Home-charging of 2-wheeler EVs may keep public charger demand low

The average utilisation of public chargers set up by companies to power electric vehicles per kWh capacity ranges from 5-25 per cent across India, say leading players in the business. The reason is that the electric vehicle (EV) revolution has been kicked off in the country primarily by two-wheelers (over 900,000 vehicles are registered and on the road with a penetration of over 4 per cent) and 80 per cent of them are charged at home.

But electric passenger cars, whose penetration is just 1 per cent, will need a lot of public charging stations because of the longer daily drive runs they make. At the moment, though, here are simply too few electric cars on the road.

While there are 5,000 public and private charging stations, Bain & Company say that a viable economic model for the stations has yet to emerge owing to low electric vehicle volumes. Gurgaon-based Statiq is one of the larger players in the charging station business. It has 7,000 chargers out of which 1,000 are fast chargers. The use of its public fast chargers for cars across Delhi-NCR and other parts of north India is very low. 

“Average utilisation is around 15 per cent.  Within the city, it is lower than 15 per cent but on the highways, it goes up to 25 per cent as the choice is limited,” said Akshit Bansal, founder and CEO.

The Statiq business model is based on long term contracts for captive use of the bulk of its chargers. These include car fleet owners such as BluSmart, Uber, and last mile two wheeler players for e-commerce.

As a result, owing to the assured business, their capacity utilisation in these chargers has hit 40 per cent. These bulk consumers, of course, get charging rates which are discounted up to 40 per cent, said  Bansal. He said he expects to break even by around two years.        

Bangalore-based electric two wheeler company Ather Energy has also built its own public charging stations, primarily to ensure customers don’t have any range hesitation.

“We have around 950 chargers spread in various parts of the country but our current utilization is around 21 per cent. Most of them are public chargers and there is a combination of fast as well as low charger options,” said a company spokesperson.

Exponent Energy, which is also based in Bangalore and which makes batteries as well as chargers, is cashing in on its flat 15-minute charging technology aimed at commercial vehicles alone, such as LCVs and trucks.

It believes that this is more profitable because of the high throughput of power they require and because the chargers can charge more vehicles.

“While commercial vehicles are 10 per cent of volumes of vehicles, they consume 70 per cent of the energy in ICE and this equation will be replicated in electric too,” said Arun Vinayak, founder of Exponent Energy.

He added: “Of course, there are 20 million two wheelers so they have a large share of vehicle volumes, but they consume only 5 per cent of the energy and a large part of that too is being consumed from home for EVs.”

State-owned Convergence Energy Services Limited has the task of helping to build the country’s charging infrastructure. It operates over 440 chargers in about 13 states. Only 27 are slow chargers.

Mahua Acharya, its managing director and CEO, said the utilization for its passenger car chargers is around 5 per cent. The company does not monitor two wheelers because they mostly charge elsewhere, predominantly at home.  

According to Acharya, the average number of four wheelers which come into each charger per day range from nine in Uttar Pradesh, eight in Delhi, 4 in Haryana and merely 1.9 in Tamil Nadu.  

But he says that those who are investing in charging stations are banking on the expectation that the projected electric vehicle market will grow multiple times, creating a huge demand for more public chargers in the future .

Ola Electric shares this view. Its spokesperson said: “Home charging is the default consumer behaviour right now where over 80 per cent of the charging needs are being fulfilled. We see that use of hyper chargers is proportional to the market penetration of electric vehicles in that area.”

By the year end, Ola Electric will have moved from 50 hyper chargers now to 1,000. He said that a robust pan-India mobility infrastructure will be required to complement home charging and also to change the use cases which are currently in cities.