360,000+ Home EV Chargers In UK By 2025?
There are currently 120,000 or so EV charging stations in the UK. A producer and installer of high-end EV chargers in the UK, Andersen, forecasts there will be 360,000+ by 2025.
There are approximately 28 million households in the UK at the moment. If you assume 30 million households in 2025, that would mean approximately 1.2% of UK households would have a home charger by 2025. If you assume 35 million people, that’s about 1% of households.
Electric vehicle sales accounted for 9.5% of new vehicle sales in the UK in June and accounted for 7.7% of new vehicle sales in the first half of the year. It’s conceivable EV sales could be at 50% in the UK by 2025, or 25% if you want to be conservative.
However, recall that most people do not buy new cars, and also keep in mind that many people (especially in large cities like London) do not have the opportunity to installed a home charger.
There were a bit more than 7.2 million new car registrations in the past three years in the UK, and the total number of licensed cars on the road was 31.5 million at the end of 2018. So, 360,000 EV chargers would serve approximately 5% of new cars registered over a three year period if car registrations remained approximately stable, and about 1.2% of all cars on the road assuming not much changes in number of cars on the road.
To my amateur eyes, and not trying to figure out how many new-car buyers have a place at home to plug in, many more home EV chargers should be installed by 2025 than 360,000, and Andersen should have much more business than this forecast implies — presuming Andersen has a good product and installation business. I have to say, it does look like one of the prettiest home chargers I’ve seen.
https://youtu.be/Rjq84rF8SJk
Going from 120,000 home EV chargers to 360,000 should not take 5 years. That would be the dream of laggard automakers entering the EV race far too late and with little enthusiasm.
The company’s press release about the news highlighted that EV sales grew in the UK by 132% in the first 5 months of the year compared to the first 5 months of 2019, while diesel vehicle sales dropped 54%. Furthermore, the number of plug-in models on the market in the UK is expected to rise from 60 to 176 by the end of this year. Give consumers 3 times more vehicle options and you’re going to get a lot more EV sales! Yet again, it’s hard to see home EV chargers only tripling in number by 2025 in such a hot market and after seeing the EV adoption curves in other countries were EV market share has risen faster and when considering the strong EV incentives the government is now offering.
In Norway, electric vehicle sales rose from 6% of auto sales in 2013 to 49% five years later in 2018. In Iceland, EV market share rose from 5% in 2016 to 25% three years later in 2019. In the Netherlands, EV market share rose from 6% in 2018 to 13% so far this year, just two years later. So, 50% EV market share is certainly possible for the UK by 2025, and 25% seems like an easy, conservative forecast.
Crunching some rough numbers, 25% of 2 million new car sales would be 500,000 new EV sales in 2025 (on the low end of my forecast range), and 50% of a more aggressive 2.4 million auto sales in 2025 would be 1.2 million EV sales. I think it’s safe to say that the country should have far more than 67,480 home EV chargers sold in that year and far more than 362,270 installed in total across the UK. Feel free to disagree if you think I’m being wildly optimistic about any of these figures or assumptions.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CCHIoNqHmrV/
No matter how far off Andersen’s forecast is, though — or if it is spot on and I’m the crazy one — the point is clear: electric car sales are rising in the UK, and so are sales of home EV chargers. Also, Andersen sells a one super pretty home charger. If I was in the market for a charger in the UK, I think there’s a very high chance I’d choose that one. (Note: I have no stake in the company and I get nothing for writing this. I just discovered the company through this press release today!)
Related story: This Is Why Electric Car Sales Are Blowing Up In The UK
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