Skip to main content

Speculative Race for Charging Stations

From the series The world car battle

If at the beginning of the 21st century electrification had technological limits in batteries, both in terms of cost and range, these are now partly overcome, because electric cars have a range of 240-450 km, more than enough for 95% of journeys of less than 50 km. The major obstacle remains the construction of a network of charging stations and their integration with the electricity grid.

The race between China, Europe, and USA

UBS Evidence Lab, a team of UBS bank experts working in 55 specialised labs to provide data on investment decisions, predicts that cost parity between electric and internal combustion cars will be achieved in 2024 [Inside EVs, October 20th 2020]. By then, the development of car electrification will be self-sustaining without government subsidies.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), in its report Electric Vehicle Outlook 2020, estimates that by 2022 carmakers will have 500 different models of electric cars available and that sales will rise from 2.1 million in 2019 to 26 million in 2030. The share of electric cars in total car sales will rise from 2.7% in 2020 to 28% 1n 2030. For the International Energy Agency (IEA), in the Stated Policies scenario, which considers evolution of the situation according to the policies already in place, the circulation of electric cars worldwide will reach 145 million by 2030, 7% of total circulation, and sales will be 35% of the total in China, 35% in Europe and 15% in the USA [LEA, Global EV Outlook 2021, April 2021].

According to these forecasts, China is leading the process of automotive electrification, the EU is racing hard to catch up, and the USA is lagging behind, although the Biden’s administration is attempting to make up lost ground with its electrification plan.

The charging network

In 2019, there were 6.5 million private and 800,000 public charging points (aka charging stations) worldwide [IEA, Global EV Outlook 2020, June 2020]. Private charging points are those owned by households, while public charging points are owned by companies and are freely accessible to all motorists, just like any petrol station.

Another BNEF analysis [Bloomberg, March 23rd, 2021] shows China’s dynamism in building an infrastructure network: its 300,000 available public columns in 2018 have risen to 516,000 in 2019 and 800,000 in 2020.

According to McKinsey January 5th], by 2030 the USA will have between IT and 30 million private and 400,000 to 600,000 public charging points, the EU together with the UK between 28 and 35 million private and 500,000 to 900,000 public charging points, and China between 15 and 17 million private and 1.5 and 2.2 million public charging points. This large difference between the public and private charging points in China, the USA and Europe lies in the different distribution of the population in the territories.

In the USA and Europe, as people move to the suburbs, half to twothirds of the population now live in single dwellings with garages. This is why McKinsey predicts that by 2030 there will be twice as many private charging points as in China, where urbanisation is leading to a concentration of the population in cities with large apartment blocks and therefore twice as many public charging points. According to the McKinsey report, by 2030 there could be 54 to 82 million private and 2.4 to 3.7 million public charging stations in the world. A worldwide market has opened up, triggering a race to invest in this sector, and with it speculation.

Financial mobilisation

According to McKinsey, the construction of a charging network will require a global investment in the period 2020-2030 of $110 to $180 billion, both for public stations and private homes. Alix Partners estimates $300 billion, of which $50 billion in the USA, that is, one-sixth of the total [CNBC, March 31st].

In Biden’s plan, of the $174 billion for electrification that would be allocated by 2030, if approved by Congress, $15 billion would go to building 500,000 charging stations [Bloomberg News, April 22nd]. If we compare this figure with the $50 billion estimated by AlixPartners, $35 billion would have to come from the private sector.

The market creates itself, and it is a mutual upward spiral — electric cars need charging stations, and these will promote the sale of electric cars.

In the next decade there will be a coexistence of internal combustion and electric cars. The current world market iS $1,771 billion for internal combustion cars and $182 billion for electric cars, for a total of $1,953 billion. In 2030, according to UBS estimates, it will be $1,073 billion for internal combustion cars and $1,158 billion for electric cars, for a total of $2,231 billion [Market Watch, March 20th].

