At first glance, the future of electromobility looks like a broken street lamp.

The tube with the yellow or green LED light at the tip is 2.38 meters high, a display can be seen on one side and a cable can be pulled out at knee height.

If the Munich start-up Qwello has its way, a large number of these charging stations for electric cars will soon be installed in Frankfurt: The company has now received approval for 30 locations with more than 100 stations, 650 more have already been applied for, and more than 1000 are to be installed one day, hopes Qwello.

Founder Henrik Thiele, who comes from the family who owns the automotive supplier group Knorr-Bremse, plans to invest a double-digit million amount in Frankfurt.

The provider's first pillar should go online in October.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Qwello is neither the only nor the first company to set up the charging infrastructure for electric cars.

The municipal electricity supplier Mainova has been involved for a long time, plus private providers such as On Charge and Innogy.

But there are still very few.

The charging station register currently shows around 100 public charging stations to owners of electric cars in Frankfurt.

That is far too few to meet the rapidly growing demand: there are currently around 14,400 cars with purely electric or hybrid drives in the city, as figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority show.

In purely mathematical terms, more than 70 cars would have to share a charging point, not counting private charging boxes in garages.

No quick charging points

In order to remedy this deficiency, Frankfurt's economic department head Markus Frank (CDU) has been campaigning for as many private investors as Qwello as possible for a good two years.

"I am happy about every company that is ready to invest," said Frank on Thursday when he welcomed Qwello in Frankfurt.

The companies should bear the costs of the expansion alone.

The providers receive public areas on roads from the city without an extra tender, which they can then convert into charging stations and use for ten years.

However, these are not fast charging stations.

It can take up to five hours to almost fully charge an Opel Mokka-e or a VW ID3.

The advantage of this technology, however, is that the installations are less complex than for a quick charger, and they require less network capacity.

Easy charging even without an app

The start-up Qwello, founded in 2017, is applying as the “Apple of the charging stations”, and founder Thiele promised that the operation should be very intuitive, even customers without an app could simply activate charging using a mobile phone or debit card.

The column is robust enough to withstand vandalism, it said.

Electric car owners pay around 28 cents per kilowatt hour of fuel, plus 1.20 euros per hour of idle time.

All of the income goes to the company to compensate for the investment costs.

Anyone who stands in a petrol car on the special-use areas threatens to be towed away.

However, it is clearly not just because of the investors that the expansion of the infrastructure is not proceeding as quickly as desired. It is due to the “political will” in the other departments, signaled Frank, who will soon have to leave office because of the new majority in the Romans. "There were also requirements for aesthetics that could not be met," said the head of department, referring to the LED light on the column, which should be used to tell from a distance whether it is free or occupied. Founder Thiele also said that it was “not an easy path” and that the company had to make some compromises.

Frankfurt is one of the first cities in which Qwello is installing columns on a large scale, so far there have only been pilot tests in Hamburg and Munich. The company is in talks with other cities, including abroad.