EV Charger Trends
EV Charger's past, evolution, and market growth
Today, we are going to look at the trends have been in the EV Charger business. We will understand the historical trends and the guidance for the next generation of EV chargers. The CPOs must realise that there is an impending threat to their network. They have a few choices to counter that threat, but they must act now.
Before we get to today’s story, I posted a question on my LinkedIn to bust a myth.
When the EV penetration crosses 30% in India, what would be the impact of e4W on the electrical grid?
The audience on LinkedIn believes that it will be between 1-3%. Let’s take a look.
Two weeks ago, we published the utilization report for ~20% of CCS2 charging infrastructure across the country for the months of April and May 2025. The average utilization percentage was ~10%.
This meant that an estimated 7.4GWh of energy was dispensed across the sampled infrastructure.
Let us assume that rest of the fast chargers also have this consumption. Thus, 7.4GWh for ~20% of CCS2 infrastructure means around 37GWh for ~100% CCS2 infrastructure.
This is a huge extrapolation because a lot of fast chargers set up by public entities like BPCL (60%+), HPCL (40%+) and IOCL (95%+) do not work. And these three players are among the top five in India for public EV charging infrastructure. But nonetheless, let us assume so.
Approximately 80% of EV users charge their car at home, thus not accounted for in this analysis. 37GWh is only 20% of the "EV specific" usage. Extrapolating this to 100% brings us to 185GWh EV usage.
This is the consumption for two months — April and May — therefore, consumption for the year, will be roughly 1,110GWh, or to put it simply, around 1.1TWh.
India's annual energy production, via Wikipedia, was just under 2000 TWh in FY23-24. EV usage at current levels is only 0.055% of the annual energy production.
Today, 4W EVs are at ~3-4% penetration. At 30% new sales for EVs, the energy required by EVs will still be around half a percentage point.
Thus, whenever someone says that rapid sales of EVs are going to strain the grid, show them this math.
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To understand what trends are going to be relevant in the future, let us first dive into the past.
In 2022, most public chargers were by Tata Power. They had 50% more chargers than all players put together. This massive investment in charging infrastructure kicked off the EV charging ecosystem in India.
Tata Power preferred to setup 25kW and 30kW chargers in accordance with the most selling EVs at that time, i.e. the Nexon EV and the Tigor EV. Coincidentally, both these EVs belonged to Tata Motors, a Tata group company.
This was seen as coordinated effort and strategy from Tata Power group — the Motors division would sell EVs and the Power division would setup the charging infrastructure. This move would reassure early customers that there is infrastructure and Tata group is committed to electric vehicles.
Other private players like ChargeZone, Glida, Jio-bp, and Statiq started building their network around 2022, by putting up 60kW chargers. Zeon Charging too, was making a mark, with their 50kW chargers. The choice of going with higher power chargers helped serve multiple purposes.
The 50-60kW chargers were dual gun, i.e. it allowed them to serve two Tata customers at the same time with full speed, unlike the single gun chargers being put up by Tata Power. When more cars were being sold with higher charging capacity, like MG or BYD, these players could also serve them by giving the entire 50-60kW on a single connector. This meant that they were future proofing their network for atleast the next generation.
Where there were power restrictions, the private players opted to put up a derated 60kW, i.e. a charger with limited power output, instead of putting up a 25kW or a 30kW charger.
The only other entities focused on putting up 25kW to 30kW chargers were the public entities, i.e. BPCL, IOCL and HPCL. These organisations had plans to setup a massive network from the get go, like Tata Power. Costing was likely a big deterrent in choosing to go with 25-30kW or 60kW, back in 2022.
For around two years since 2022, the charging infrastructure was growing rapidly, almost doubling every six months. Massive investment was being made by Charge Point Operators to occupy prime real estate and setup their brand. After all, the next generation fuel pumps were being setup.
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