On February 13th, 2020, Seeking Alpha, a financial consultancy, reported a partial list of the leading companies in the electric charging sector. They include Tesla Motors, Ionity (a Daimler, Volkswagen and BMW joint venture), Electrify America (Volkswagen), Qingdao TGOOD (China), EVgo (USA), Charge Point (USA — whose investors include Chevron, Daimler AG, BMW and Siemens), Blink Charging (USA), Tritium Pty (Australia), EV-Box (the Netherlands — recently acquired by France’s Engie) and ENEL X e-Mobility (Italy — ENEL).

The number of companies entering the sector is growing rapidly and changes from month to month. The business is also of interest to oil companies, which can exploit their established network of petrol stations. Shell has acquired NewMotion in Europe, while BP has invested in FreeWire in the USA.

New wave of speculation?

In the capitalist economy there is a mismatch between a company’s fixed and working capital and its market capitalisation (the total share price or market value of the company). This imbalance gives rise to the inevitable speculation fulled by financial capital. The ups and downs of the market are sensationalised by the media, which promote investing as a sport for the common man — according to Bruce Wasserstein [1947-2009] investment banker at Lazard bank [Big Deal: 2000 and Beyond, London, Hachette, 2009].

Bloomberg, a newspaper strongly in favour of electric mobility, writes on April 30th that speculators are rushing to invest in charging stations, convinced that a boom is just around the corner. There is a risk that early investors will be burnt out before the profits come in. One criterion used by the financial markets to compare the dynamics of economic sectors is the TSR (Total Shareholder Return): this is obtained by adding up the share price increase and dividends over a given period, then dividing it by the share price at the beginning of the period. If in one year the share price of a company rises from 100 to 120 and the dividends distributed are 10, the TSR would be: (20+10) divided by 100 = 30%.

In 2020, the TSR calculated on 2019 was 16% for oil and gas companies, +11% for insurance companies, +18% for traditional car manufacturers, +51% for high-tech companies, +63% for semiconductors and +187% for the electric mobility sector [McKinsey, April 6th]. Financial markets are betting on the electrification of the car.

Tesla Motors in 2020 had 48,000 employees, sales of $26 billion and losses of $144 million; Volkswagen had 671,000 employees, $252 billion in sales and profits of $12 billion [Forbes, May 13th, 2020]. On April 28th, 2021 Tesla had a market capitalisation of $672 billion against Volkswagen’s $136 billion [YCharts, Chicago]. Volkswagen, with 9.6 times Tesla’s sales and 14 times its employees, was worth five times less to the stock market: this sharp gap between physical production processes and their monetary representation is forcing car companies to electrify if they want to defend their market value and satisfy their shareholders. Financial capital is setting the pace for industrial capital, to the rhythm of energy transition. The strong revaluation of shares on the market has been used by Elon Musk to finance Tesla Motors; in his wake follow the companies that are building the network of electric charging stations.

One example is Blink Charging: its shares have risen 3,000% in 8 months [Bloomberg, February 8th]. Despite never having made a profit in 11 years since its inception, its market capitalisation reached $2.17 billion, 481 times sales of just $4.5 million, compared to an average ratio of less than I for car companies. Also in the charging station sector, ChargePoint had $144 million in sales and a market capitalisation of $2.1 billion; EVgo Services, with $14 million, had a market capitalisation of $2.4 billion. A speculative bubble is forming in the market for charging stations because it will take years of investment before one makes a profit [Bloomberg, April 30th].

Darwinian selection

Speculation is in the nature of the capitalist economy and has already taken its toll with the dot-com (telecommunications and Internet) financial bubble, when the Nasdaq stock index rose 400% between 1995 fall 78% by and March 2000, only to October 2002. With the bursting of the bubble, the Dow Jones lost $7 trillion, 500,000 people lost their jobs and 23 telecommunication companies went bankrupt [The American Prospect, September 2002].

The boom in new companies in the electric car charging sector will be followed by Darwinian selection. Erik Gordon of the University of Michigan warns that if the electrification of the car is real, the companies’ stocks are not. The dot-com boom produced some real companies, but most of the overpriced dot-com companies were lousy investments. The electric boom will be the same story. Some great companies will be built, but most of the investors who chase insanely-priced companies will be crying (Bloomberg, February 8th].

