What will the 'scary' 2030 electric future look like? Much of China is already living there and it is good news for owners of electric cars such as the BYD Sealion 7, Kia EV5, Tesla Model Y and XPeng G6 | Opinion

It’s a chilly overcast day on the outskirts of Hangzhou and there’s a hum in the air. The ominous tone is generated by no less than 40 fast electric car chargers, which sprout from an otherwise empty field on the side of a freeway.

This is the Shaoxing Service Area, a ‘Rest Stop’ on the freeway between two major Chinese east coast cities. It features three rows of fast chargers where in Australia you’d be lucky to find one, a two-storey shopping centre to keep you entertained, and one of Nio’s even more futuristic battery swapping stations hidden away at the back.

If you wanted a look into the year 2030, when we’re all meant to be driving zero emissions vehicles, this is it. China is already living in what many consider to be an unattainable existence, where everyone has a free bay to charge and there’s plenty of things to do while you wait, whether it's an hour or just 15 minutes.

To give you an idea of the scale of the problem Australia faces though, China already has over 1.8 million public DC chargers, whereas Australia only just cracked the 1000 mark by June of 2024. At one point last year, China built more AC and DC public charging than has ever been built in the USA in just a 73 day period.

A better way to look at it is the ratio of chargers to the amount of electric vehicles currently on the road. Even with its astronomical EV sales compared to the rest of the world, China has kept pace with its infrastructure. It has roughly seven electric cars per public charging location.

In Australia it is closer to 150 cars per charger, according to the EV Council's data.

So if you’re an EV owner wondering why it’s so hard to find a station, or you’re a combustion car buyer wondering where all the chargers are, your answer is there’s nowhere near enough of them yet.

The Shaoxing Rest Area, with its 40 plus chargers, isn’t even one of the biggest ones in China. The Xiawuji Battery Charging station on the outskirts of Beijing features no less than 70 fast charging bays offering similar facilities.

Shell has opened what appears to be the largest fast charging facility in the world in Shenzhen, sporting an absurd 258 public DC fast chargers all in one location.

Shell said the facility services over 3300 EVs a day and has rooftop solar capable of generating up to 300,000kWh of electricity a year to help at least subsidise what can only be an eye-watering energy cost.

On the topic of facilities, the Shaoxing location I saw has a two storey shopping mall, mainly occupied by a range of dining outlets, whether it’s a local hotpot shop or a Starbucks. It also had enormous toilet facilities, complete with showers. There’s plenty of indoor and outdoor seating. Interestingly the site still offered a Sinopec refuelling facility for non-EVS, but it consisted of a handful of bowsers taking up about a third of the space of the EV charging bays.

It’s the utopia many EV owners are currently looking for, particularly on the great heavily-travelled expanses on Australia’s east coast, yet this little sample of the 2030 future doesn’t come without its own warnings of building up too quickly.

According to multiple sources, the use rate of some of these larger sites are surprisingly low, showing what some are calling a “high seasonality” with strong demand in summer travel periods followed by steep declines in demand for charging in winter. It’s reflected at the Shaoxing site. I was there in December on a chilly winter's day and only a handful of the 40 sites were in use. 

Reuters has reported on a heavily fractured charging market, with the five biggest charging vendors making up only 65.2 per cent market share as of 2023. It reported estimates from Rystad energy, which indicate the pylons of even the largest player are earning less than US$10 a day.

Australian charge providers who are yet to develop such large sites can learn from China before they fall into the same traps.

For example, Australia’s EV charging networks started out with rapid fragmentation between brands, meaning a similar frustrating experience requiring an array of phone apps to activate and pay for them. Established networks have now become more dominant, with most public DC sites run by either Chargefox or Evie Networks, and most AC slow chargers now being able to be paid for via a single Exploren app.

How far are we away from Chinese-style ‘Rest Stops’ as a harbinger for the 2030 future? Certainly a way off yet, but our first glimpse of it might come via Ampol’s redevelopment of the M1 Northbound site in Wyong, NSW, which has been approved by the NSW government for funding for ten DC charging bays. It won’t be the largest site in Australia, with that title already held by the Tesla charging station in Albury. It is hidden away in a public multi-story carpark featuring 16 pylons, but it most resembles a ‘rest-stop’ style location by the side of a highly-trafficked intercity route.

While it comes with its own set of warnings to heed then, spots like the Shaoxing rest stop should come as proof that a 2030 future where the majority of us are driving electric cars is not only possible, it’s nothing to be afraid of after all.