This year, newly installed electric vehicle charging stations were found to be at about half of last year's installations. The industry said certification and installation were delayed as the conditions for paying subsidies changed without sufficient preparation, slowing charger rollout.
According to the electric vehicle industry on the 13th, the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment recently said at the Electric Vehicle Leaders Forum held at the National Assembly that 60,522 EV chargers were distributed this year through Nov. 13. That is 55.34% of last year's installations (109,377). Of these, the number of fast chargers installed was 5,428, only 42.75% of last year's.
Starting this year, the government decided not to pay subsidies for slow chargers that do not have a smart control function. Smart control refers to a function that allows the consumer to charge as much as desired by checking the battery's state of charge in real time from the charger.
The push to require a smart control function has been raised since the electric vehicle battery fire at an apartment complex in Cheongna, Incheon, in August. The logic was that, to prevent EV fires, it is safer to charge to 80% to 90% rather than 100%, so introducing smart control, which is effective for adjusting the state of charge, is necessary.
The problem is that even if a slow charger is equipped with a communication module for smart control, each EV must also have a protocol installed that can communicate with it for the function to work properly. Among EVs released in Korea, the only models that support smart-control slow chargers are KGM's Torres EV and Musso EV. At Hyundai Motor and Kia, which account for the largest share of domestic EVs, no models support this function.
With too few EV models supporting smart control, certification of slow charger performance inevitably faced delays. As a result, payments of subsidies to charger manufacturers were also pushed back, and this year's charger installations plunged to "half" of last year's, the industry said.
A senior official at an EV charging company said, "For slow chargers with smart control, the government must test every product and issue certification before installation can proceed," and added, "Certification did not happen until May, which pushed business openings to July or later, and we could not supply chargers on time."
Many also say the fire that broke out while an EV was charging in an underground parking lot of an apartment complex in Cheongna International City, Incheon, last year affected the decline in charger deployment. After the incident, more consumers in the domestic finished car market became reluctant to buy EVs, leading charging operators to scale back new investments.
An official at a charger manufacturer said, "After the Cheongna fire, demand for EVs fell in the domestic market, freezing investment sentiment in the charging sector," and added, "With the government's plan to mandate smart control on top of that, many manufacturers have decided to reduce investment for the time being."