China to build more charging points for electric vehicles

China plans to build 800,000 charging points, including 100,000 public ones, for electric vehicles this year to meet increasing demand, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday.

A total of 100,000 public charging points have been installed nationwide in 2016, bringing the total number of public charging points in China to 150,000, according to the NEA.

A total of 14,000 kilometers of highway has also been equipped with inter-city fast-charging stations, with an average spacing of 48.6 kilometers.

Electric vehicles consumed more than 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in China last year, saving about 400,000 tons of fuel, according to the NEA.

In Beijing and Shanghai, a charging facility can now always be found within a radius of less than 5 km, while other major cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen are working toward this goal.

“For the new year, China will work to solve the payment and information-related problems for charging facility operators and implement a unified national standard for charging ports of electric vehicles,” said the NEA.

According to China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), the country will build a nationwide charging-station network that will fulfill the power demands of 5 million electric vehicles by 2020.