China to build more charging points for electric vehicles

BEIJING - China plans to build 800,000 charging points, including 100,000 public ones, for electric vehicles this year to meet increasing demand, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said Thursday.

A total of 100,000 public charging points have been installed nationwide in 2016, bringing the total number of public charging points in China to 150,000, according to the NEA.

A total of 14,000 kilometers of highway has also been equipped with inter-city fast-charging stations, with an average spacing of 48.6 kilometers.

Electric vehicles consumed more than 1.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in China last year, saving about 400,000 tons of fuel, according to the NEA.

In Beijing and Shanghai, a charging facility can now always be found within a radius of less than 5 km, while other major cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen are working toward this goal.

"For the new year, China will work to solve the payment and information-related problems for charging facility operators and implement a unified national standard for charging ports of electric vehicles," said the NEA.

According to China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), the country will build a nationwide charging-station network that will fulfill the power demands of 5 million electric vehicles by 2020.