New analysis from Wood Mackenzie has found that by 2050 the commercial electric vehicle (EV) charging equipment market will be worth over $870 billion (£623 billion).
It outlined how policy support will reduce the primary barrier for commercial EV adoption – which it identified as cost – and therefore see the annual market value of electric bus and truck charging outlets pass the $200 billion mark by 2045.
However, whilst the sector’s annual market value is expected to hit $243 billion by 2045, the following five years to 2050 will see a decline of almost $25 million.
Whilst annual charger installations will continue to increase through to 2050 – rising from 200,000 in 2020 to over one million in 2050 – a combination of the shift to higher powered charging, the development of public charging networks for trucks or on-route charging for buses and more efficient fleet management strategies will result in fewer chargers needing to be installed in 2050.
Charging will take place in three locations through 2050, WoodMac said, with these being depots owned or operated by the fleet operator, destinations such as warehouses or ports and public charger networks along transit corridors.
WoodMac outlined how the first two of these are already being developed, but that public commercial vehicle charging networks will need to be built in order to support long-distance transit and freight vehicles.
Kelly McCoy, Wood Mackenzie research associate, explained that it is “important to pay attention to how the commercial charging segment evolves”, with stakeholders now being “more proactive than they were in the passenger EV segment to develop new charging strategies, products and solutions”.
McCoy gave the example of utilities and grid operators engaging fleets in pilots and fleet operators actively pursuing integrating EV charging with other on-site distributed energy resources and their building loads to minimise electricity demand.
The potential for vehicle-to-grid was also highlighted by McCoy, describing commercial fleets as “excellent resources” for the technology due to them having fixed routes and schedules as well as remaining parked for most of the day.
WoodMac continued to detail how while light and medium truck installations are underway across the globe, heavy truck electrification is not expected to reach every market by 2028.
Currently, it is China that “dominates” the electric bus and charging infrastructure landscape according to WoodMac, which said that in 2020, the country had more electric buses than any other region will have in 2050.
By mid-century there will be six times as many electric bus charging outlets installed in China compared to the second largest market, the United States.