A joint venture between Chinese electric car maker BYD and global oil giant Shell has delivered one of the biggest EV charging sites around the world.
According to a new report from cnevpost, the site will have 258 new charging stations with a solar canopy setup which will generate 300,000 kWh of electricity every year.
The newest site is located in BYD’s home city of Shenzhen in south-east China and is near the local airport terminal. This site was officially opened by Shell this week and will form part of Shell’s expansion into the fast-charging space in the country.
According to Shell, it will be able to charge up to 3,300 EVs every day and is the company’s largest charging station in the world. It includes coffee, dining and lounge facilities.
Both BYD and Shell entered a global strategic agreement in March 2022 to developing a charging network. The initial plans are to focus efforts in Europe and China before looking at global charging network opportunities.
The latest also reports the significance of such large charging hubs given Shenzhen alone has 860,000 new energy vehicles (NEV) that are either plug-in hybrids or pure battery electric vehicles.
In comparison, Australia has only recently surpassed 120,000 EVs and the largest charging sites that are currently commissioned are operated by Tesla.
Box Hill in Melbourne and Campbelltown in Sydney both have 12 fast-charging stalls with plans for Tesla to open 20 stall sites in the coming years.
Recently architectural plans revealed a 28-charging station site in the works at a service station in Wodonga but that still appears to be many months away from commissioning.
Tesla also recently opened 30 of its Australian sites to non-Tesla EVs, which is good for EV drivers and will help drive greater adoption with more chargers in the open network. This has also started to create healthy competition amongst other charge point operators and will accelerate the rollout of more sites in Australia.
Although the growth in EV uptake has driven a surge in charging infrastructure projects, it’s unlikely that we will see 258 charging station sites like those in Shenzhen anytime soon. What we do hope is to have hundreds of smaller hubs across major cities and towns, helping EV drivers travel reliably across the country.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.