Recently, the State Grid has released news. It plans to build 120,000 electric charging piles for electric vehicles by 2020, and build a public charging network covering all cities in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and the Yangtze River Delta and other major cities in the region. Based on the world's largest smart car networking platform, 3 million charging stations are connected. This means that the number of domestic charging piles will increase significantly in the future.

In recent years, new energy vehicle policies have been prosperous. As early as 2015, China issued the "Guidelines for the Development of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure (2015-2020)" and "Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Construction of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure"; from 2016 to 2017, many ministries and commissions jointly Issued the "Notice on Accelerating the Construction of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure in Residential Areas", "Notice on Accelerating the Construction of Internal Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure in the Unit", etc., which greatly solved the problems of unsuitable property, difficulty in accessing electricity, etc. The landing of the site cleared many obstacles.

After entering 2017, new energy vehicles are welcoming the blowout, which further forces the construction of domestic charging piles to accelerate. By the end of 2017, a total of 214,000 public charging piles had been built nationwide, an increase of 51% year-on-year.

According to reports, there are currently 13 relatively large-scale operators in China, including special calls, national network companies, star charging and China Putian, which account for 86% of the nation's public-type charging infrastructure. Among them, the special call to build and operate 97,569 charging piles, accounting for 46%, ranking first. The second country has 42304 national networks, accounting for 20%. Then there were 28,521 stars and 14660 Chinese Putian.

In the provincial administrative region, a total of 70 electric vehicle charging new policies were issued in 49 provinces and cities nationwide. The leading public charging piles are Beijing, Guangdong, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Shandong. The charging demand in Beijing is mainly for private passenger cars, while Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Shanxi mainly provide public transportation such as public transportation and rental.

Low overall utilization, the scale still lags behind

However, although China's public charging piles rank first in the world and enter a period of rapid development, the problem of insufficient structural supply of charging infrastructure has become increasingly prominent, and the overall scale is still lagging behind.

The data of China's electric vehicle charging alliance also shows that in 2017, there were 231,820 private charging infrastructures installed in the country, and the new energy vehicle pile-to-pile ratio was about 3.8:1. This is far from the goal of China to achieve a vehicle-to-pillar ratio close to 1:1 by 2020.

In addition, although the number of public charging piles planned for construction in 2020 is about 500,000, it still does not match the scale of development of new energy vehicles in the same period. Moreover, due to the unreasonable layout, the usage rate of public charging piles is less than 15%.

In fact, the low utilization rate of charging piles has become a prominent problem that restricts the development of the charging industry. In addition to the unreasonable layout of the charging piles, other such as inadequate maintenance, incompatibility of the charging interface of the piles, and low level of interconnection and intercommunication are all important reasons for the low utilization rate of the charging piles and difficulty in meeting the needs of consumers.

Urgent need to break the profit dilemma

In fact, although the development of the charging pile industry is in full swing, its sustainable business development model has not been formed, and there are two-way contradictions between the operating enterprises' profitability and the high consumer charging price.

With the centralized development of the charging pile market and the continuous emergence of new energy vehicle market demand, how to build a smarter and more used new energy vehicle charging model has become the key to the development of the industry.

At present, with the help of Internet +, big data and other technical means, to promote the open sharing and interconnection of information, and to make the vehicle and charging pile network more matching, is a necessary means to enhance the user experience and expand the market scale.

In the future, under the application of new technologies such as “Internet +” and intelligent charging and discharging, the piles can be shared after the network is put into the network. The proportion of building piles, building networks and building stations can be reduced and the efficiency can be improved. Obviously, the charging pile industry still needs to develop rapidly in the next few years, solve the problems of uneven distribution and irregular operation in the industry, and explore the profit model of sustainable development.