India's EV charging needs are nuanced

Electric vehicle (EV) charging stations – both in public and private places – are driving the e-mobility revolution in countries with vast expanses of land like the US and in Europe. On the other hand, Asian countries having a sizeable number of two-wheelers like China and Taiwan are seeing increasing adoption of battery swapping, a process in which discharged batteries in an EV can be replaced with charged ones from swapping stations.

In India too, there has been an endless debate around choosing the ideal mode of charging solution for EVs from the available ones - battery swapping, public charging, charging stations at home or work and fast charging to name a few. However, India’s vehicular composition is as diverse as the land itself, therefore making its EV charging requirement an extremely nuanced one. A study by Deloitte to understand customer concerns regarding EVs revealed that the most prominent concern in India was the lack of charging infrastructure.

Also Read: Building an electric mobility ecosystem in India

“India has a unique transportation ecosystem with vehicles of different shapes and sizes operating across diverse operating conditions owing to the variation in climate and topography. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to electro-mobility solution for the country,” said SUN Mobility chief executive officer Anant Badjatya.

A World Bank study revealed that the EV market is characterised by network effects. The demand for EVs depends on the availability of publicly accessible charging stations, and, in turn, the supply of charging infrastructure depends on the installed base of EVs to use the stations. This means that policies that strengthen one side of the market could help the development of the other side of the market as well. Building charging infrastructure is a cost-effective strategy for governments to leverage the network effects of the EV market.

The world’s fourth largest automobile market is often understood as a country that is run on two-wheelers considering that there are more than 22 crores of them plying on Indian roads, as per the Vahan portal. But that’s not all.

The pandemic-induced demand for e-commerce has driven sales for three-wheeler commercial vehicles, too, in Asia’s third-largest economy. On the other hand, congestion due to the increasing number of four-wheelers in the country has led to three Indian cities ranking in the top 20 most polluted ones across the world, as per a report by the State of Global Air Initiative.

These facts point to the need for specialised EV charging solutions to address the pain points of each of these vehicular segments.

Electric 2-wheeler and 3-wheelers

In the two-wheeler and three-wheeler segments, which account for a lion’s share out of all the vehicles in the country, there are multiple use cases of EVs: e-commerce deliveries and personal mobility.

While each of these calls for different charging solutions due to various factors, range anxiety is not much of an issue when it comes to personal mobility, said stakeholders. “For an average driving of fewer than 100 kilometres a day, there is no need for an extensive public charging infrastructure,” said Karthikeyan KP, Managing Director, Zeon International, an EV charging infrastructure provider. As per the Bureau of Energy Efficiency, the average range of electric 2-wheelers currently available in the market is around 84 km per charge, which is enough for day-to-day travel within a city, it said.

Also Read: How do electric vehicle batteries work?

However, while most of the market share in the personal mobility segment is addressed by charging technology at home or office, the same wouldn’t work for fleet operators and commercial use-cases, said Karthikeyan.

“For fleet, battery swapping would be an ideal solution since the utility is quite high,” he added.

Others agreed and said the “operational feasibility” and “economic viability” of the charging solution also need to be looked at before choosing the right one for a use case. For instance, the vehicles used by gig working platforms need to have a very low downtime.

“Applications such as last-mile delivery and passenger transport, which require low upfront cost, higher vehicle uptime, and flexibility in range can be addressed by battery swapping based electro-mobility solutions,” said SUN Mobility’s Badjatya. For three-wheelers, battery swapping offers a “compelling use case” with significantly lower up-front cost, unlimited range and no requirement of charging which increases the uptime of these vehicles which are means of livelihood, he added.

Electric 4-wheelers

In the case of passenger vehicles, while EV adoption in India has been moderate, the focus has remained on range anxiety and the ability of electric cars to have longer ranges.

However, the average daily intracity of car driving in India is not as high as it is in some of the American and European countries, and hence a vast network of public charging is unnecessary in this case too, said Karthikeyan.

A typical Indian customer who goes for an EV with a 400-km range may still do 350 days of 50 km driving and 15 days of 350 km driving in a year. The overnight slow-charging at home may adequately cover daily needs, he explained.

As of March 2022, India had 1,742 public charging stations.

The average range of electric cars available in the market is between 150-200 km per charge, according to the Bureau of Energy Efficiency. This range, when considered with the continuously increasing charging infrastructure, makes commuting even inter-cities easier, it added.

“Since an average inter-city travel of 400 km a day in India is not without any breaks in between, the trick here is to place chargers at those strategic places,” Karthikeyan said.

A 50-kilowatt-hour charging station can give provide enough charge for the car in a 30-minute break to suffice until the next stop, he added.

Breaking the range-anxiety myth

While range anxiety – the fear of running out of battery charge and being stranded - is preventing quicker adoption of EVs, the same is only in one’s head and not in reality, said Karthikeyan.

As the EVs will also have smart and connected features, it is easy to dynamically optimise the trip by considering the charging stations en route and their availability aand thereby address the range anxiety problem.

(This is the second story in the “Reimagining Mobility” series focused on building a holistic ecosystem around the future of mobility)