ZAP // Depositphotos; Sony
Portugal has already surpassed European targets when it comes to charging stations, but the rest of Europe cannot say the same.
The European Commission has set a target of reaching 3.5 million charging points by 2030. But there is a small problem: to achieve this target, Europe needed to quadruple the current number in the next five years.
Put in another perspective, the EU will have to install almost 10,200 points every week over the next five years to achieve this goal.
According to, Portugal was the country where the sale of electric vehicles grew the most — 13.3% in the first three quarters compared to the same period last year and, at the same time, there was a drop in the sale of new diesel cars — around 8.8%.
These values go against the European trend of cooling of this market — the number of new trams in the EU fell 5.8% in the first nine months of 2024.
According to , Portugal was also one of the only countries in Europe in which the European target for installing charging points was met, and even exceeded: Portuguese network capacity presents a surplus of 20% in its public access network.
In Portugal, for every three AC (slower) stations there is one DC station (fastest), a very positive value when compared to the rest of Europe (seven to one), which may justify our country’s position in the seventh largest tram market share.
Ahead of Portugal, in the tram market, there are only “richer” countriessuch as Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium and Luxembourg.
But, according to José Manoel Fernandeswho talks about these numbers in a space in the Observador, says that it’s not quite like thatand that Portugal has, after all, just one DC post for every six AC.
This is because, explains the journalist, “most fast chargers have two sockets, but one of them is for a Japanese model of chargers that, in Portugal, practically does not exist“.
ZAP did a search on the app’s map in 12 stations of fast charging (DC) in the Porto region — each of which has a CCS2 socket (the most common fast charging socket in Portugal) and a CHAdeMO socket, which fewer electric vehicle models in Portugal use.
In most cases, the charging station with CCS2 socket was in use or had recently been used; just in one case the CHAdeMO charging station was being used. However, in other cases, despite being available, CHAdeMO had been used less than 1 hour ago.
Like this, in practiceand if the Miio data is correct, the actual proportion of DC charging stations does not exactly correspond to 2/6.
However, it will not be as close to 1/6 as José Manuel Fernandes says. In other words, the calculations don’t add up completely: a third is not a sixth…but it is difficult to determine which value it comes closest to.
Furthermore, despite Portugal’s good ranking in the rankingit is also worth noting that 100% of European countries have reached the targets imposed by the EU for 2024, and 88% of Member States have already reached the target for 2025 this year, according to Europeans. But, When it comes to 2030, the situation becomes more complicated.
In 2023, the weekly average of new points installed was slightly below 3000. As Público highlights, these values are well below the more than 10 thousand needed, every week for the next five years.
According to the European Observatory for Alternative Fuels, as of October 2024, there will be 850,857 charging points across the European Union. The problem? More than half of them (55%) were concentrated in Germany, France and the Netherlands alone. The installation of these points is therefore quite uneven across Europe.
“The European charging network is insignificant when compared to that of Chinawhere the public access network is equivalent to around two-thirds of the global charging network”, ACEA (European Automobile Manufacturers Association) told Público, so there is still “a long way to go”.
