Chargers Hit 2.25 MW. The Grid Learned to Say Maybe.

The global view

A fortnight ago we reported Geely building 1,800 kW to beat BYD's 1,500. It overshot its own brief. On Wednesday in Ningbo it put 2,250 kW on a charger and pushed a Lynk & Co 10 from 10 to 70% in four and a half minutes. BYD answered with count rather than kilowatts: its 2,000th expressway station opened Thursday, three months ahead of plan.

The more useful story this week was smaller and further from the show floor. Ampol and Ausgrid connected eight 200 kW bays north of Wyong for about A$90,000 on a dynamic connection, against a firm connection that would have run to millions, in exchange for curtailment two or three days a year. GRIDSERVE did the UK version at Cobham on the M25, and a Siemens study put Europe's prize at €10.6 billion of avoided grid spend if charging learns to flex. Korea went further and halved public charging prices at lunchtime over Chuseok to soak up surplus solar.

So the pattern: the charger is getting bigger and the wire is getting negotiable. One of those is a press release. The other is a line item on a CPO's capex sheet, which is where profitability has always been decided. Six conferences ran on Wednesday to discuss all of this; we stayed home and handed out the trophies instead.

Europe

Germany's truck network moved from implementation to concrete. Construction has started at 124 unstaffed service stations, and the Commission cleared up to €1.6 billion in state aid for as many as 1,410 charge points at over 120 rest areas. The full plan now describes 4,200 points at 350 locations, which is a larger number than the 1,800 megawatt points we quoted last week because it counts overnight bays too. Our market map says the corridor demand lands on far fewer bays than the lobby claims, so the interesting question is not whether Germany builds 4,200, but how many of them sit on the twenty roads that matter.

Daimler Truck, whose CEO priced the CO2 fine last week and blamed the missing chargers, unveiled the eActros LowLiner with megawatt charging from late 2027. The charger she says is missing arrives on her own truck in fifteen months. Meanwhile Swiss haulier Dreier is not waiting for anyone: it runs 88 electric trucks and is building its own transformers, storage and two kilometres of cable because the grid would not.

Which brings us to the Siemens study for ChargeUp Europe and ACEA. Europe's distribution grids need €24.7 billion by 2030 to absorb EV growth, and intelligent load management cuts that to €14.1 billion, with three-quarters of the reinforcement at low voltage. Of five countries sampled, only Germany has all four smart-charging building blocks in place, which squares with what we found when we measured what a parked car is worth: the value is mostly a lower bill, and it only exists where the plumbing does.

The UK supplied the proof of concept. GRIDSERVE and Extra opened 24 bays at Cobham on the M25, the busiest service area in the country, connected through UK Power Networks' flexibility system so site power adjusts in under a minute. That is a top-tier site on our location score getting a cheaper wire, which is the combination that prints money. Westminster also created a permitted development right for cross-pavement charging, aimed at the 40% of households with no driveway who currently pay up to ten times the home rate.

North America

California did the unglamorous work. Governor Newsom signed six bills that let manufacturer-tested chargers go live without a bespoke inspection, extend streamlined permitting to trenching, solar canopies and storage, and cut permit fees for apartments. The state already has over 216,000 public and shared plugs. The bottleneck was never the hardware, it was the queue at the county office.

New York picked a curbside winner and the winner kept quiet. Brooklyn's it's electric won the contract for 700 permanent on-street points across five boroughs in July and told nobody until its bridge round closed in September. The financing structure is the part worth copying: venture money funds the operating company, green banks and project finance fund the steel in the ground.

On trucks, the contrast with Europe sharpened. The federal commercial clean vehicle credit lapsed a year ago, California's HVIP carries the load with over $1 billion deployed, and an Australian retrofitter with four-minute battery swaps reports 118 contracted North American conversions. AP's take on the Geely news was that American fast charging still takes 20 to 40 minutes. It also noted that most Chinese public chargers run well below a megawatt, which is the caveat the headlines left out.

China

Geely's fifth-generation station peaks at 2,250 kW, pairs with a 12C battery, and runs an AI model that predicts cell temperature 30 seconds ahead and trims power before it gets there. The Lynk & Co 10 in the demo peaked at 1,093 kW, so the car took half of what the cabinet offered. Geely wants 22,000 stations and 100,000 connectors by end-2027.

