Thomas Dahlem, CEO of the company that is building the Sagunt battery gigafactory, said yesterday that Spain has about 400 charging points per million inhabitants, about 600 below the European average. And he referred to the latest figures from the Electromobility Barometer to point out that, at the end of September 2023, there were only about 25,000 public charging points (only 12% in the Valencian Community), a figure that is “far from the objective.” marking of 45,000 public points by the end of the year.”
Likewise, Dahlem was critical when pointing out that “public administrations can not only advocate for sustainable mobility, but must also implement effective public policies in its favor.” Shortly after, the former Minister of Infrastructure and now Secretary of State for Industry, Rebeca Torró, defended that “the number of charging points is sufficient for the number of electric vehicles,” but noted that their deployment “has to be ambitious.” According to Torró, “we are prepared for it to grow at the same rate as enrollment does.”
The words of both resonated on the first day of the eMobility Expo World Congress that Valencia will host for three days, a meeting on electric mobility held in the territory that aspires to become the main electromobility hub in southern Europe. The PowerCO gigafactory has a lot to do with that leadership, whose construction works will be awarded “in the coming weeks,” as Dahlem announced yesterday.
And although the person in charge of the company did not want to comment on details of the internal process for the award, there is the intention to take into account local suppliers, as has already been staged in different days held by the Business Confederation of the Valencian Community (CEV).
With the first works completed and a staff that is about to reach a hundred people, the project is moving at a good pace and meets the schedule that the company set when it announced its million-dollar investment in Valencia. Furthermore, the Valencian administration is also going in parallel, since the head of the Consell, Carlos Mazón, who inaugurated the congress yesterday, highlighted that the construction of the Sagunt intermodal platform will soon be signed, which already has a successful bidder for the works. “The Valencian Community has the great opportunity to generate one of the great clusters of new mobility in Europe,” highlighted Mazón.
Many of the agents involved in this new paradigm were there yesterday: in addition to PowerCO, BP participated and today it will be Ford’s turn. The first company – whose president in Spain, Andrés Guevara, participated in the congress and today meets with Mazón at the Palau de la Generalitat – maintains its investment commitment of 2,000 million euros in the Valencian Community, as announced a year ago.
The company will install an electrolysis plant at the Castelló de la Plana refinery that will be operational in 2027 and that could generate, according to its calculations, around 5,000 direct, indirect and induced jobs. The company considers key the deployment of the regulatory framework for processes such as the Perte of renewable energies, renewable hydrogen and storage or the Circular Economy, issues that Guevara raised yesterday.
Today it will be the turn of the multinational based in Almussafes, immersed in a new ERTE that is once again worrying the sector, and in its presentation it will explain how BlueCruise technology works. Regarding the temporary employment regulation file, asked yesterday by the Minister of Innovation, Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Nuria Montes in an interview on Cadena SER, she said that the automotive multinational Ford is taking “safe steps” towards electrification of the Valencian plant with the “priority” of “taking care of the human capital” of the factory itself and its entire auxiliary industry, despite recognizing that the situation of the sector at a global level “is not being easy at all.”
