Where should India's next EV chargers go?

India's electric vehicle market is growing fast, and the charging network is growing with it. But most chargers are still placed where a site happens to be available, not where demand will be. The result is a familiar pattern: some chargers sit idle while drivers elsewhere cannot find one.

Where to build next is a question data can answer, at least well enough to make better decisions.

Demand is not one number

The first mistake is to treat charging demand as a single figure. Different vehicles charge in very different ways.

• Two-wheelers and three-wheelers mostly charge at home or at work, or swap batteries. Public demand comes from commercial use, such as delivery and passenger three-wheelers.
• Cars charge mostly at home and work, with public chargers needed in dense cities and along highways.
• Buses and fleets charge at depots, on schedules, and need high power in one place.

A useful estimate is built segment by segment, then added up.

What the estimate draws on

Much of the data needed is public or can be bought:

1. Vehicle registrations by type and location, which show where electric vehicles are today and how fast they are growing.
2. Population and density, which show where future buyers live and where home charging will be hard.
3. Traffic and corridors, which show where vehicles travel, not just where they are registered.
4. Existing chargers, by location and power, which show the supply side.
5. Grid capacity, which decides whether a high-power site is feasible at all.

Put together, these give an estimate of demand for each area and each segment, and a comparison with what is already built.

The useful output is not a demand map. It is a map of the gaps between demand and supply.

White space

The most useful output is what planners call white space: places where estimated demand runs well ahead of charging supply. Those are the places where a new charger is most likely to be used, and where a missing one is most likely to hold back adoption.

Three audiences, one set of numbers

Three kinds of organisation need this answer, each for a different decision.

• Charging operators want to know where to build next, ranked by expected use, because utilisation decides whether a site pays.
• Government and policy bodies want to know where coverage is thin compared with demand, including in places the market will not reach on its own.
• Vehicle makers and fleet operators want to know whether their customers and vehicles will find a charger where they need one.

It is tempting to build a separate analysis for each. That produces three versions of the truth. A better approach is one demand model with a different view for each audience, all reading from the same numbers.

What to be careful about

Forecasts of electric vehicle adoption are uncertain, and they move with subsidies, battery prices and fuel prices. Any estimate should show its assumptions and be updated as registrations come in. And demand is only half the economics of a charger: the cost of land, power and maintenance decides whether a site is viable, even where demand is strong.

Better data will not remove those uncertainties. It will make the next thousand chargers much more likely to be in the right places.