Spain has seen a growth in the installation of public access charging points for electric cars over the past year by adding 11,173 new connections, which went from 18,128 at the end of 2022 to 29,031 at the end of 2023, which represents an increase of 60%, according to the Electromobility Barometer presented this Monday at a press conference by Anfac.
“It is a positive figure and we have to be satisfied with the effort,” said the general director of the vehicle manufacturers association, José López-Tafall, in the presentation of the study, the only one at the national level that closely follows this trend. in the absence of a Government observatory. In just one year, as many charging stations have been built as there are gas stations in Spain, 12,000, although the pace of deployment is still far from the objective.
The figure would be much higher, 37,029 poles, and Spain would surpass Italy and Portugal in infrastructure of this type if there were not 7,728 points out of service, that is, one in five. “They are the ones you find with the tape on,” said López-Tafall. They do not work because they are damaged, in poor condition or without access to the network due to lack of permission.
Of the 29,301 that do work, around 25%, 7,122, are in Catalonia. It is almost double that of Madrid, 3,814, and a figure comparable to adding this autonomous community, second in the classification, with the third, Andalusia, with 3,453. In Catalonia there are as many points as in the sum of Galicia, the Basque Country, Extremadura, Murcia, Asturias, Cantabria and Navarra.
Anfac highlights as a positive element that in just one quarter the number of points in poor condition has been reduced by 1,141. As a negative element, remember however that by 2024 the country should have 63,000 operational points if it wanted to get closer to the one set by the Government for the end of the decade, of 300,000 points.
Anfac continues to observe with concern the weakness in sales of electric cars and plug-in hybrids. In the first two months of the year, only 8,500 were sold per month, when the figure should be around 23,000 per month to reach the annual goal. They were equivalent to 9% of the total, even less than the 2023 average of 12%.
López-Tafall denied that this slowdown in the electric market responds to the expectation of an improvement in the Moves plan that should replace the current one, which expires in the middle of the year. He alluded to interest rates and other specific factors, and considered the data to be insignificant because it corresponded to the start of the year. “Sales should improve in the coming months,” he said.
Our sights are set on the new Moves plan, whose endowment should be around, in Anfac’s opinion, 400 million euros per year. “We need the money to arrive quickly,” he said about future government incentives for electric purchases. Of the previous Moves, endowed with about 1,200 million euros, about half of the item will remain unexecuted due to the delay in receiving aid and bureaucracy, Anfac maintains.
