TOTAL INVESTING IN EV CHARGING POINT
Oil and gas giant is investing in Electric vehicles charging to have a sustainable environment
Total, the French multinational oil giant, announced that it would have up to 20,000 new public EV charging points built and run in the Netherlands. The company has aligned with Shell and BP to make substantial investments in charging infrastructure for electric cars.
Total was awarded the contract by a multi-government agreement, named Amsterdam Electric Metropolitan Region. The concession is reportedly the largest contract for charging EVs in Europe. It will include three provinces — North Holland, Flevoland, and Utrecht — a region with a population of 3.2 million.
Total is already the leading EV charging operator in the MRA-Electric area, with more than 4500 public charging points in the Netherlands. The company has developed extensive experience and skills to operate an EV charging network.
As part of the agreement, the electricity provided to the EV charging network by the Total Netherlands will be 100 percent from renewable energy, such as solar and wind.
According to Alexis Vovk, president for marketing and Services at Total, providing such reliable charging infrastructure and services to the Dutch EV drivers, powered by clean and renewable electricity, is an essential and extraordinary step towards sustainable mobility. It is consistent with our ambition to operate 150,000 charging points in Europe by 2025 and to become a significant player in the business of electric mobility.
In the Netherlands, lucrative EV incentives led to a dramatic increase in electric-vehicle sales in 2019. EV sales increased by about 150 percent for the year. The sell-up rate for the EV was around 15 percent of all vehicle sales.
In October 2018, ChargePoint and Total Gas & Power announced a reseller agreement to provide companies throughout the UK with integrated EV charging products and services.
BP bought Chargemaster, the UK's biggest electric charging network, in June 2018. At the time, BP said it was set to increase the number of EVs in the UK from 135,000 vehicles (in 2018) to 12 million by 2040. Chargemaster-rebranding as BP Chargemaster had 6,500 charging spots at the time of its acquisition.
No oil company has made more significant steps than Shell in EV charging. It acquired Dutch-based NewMotion in 2017, which at the time had over 30000 charging points across Western Europe for electric vehicles.
Shell acquired Greenlots a year ago, a Los Angeles-based maker of technologies for charging electric vehicles and energy management. The Volkswagen affiliate, Electrify America, uses Greenlots as the core infrastructure of its EV charging network.
Shell announced plans in October 2019 to become the UK's first fuel retailer to pick up traditional fuels from a service station and replace them with an EV-charging hub.
