The project to fill Spain with electric stations

“How many recharging points will there be in my town or in my city in the coming years?”, the president of Seat, Wayne Griffiths, asked himself a few days ago, to demand from the Government a concrete plan, “and not philosophical”, for expansion of electric stations.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
12 November 2022 Saturday 20:46
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The project to fill Spain with electric stations

“How many recharging points will there be in my town or in my city in the coming years?”, the president of Seat, Wayne Griffiths, asked himself a few days ago, to demand from the Government a concrete plan, “and not philosophical”, for expansion of electric stations. The Ministry of Transport does not yet have advanced work on the table while the automobile sector demands speed. At this juncture the construction companies have burst in. Large companies such as ACS, Ferrovial, OHLA, Acciona, Sacyr, represented through the Seopan employers' association, integrated into the CEOE, which do have the financial capacity and resources to be able to develop this map of essential green points for the deployment of the electric vehicle and which They propose to do it themselves.

Seopan has prepared a project that has been sent to the Government. It consists of the installation of 1,585 charging stations distributed throughout the country. Each installation would have, on average, ten recharging points, so that there would be more than 10,700 plugs for electric cars in the more than 65,000 kilometers of interurban roads that exist in Spain. Each of them, they propose, would be placed an average of 50 km apart. Cities and towns would, for their part, have their own public and private facilities.

The recharging points on the highways, always according to the plan drawn up by the construction site, would be installed both on high-capacity interurban roads and on non-secondary conventional roads. On the first highways, they plan to locate an electric charging station on each side of the road and only one on conventional roads. The facilities with the highest vehicle traffic would have up to twelve cargo terminals and those with the least, four.

One of the problems for the implementation of the electric car would be the charging speed, a situation contemplated in the Seopan plan. His proposal consists of 350 kW points, a charging power considered ultra-fast and that would allow an electric car to be recharged in between 5 and 10 minutes. These types of points are what Repsol is installing in some service stations.

The construction companies budget at least 3,700 million to start up this infrastructure for the electric vehicle. 1,700 million would go to the electric stations on the roads owned by the State and another 2,000 million to those of the autonomous communities. But, and who pays for all this project? Seopan calls for a new Perte focused on the recharging infrastructure of the vehicle of the future. “El Perte would be based on the large scale and complexity at the time of carrying out the location, project, construction and connection of the network of charging stations, which would also require guaranteeing a minimum volume of the actions or lots to be contracted, through a concurrence procedure. competitive in accordance with the law of contracts of the public sector”, raises the bosses.

Construction companies even make a novel proposal to the Government, as can be read in the report sent. The employers consider that the sector has the financial muscle to be able to advance up to 40% of those 3,700 million to start building this network of charging stations that would be operational from the year 2026, when the most conservative forecasts of the electricity industry The automotive sector estimates a fleet of electric vehicles in Spain with around 1,000,000 accumulated registrations, fourteen times more than the registrations made until the end of last year.