ABB E-Mobility and Shell announced an agreement this week for 200 360kW Terra EV chargers to be made available across Germany in the next 12 months. The launch of this network will provide additional DC fast charging support for German EV owners and support the overall goals of its charging stations infrastructure rollout across the country.
The announcement follows a recent global framework signed between the two companies in which Shell agrees to supply ABB’s full range of AC and DC fast charging stations. The Terra 360 is a modular charger that can simultaneously charge up to 4 vehicles with dynamic power distribution. Whilst these 800 charging points (200 charging stations) are less than 10% of the total that were installed across Germany last year and less than 5% of the total new charging point installations forecast for 2022, as presented in SAR’s analysis of the EV public charging infrastructure market in its upcoming EV Charging Service, they could be some of the most important. Many countries have different strategies to roll out of their EV charging infrastructure and are still learning from other global deployments. Most have a strategy for a mixture of slow and fast charging infrastructure, though the perfect balance in still unknown and considerations such as the density of housing, number of houses with driveways, EV installed base growth projections and grid stability need to be taken into account before determining what the public charging DC fast charger requirement per number of kilometres is.
Maybe one of the most important features of this rollout is that all 200 charging stations are to be powered by 100% renewable energy sources, something not yet possible in other regions which currently lack widespread capacity of renewable energy generation.
