Britain's Grid Bill Rose Sevenfold. EVgo Ordered Less Asphalt.

The global view

The number of the week is £440.13. That is what a British rapid charger pays each week in grid standing charges before it sells a single kilowatt-hour, up from £61.47 in 2021, according to an impact assessment by operator Zest and The Fast Charge. On our arithmetic that comes to about £22,900 a year per charger, and the authors expect £541.73 a week in 2027.

A fortnight ago Philip New's review blamed network charges above all for a 94% real rise in rapid charging prices. This week someone itemised that bill, and the grid's part of it has grown sevenfold. Last week we wrote that carmakers had kept the app and let someone else own the asphalt. This week EVgo, one of those someone elses, cut roughly $100 million from its 2026 capex.

Elsewhere, people tried to change the fixed costs instead of passing them on. Ampol opened a site on a grid connection that adds 750 kVA only when the network can spare it, and Hyderabad wrote its charging tariff into ten-year contracts. Most of a charger's costs are fixed, and this autumn the price is being set by whoever controls those costs. That is rarely the operator.

Europe

Zest and The Fast Charge warn that UK rapid charging could pass £1/kWh before VAT by 2027, up from an average of 79p today. Freedom of information documents show Ofgem told the Treasury that capacity-based charges trap rapid chargers in an "unproductive cycle". Meanwhile, the two reform proposals, DCP 420 and DCP 454, have sat in working groups for three years.

The £100 million from the Budget that we covered on 30 October goes to low-speed residential chargers, which is not where this bill lands. Ministers are also reportedly preparing to cut the 2030 ZEV mandate from 80% to about 60%, with consultation options as low as 50%, which makes our October report of a trim look modest. And Britain's 125,000 public charge points have no specific cyber security requirements: a consultation closes on 20 December, and existing units will not need to be retrofitted.

More detail emerged on Elli's exit from hardware. Volkswagen's unit is dropping home wallboxes, the battery-buffered Flexpole and commercial build-out, after a €54 million loss on €174 million of 2024 revenue. As our deep dive on Europe's 2.5 million-a-year Type 2 market showed, Elli was Germany's best-selling wallbox brand in a price war. Demand for those boxes is still being written into law: Sweden now gives tenants and condominium owners a legal right to request a charging point, with the property owner installing it and the resident paying.

Mercedes may not be finished selling either. FAZ reports that its North American sites and its Chinese joint network with BMW could follow the European hubs. That would add another line to the carmaker exits in our M&A scorecard.

North America

EVgo's third quarter had two stories in it. Charging network revenue rose 29% to $72 million on 103 GWh across 5,530 stalls, which on our arithmetic is about 200 kWh per stall per day. The adjusted EBITDA loss narrowed to $3.5 million, while the net loss widened to $49.2 million.

The second story is the bid we reported last week. A special committee is now reviewing LS Power's $2 take-private offer, and management will cut about $100 million from 2026 capex, citing slower EV sales and weak charging demand. A company that grew charging revenue 29% calling demand weak tells you which forecast it had been building for. As our Europe-versus-US comparison showed, building behind the cars is how America keeps its chargers busy.

EVgo also opened its first EVgo-branded Tesla Supercharger site: 12 V4 stalls with Magic Dock at a Chicago grocery plaza, with hundreds more planned at Regency Centers properties. It is the same split we saw last week, only reversed: Tesla supplies the hardware and someone else's brand goes on the canopy. EVgo is also promising 750 kW chargers from 2027, which our faster-charging deep dive would ask it to justify per minute saved.

Canada's proposed budget renews ZEVIP with CAD 587 million for more than 55,000 chargers, covering up to 50% of project costs, or 75% for Indigenous-led projects. On our arithmetic that is about CAD 10,700 of public money per charger. That buys a share of a kerbside post, not a fast-charging hub.

China

China reached 24.78 million charging points by the end of September, up 37.2% in a year, of which 5.21 million are public. Last week Beijing pledged 40 million by 2030. If growth held at this year's pace, which is our extrapolation and not a forecast, the target would be met around early 2028, on a public network that last ran at 6.51% utilisation.