New technologies, new social productive forces and developments in science and technology abound, but the capitalist mode of production remains with all its contradictions.

Lotta Comunista, May 2021

Labels:

Popular posts in the last week

The EU Commission Plans for Rearmament and a Clean Industrial Deal

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series European news Following the European elections which took place on June 6th - 9th, the leaders of the Member States met on June 27th at the European Council. Ursula von der Leyen was nominated as president of the next European Commission, after she was chosen as the European People’s Party’s (EPP) Spitzenkandidat (“leading candidate”). The agreement also included the election of former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa as president of the European Council, and the appointment of former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas as High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Subsequently, on July 18th, Parliament elected von der Leyen as president of the Commission by an absolute majority, with 401 votes out of 719 MEPs. On September 17th, von der Leyen presented her team of commissioners to the European Parliament and, two days later, the Council adopted this list of...
Read more

Libertarian Communism: A Different Kind of Communism

Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM   An examination of the debate within the groups that were to create GAAP (Anarchist Groups of Proletarian Action) gives a vivid picture of the problems that between 1948 and 1951 had to be slowly and painfully faced. Three major confrontations, progressively more serious, took place between Cervetto and Masini in the autumn of 1949 and again in the spring and autumn of 1950. As preparations were being made for the National Conference at Pontedecimo – from which GAAP would be born – debate on the nature of the organisation and on theories of the State and imperialism began to define the characteristics of the new political group, but also revealed the differences. The first step had been to look for ‘a different kind’ of communism in anarchism. Along this road Cervetto , with an ever-surer grasp, would raise the issue that had been first posed by Marx and Lenin : our militant...
Read more

Lotta Comunista: The Origins 1943-1952

Guido La Barbera Contents 9. Preface to the English Edition 13. Preface 19. Useful dates 21. Chapter One «ONE OUGHT TO KNOW WITH WHOM ONE IS DEALING» 25. The balance-of-power theory 27. Theory and the ‘strategy-party’ 29. Chapter Two THE FOUNDRY AND THE PARTISAN STRUGGLE 31. The Savona group 39. Passion disciplined by reason 40. Never again a tool in the hands of others 41. The Genoa group 46. The Sestri Ponente group 48. The groups in Rome and Tuscany 52. The strength of GAAP: ‘only a handful’ 55. Chapter Three LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM: A DIFFERENT KIND OF COMMUNISM 58. Reckoning with Bordiga...
Read more

Socialism and Nationalism in the History of France

The collapse of French socialism at the outbreak of the First World War is considered by many historians to be the most significant case of its kind. We must go back in time to find its origins. The dramatic repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was followed by a decade of shootings and the deportation of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants. Reactionary monarchical legitimism attributed the decline of France to the Revolution of 1789, but by then the nouvelles couches sociales , the new classes produced by capitalism, as Leon Gambetta defined them, demanded a politics free from economic, social and clerical ties. The Radical Party, a turning point of French politics, was its expression. The same taditional Catholic Judeophobia dating back to the Middle Ages — according to Michel Dreyfus’, research director at the CNRS in Paris, Anti-Semitism on the Left in France [Paris, 2009] — gradually transformed into the image of the Jews associated with money and modernity who des...
Read more

The Spider Web of OpenAI Agreements

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 14 From the series The telecommunications battle There are two interwoven and contrasting trends in the American economy. On the one hand, we are witnessing steady growth in the value of securities linked to the furious race towards artificial intelligence (AI), which could lead to a financial bubble; on the other, an increase in GDP, precisely due to the huge investments in this field, is taking place. In the first week of November, a downward correction saw many technological securities devalue by $1.2 trillion on the stock exchange. Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, the biggest American bank, predicts that there is a one-in-three probability of a collapse, albeit not imminently. As I see it — he states — artificial intelligence is real and, all in all, it will pay off [...] just as happened in the past in the case of automobiles and television sets . Products which, however, have also seen many...
Read more

