Guo Sheng, Ministry of Transport: "Range anxiety" effectively alleviated: Nearly 90% of the country's highways are covered by charging facilities

On July 31, the Ministry of Transport held its July regular press conference to introduce the economic performance of my country's transportation in the first half of the year.

Guo Sheng, deputy director of the Highway Bureau of the Ministry of Transport, said that the Ministry of Transport attaches great importance to the construction of charging facilities along highways. According to the unified deployment of the State Council, since 2014, local governments have been deployed to add charging facilities in the service areas of highways in combination with the scale and development needs of new energy vehicle users. In August last year, our ministry, together with the National Energy Administration, the State Grid Corporation of China and the Southern Power Grid, issued the "Action Plan for Accelerating the Construction of Charging Infrastructure Along Highways", guiding local governments to focus on highways and qualified national and provincial trunk highway service areas, and accelerate the construction of highway charging infrastructure in accordance with the principles of "charging stations first, supply to promote demand, adapting to local conditions, classified promotion, wide coverage, moderate advancement, universal openness, intelligence and efficiency".

As of the end of June this year, 5,931 highway service areas across the country have built charging facilities, accounting for 89.48% of the total number of highway service areas in the country. There are 6,628 highway service areas in the country, with a total of 18,590 charging piles built, covering 29,000 small passenger car parking spaces, and about 27,000 parking spaces have reserved conditions for construction and installation, which means that nearly 90% of highway service areas are covered with charging facilities. Among them, the coverage rate of highway charging infrastructure in 17 provinces such as Beijing, Hebei, and Liaoning exceeds 90%. There are already 5,128 highway service areas in the country where charging parking spaces account for more than 10% of small passenger car parking spaces, and the charging infrastructure network of highway service areas is becoming increasingly complete. Judging from the operation guarantee during major holidays such as the Spring Festival, Qingming Festival, May Day, and Dragon Boat Festival this year, the phenomenon of charging queues in service areas across the country has been greatly improved, and there has been no serious queuing phenomenon, and the problem of "mileage anxiety" of electric vehicles has been alleviated to a certain extent.

At the same time, due to information asymmetry, the public cannot effectively obtain information about the setting and real-time use of charging infrastructure, resulting in different busy and idle charging facilities in different service areas, especially during major holidays. In response, we have taken two measures. One aspect is to strengthen charging security. In April this year, the National Energy Administration and our department issued a notice to deploy local governments to carry out travel and charging demand prediction, formulate holiday charging service guarantee plans, publish charging strategies for green travel, deploy mobile emergency charging equipment, and timely publish service area traffic and charging queues. The second measure is to strengthen the release of information. Our department has included the "easy check" service of charging infrastructure on highways in our department's practical work that is closer to the people's livelihood this year. By providing real-time status query services for charging infrastructure in highway service areas, we will guide the public to reasonably choose charging places, promote the full use of charging facilities, and further enhance the guarantee capacity of highway charging services.

Providing good electric vehicle charging services is a systematic project, which requires the full mobilization of all forces, and comprehensively strengthening the construction of charging infrastructure in various links and scenarios such as residential communities, enterprises, institutions, tourist attractions, and public parking lots, so as to form a rationally laid out, scientific and efficient charging infrastructure system in the whole society to meet the charging service needs of vehicles throughout the entire travel process. In the next step, our department will thoroughly implement the latest deployment requirements of the Party Central Committee and the State Council on the construction of charging infrastructure, adhere to problem-oriented and goal-oriented, focus on charging facilities in highway service areas, and further optimize and improve the charging infrastructure network along the highway in accordance with the principle of "moderately ahead of time", and strive to form a charging infrastructure network with "fixed facilities as the main body, mobile facilities as supplements, full coverage of important nodes, good operation and maintenance services, and guaranteed travel for the masses", effectively meet the charging needs of electric vehicles, serve the public's convenient travel, and help the high-quality development of the electric vehicle industry.