The more telling deals were in battery swapping. BAIC signed a "million-vehicle" swap pact with CATL, Dongfeng signed a group-level deal, and Geely took 30% of NIO Energy by contributing its Yiyi Hulian business plus 640 million yuan. In Europe carmakers are selling their charging networks, while in China they are buying stakes in a rival's swap network.

CATL already runs 2,520 Choco-Swap stations in 200 cities and is working with Huawei-backed Yinwang on 99-second automated swaps. The country now counts 7,108 swap stations in total. That is small next to the charger count, but swapping is where carmakers are putting their own money.

India

Exicom's CEO says India needs at least 25,000 more DC fast chargers in three years, on top of roughly 8,000 today. The same interview puts network utilisation at about 5%. A charger maker asking for more chargers at 5% utilisation is not news, but the 5% is.

ChargeZone plans DC chargers at 1,000 new locations using made-in-India units from Quench rated 120 to 480 kW. The aim is to grow from 120 MW across 550 sites to 300 MW, with buses and trucks first in line. Mahindra's Charge_IN has reached 59 highway stations and is targeting 250 by December 2027.

Hyderabad shows where the utilisation problem gets solved. TGREDCO is tendering 200 public stations on ten-year contracts at a notified ₹13 per unit, while TGSRTC's 2,200 new e-buses will need an estimated 124 MW of depot charging across 25 sites. One city's bus depots will need more power than ChargeZone's entire national network has today.

Rest of Asia

From 1 July 2027, Vietnam's public charging stations must accept any compatible EV and publish their prices, billing methods and energy delivered. That is a big change in a market whose charging grew up around a single brand. On the highways the gap is plain: only 10 of 54 rest stops offer charging, although 17 of 21 on the North-South Expressway are building it.

The new standard, QCVN 32:2026/BCT, leaves out indoor and basement chargers, and experts want fire rules for them quickly. In a country of apartment car parks, that gap is where the next standard has to go.

In Abu Dhabi, BYD showed a solar-and-storage Flash Charging system with a robotic arm that finds the port, opens the flap and plugs in by itself. The arm takes about 50 seconds, a sixth of the five-minute charge it starts, and is not yet for sale. BYD now talks of 6,000 Flash Charging stations worldwide by the end of next year, double the 3,000 it promised Europe alone in October.

In Thailand, ZD Energy's Chonburi plant delivered its 100,000th charger, and the company claims more than 80% of the country's AC market. As our deep dive on Chinese charging abroad found, China exports factories and hardware, not networks.

Oceania

Ampol opened AmpCharge at its twin Wyong M1 sites on its first dynamic grid connection, built with Ausgrid and Kwetta. Each eight-bay site gets 500 kVA it can always count on, plus up to 750 kVA more when the grid has it spare. Britain's operators pay a fixed rate for capacity, while this one only pays for the extra when the grid can deliver it.

GoEV took the same idea further with ChargeNOW, a 20-foot skid that pairs a 640 kW Sinexcel charger with up to 522 kWh of storage and runs off a 400 A connection. It needs no trenching, and the battery covers what the grid connection can't. It is aimed at truck depots, where the grid connection usually takes longer to arrange than anything else.

Perth opened its largest e-bus depot at Bayswater, with charging for 132 buses and room for 180, under a A$250 million federal-state programme. On the BYD side, Denza is planning a flash-charging network in Australian cities, with a wider infrastructure announcement promised for 2027.

Africa

Ghana's EV charging and battery-swap regulations took effect on 10 November, replacing an interim notice. Charging and swap operators now need licences, and battery collection and recycling duties sit under the EPA. The rules are meant to attract billions in investment, but costs, financing and tariff uncertainty have not gone away.

At COP31 in Antalya, Nigeria asked for climate finance for transport and reported 140,000 CNG conversions against 12 EV charging stations under development. It also has 40 electric buses and a swap scheme for 800 e-tricycles. Those ratios show which fuel Nigeria is backing for now.