The Theoretical and Political Battles of Arrigo Cervetto: V

Internationalism No. 81, November 2025 Pages 8 and 9 From the introduction to Arrigo Cervetto’s Opere Scelte ("Selected Works") , recently published in Italy by Edizioni Lotta Comunista. V The Leninist tactic in the educational crisis and the union tactic on the prospects of trade unionism had already produced results in Genoa that alarmed the Italian Communist Party (PCI). With the restructuring crisis , when opportunism began to side with austerity policies and the Leninists with the defence of wages, however, the reaction of opportunism became furious, following the Stalinist script of slander and intimidation. In those years, I worked to ensure that what was a tradition for my generation would become a common heritage for the new generation. We needed to select, discipline, and amalgamate. We needed to assert ourselves to do so. In 1974, the spontaneous movement of students and workers, unable to find a tra...
Read more

The Myth of Cooperation

From the series Vaccines and world contention There are by now ten authorised vaccines already in use against SARSCoV-2, and there are 77 countries in which vaccinations are taking place. By mid-February, 173 million doses had been administered and the campaign is proceeding at an average rate of six million a day, calculated on the basis of last week’s figures. At this pace, it would take 5 years to vaccinate 75% of the world population with two doses [ Bloomberg , February 15 th ]. More than half of the injections have been carried out in the United States, the UK, and the European Union which, together, account for 11% of the world population. In at least one third of the 77 surveyed countries, less than 1% of the population have received their first dose of the vaccine, and, in the rest of the world, vaccines have not yet arrived. Imperialist globalisation Individual states are pursuing autonomous solutions to a global problem. Epidemiologists believe that, while a vast propo...
Read more

Show Warfare?

Internationalism No. 86, April 2026 Page 16 After show politics and show diplomacy , have we sunk to the obscenity of show warfare ? On the surface, this is true. The Pentagon’s video game-style communications, where airstrikes, missile launches, and deadly explosions are set to music for social media clips, certainly suggest so. It matters little that a hundred schoolgirls were also blown to bits as artificial intelligence took centre stage on the battlefield. In reality, war propaganda has always showcased destruction and mocked the enemy; today in Washington, in the era of the high-tech groups of television and social media democracy , the only thing that has changed is the style and the means used to inflame fanaticisms and stuff people’s brains. In Tehran, dominated by a parasitic bourgeoisie that feeds on oil revenues and is intertwined with the militias and hierarchies of t...
Read more

Democratic Defeat in the Urban Vote

Internationalism No. 71, January 2025 Page 2 From the series Elections in the USA A careful analysis of the 2022 mid-term elections revealed the symptoms of a Democratic Party malaise which subsequently fully manifested itself in the latest presidential election, with the heavy loss of support in its traditional strongholds of the metropolitan areas of New York City and Chicago, and the State of California. A defeat foretold Republican votes rose from 51 million in the previous 2018 midterms to 54 million in 2022, a gain of 3 million. The Democrat vote fell from 61 to 51 million, a loss of 10 million. The Republicans gained only three votes for every ten lost by the Democrats, while the other seven became abstentions. In 2022, we analysed the elections in New York City by borough, the governmental districts whose names are well known through movies and TV series. In The Bronx, where the average yearly household income is $35,000, the Democrats lost 52,0...
Read more

The National Gamble of Poland

Internationalism No. 33, November 2021 Page 3 From the series European News In a lawsuit brought by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, the Constitutional Tribunal, which is composed of judges chosen by the government, ruled that fundamental parts of the EU Treaty are incompatible with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. This ruling thus denies the primacy of European law over national law, undermining both the political assumption of continental integration and the supranational character of the EU . Vectors of Polish history We can shed light on this event if we consider the four field vectors that cross Poland: its traditional ethnic-religious nationalism, its marked Atlantic tropism, the objective attraction exerted by the European force field, and the looming threat of Russia. The general picture is global collisions: China’s irruption and the crisis in the world order have put pressure on Warsaw to define its st...
Read more