There are already more than a million e-cars in Germany, but many cannot refuel quickly at home.

At least for fast charging stations with higher power, the energy supplier must first be asked for permission.

That's not always easy.

A driver in the south of the country recently heard that he was still lucky, but that many more charging stations were currently not possible in his residential area.

In the west, a real estate developer reports that there are only two or three fast charging stations for new buildings with several residential units, but that his customers want more and are willing to pay for it.

Is the much-touted electromobility already in the bottle neck today?

Jan Hauser

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

The fact is: the power grid has long felt the effects of electrification and has so far withstood the change. After all, there have even been fewer power outages in recent years: the average interruption time per connected end consumer fell from 15.14 minutes in 2017 to 10.73 minutes last year. This is the lowest downtime since the statistics were first published by the Federal Network Agency in 2006. But with more electric cars, the power grids are facing difficulties. The network agency warns of the future challenges posed by private charging. "Particularly in the evening hours, a rapid ramp-up of electromobility could partially overload the local distribution network if many vehicles are to be charged at the same time," said the authority on request.

The energy transition is progressing too slowly anyway

Nevertheless, politicians are steering the country at full throttle into electromobility.

In their talks on a traffic light coalition, the SPD, Greens and FDP have already agreed to only allow vehicles that do not emit CO2 before 2035.

"We want to make Germany the lead market for electromobility and to do so massively accelerate the expansion of the charging station infrastructure," says the exploratory paper of the three parties.

This means that millions more electric vehicles that need to be charged quickly in driveways and garages are likely to come onto the streets in Germany.

That doesn't sound like a sure-fire success.

The energy transition is progressing too slowly for that anyway: The expansion of power lines and renewable energies is lagging behind, while the demand for electricity is increasing.

Nevertheless, so far neither large energy companies nor public utilities have reported that they can no longer keep up. At least some let it be known how difficult the situation is today. The energy company EnBW points out that charging stations for electric cars with an output of up to 12 kilowatts are only subject to notification and only then require approval. As a network operator, they are fundamentally obliged to connect the charging infrastructure to the network. But: "In practice it can happen that the installation of a charging device is not possible immediately, but a local network reinforcement beforehand is necessary," reports the supplier from the south, which connects up to 1,600 new charging points every month. EnBW does not say how often such a delay occurs “in a few individual cases”.However, the number of cases could increase. The expansion already depends on the local situation and other influences such as official approval procedures. Different cabling, a transformer replacement, a new transformer station: all of this can quickly take several months.