BYD opened its 2,000th expressway station at Baoying on the Beijing-Shanghai route, covering all 22 of China's busiest trunk lines, with 11,586 flash stations in 341 cities overall. When it hit 10,000 four weeks ago we calculated it needed about 80 a day to reach 20,000 by December. By our arithmetic it has managed roughly 59 a day since, and now needs closer to 86 a day for the rest of the year, with 6,000 overseas stations added to the wish list on top.

Then a third entrant. Battery maker Sunwoda announced 10,000 megawatt stations by end-2027 around a 15C pack that charges to 97% in nine minutes, with no locations, no investment figure and no launch vehicle. Three companies are now racing on C-rate and station count while nobody publishes a utilisation number. As we argued when we built the execution score, the socket that pays is the one that gets used, and a 2.25 MW cabinet at 4% utilisation is a very expensive sculpture.

India

The state charging app is not going well. Unified Bharat e-Charge launched on 15 August and completed nine charging sessions from 148 booking attempts in the first two weeks of September, so the government will now open it to Google Pay, PhonePe and Paytm rather than the state app that handles 1.1% of UPI volume. The same week, private aggregator ChargeIndia put 40 networks in one app across 1,200 cities on OCPI, with UPI payment and no wallets. One of these platforms was built for drivers.

Mahindra's Charge_iN reached 50 stations and 200 points in under a year, all 180 kW dual-gun and all open to other brands, with the first HPCL forecourt site on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. BMW India's CEO puts the national count at 52,000 public stations and 16,000 fast chargers, and one in four BMWs sold there is now electric. Even the Supreme Court joined in, with a justice suggesting chargers on the court premises so cars could fill up during hearings. Dwell time, your honour.

Rest of Asia

Korea produced the week's best dataset. Highway rest-stop charging over the five-day Chuseok holiday reached 1.4 GWh last year, up 363% on 2023, while the charger count rose only 40%. By our arithmetic, load per charger roughly tripled in two years, which is the same holiday squeeze we mapped when 145 European sites ran full in July. The expressway operator wants 3,500 units by 2030.

The policy response was pricing, not concrete. For this year's holiday the ministry and KEPCO halved public charging fees between 11am and 2pm, waived the energy charge entirely on 102,000 self-consumption chargers, and framed 1.16 million EVs as a demand-response resource for surplus solar. That is our V2X thesis run as a four-day national experiment. Seoul is also cutting subsidies for substandard fast-charger power modules, shifting from installation counts to uptime.

Vietnam is consulting on a national charging standard for July 2027 while TMT-EGREEN races to 2,100 chargers by New Year, some at 1,040 kW. Oman set regulated tariffs from 1 October in three power tiers, with the top tier at nearly nine times the home rate. Regulated price ladders tend to tell CPOs where to build before the drivers do.

Oceania

The Wyong connection is the one to file. Ampol's AmpCharge and Ausgrid put eight 200 kW bays on a dynamic operating envelope for about A$90,000, with curtailment expected two or three days a year, against a firm connection that could have cost millions. Ausgrid is building a low-voltage version and talking to other operators. If the network can say maybe on the hottest afternoons, the CPO saves the transformer.

The other Australian story is more contested. The Energy Market Commission gave draft approval for regulated networks to build public chargers and recover 70% of the cost from every customer, about A$1 a year per household, unlocking A$40 million of federal money for 14,000 chargers in blackspots. By our arithmetic that is roughly A$9,500 per charger all-in, which is destination-charger money, not fast-charging money. Private operators get first refusal on sites and the networks act as supplier of last resort; the industry calls it a monopoly land grab, and the final determination lands on 17 December.

South America

The feed sent South America one story this week and it was Chinese. Transport Topics carried the Geely news with the observation that the US may pursue a more moderate upgrade path. Brazil, whose BYD plant is the continent's biggest EV bet, got a country tag and nothing else. We will take that as a quiet week rather than a verdict.

Africa

Three weeks ago Ghana's answer to fast chargers blowing transformers was pre-approval for every site. Kenya's answer to growth was to stop penalising it: EPRA scrapped the 15,000 kWh monthly cap on the preferential e-mobility tariff, so bus fleets, swap stations and charging networks no longer fall off a cliff when they succeed. E-mobility consumption had risen 300% to 5 GWh in the year to June 2025, which is exactly the kind of number a cap was designed to stop.

South African retailer Clicks is putting 30 SANY heavy electric trucks on the road by October, with chargers at all ten distribution centres, and its Montague Gardens depot would be Africa's first retail DC with an all-electric fleet. Morocco, with about 1,500 charge points against Portugal's 14,000, got a home-grown charge-point management platform from Watt.ma. Software before hardware is the right order when the hardware count is four digits.