oil products, on the way to 75-80% EV share by 2030. Sinopec is the company that dug the fuel tanks out of a Shanghai forecourt for BYD chargers in August. It is now forecasting its own erosion, from a stage in Singapore, with 23 million charge points behind it, two-thirds of them private.

On trucks, BCG's study puts China at nearly 30% battery-electric share of medium and heavy truck sales and over 90% of global zero-emission truck volume, on total-cost parity and battery swapping. Europe is building the chargers we counted last week. China built the trucks.

India

ChargeZone did something this column has spent three years asking CPOs to do: it sold the electricity before building the station. It reports over $1 billion of long-term energy contracts with intercity bus, truck and commercial car fleets, underpinning 1,000 highway stations and a jump from 120 MW to 300 MW of capacity. The target is 700 GWh a year and 30% utilisation, up from about 14%; our arithmetic on 700 GWh across 300 MW gives 27%, close enough. Contracted load is the shortcut to the execution score, and $25 million of bank debt says lenders agree.

The government, facing the same highway with different maths, is weighing cheaper finance for battery-swappable trucks under a proposed ₹9,852 crore scheme for 50,000 e-buses and 50,000 e-trucks. The reason is stark: India has nine public chargers above 240 kW, and the existing scheme has subsidised 52 trucks. Where China chose swapping from strength, India is choosing it from scarcity.

The HERE-SBD readiness index sent Telangana from 25th to first and Delhi from fourth to 17th, while 77% of owners reported a faulty charger. Telangana is pressing the advantage with tenders for 369 stations on ten-year contracts, a fixed Rs 13 per unit tariff and a 95% uptime clause in Hyderabad. Tata Power says the growth is moving to tier-2 towns and corridors; the uptime clause suggests states have noticed the 77%.

Rest of Asia

Singapore added over 4,000 charge points in four months to reach 34,700 of a 60,000 target, with EVs at 63% of new registrations this year, up from 45%. The early-adoption incentive ends on 1 January and every HDB town gets a fast hub by end-2027. That is the sequence our demand model predicts: subsidy off once the curve carries itself.

Oman is pricing power, not just energy. Regulated tariffs from 1 October step from 50 baisa per kWh below 90 kW to 120 baisa above 180 kW, with a single national app aggregating every operator. Malaysia, by contrast, is being told it needs 429 installations a month to reach 30,000 chargers by 2030 from 6,416, and that its ten-plus operators should copy AFIR's card-payment rule.

Two smaller markets found capital in unusual places. Lao ride-hailer LOCA issued the country's first green bond to fund fast charging every 50 km across all 18 provinces, with PIDG and the ADB behind it. In Japan, Terra Charge is handling condominium approvals and subsidies on behalf of individual residents, turning ¥550,000 of installation into a ¥1,000 bill for the 85% of flat-dwellers with no building charging.

Oceania

Australia's problem has flipped from too few cars to too few sockets. The HERE-SBD index puts the country at 24 EVs per public charger, with 60% of chargers in Victoria and New South Wales, in the same month EVs reportedly outsold petrol, diesel and hybrids for the first time. Geely's 1,800 kW ambitions include Australia on the list of export markets, which will not help the ratio but may change the queue.

The consolidation game arrived in Brisbane. Intellihub, the smart-meter company owned by Pacific Equity Partners and Brookfield, is reportedly evaluating Evie Networks, the country's largest ultra-fast operator, to sit alongside the EVSE business it bought from Engie last year. Infrastructure funds buying from utilities and founders is exactly the pattern in our M&A scorecard; the novelty is a meter company as the vehicle.

Queensland went the other way. The state government has stopped funding the Electric Super Highway and ordered 630 diesel buses, while regional EV ownership rose 98% in the Western Downs. Canberra, meanwhile, expanded the A$60 million DRIVEN programme so dealers can claim 80% of EV workshop tooling on top of charger rebates. One government funds the mechanics; another buys the diesel.

Africa

Kenya's electric fleet went from under 800 vehicles in 2022 to over 35,000 by last December, and about 95% of them have two wheels. ARC Ride raised $33.3 million to add 5,000 motorcycles and carry its battery-swap network into Ghana, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. Kenya Power's meter agrees with the story: charging consumption rose 188% in 2025, and the utility has launched an off-peak e-mobility tariff to keep it coming.

Nigeria's state oil company is running the Sinopec playbook without the excavator. NNPC plans to retrofit more than 900 outlets with solar and fast chargers, starting with 50 to 70 smart stations within six months. The first, in Abuja, runs on a 200 kW solar array and has six charge points beside sixteen petrol pumps. Pricing has not been announced, which in a market with almost no EVs is the whole question.

Ghana keeps supplying the cautionary tale. Two weeks ago its energy minister said fast chargers were blowing transformers; this week the country's engineering institution warned that badly installed home chargers are overloading household circuits. National charging standards remain, in the Energy Commission's phrase, under discussion.