As soon as he arrived in the urban area of Dengzhou, Liu Bin headed straight to the State Grid charging station located on the North Ring Road. At this time, his vehicle still had 60 kilometers of remaining range.
On February 9th, the 30th day of the twelfth lunar month in the year of the Guimao Rabbit, Liu Bin, who returned from Xi'an, Shaanxi to his hometown in Dengzhou, Henan, opened his newly purchased Tesla Model 3. This car has a nominal range of 606 kilometers, with a distance of 430 kilometers between the two cities. However, due to the increased energy consumption during high-speed driving, there are still 60 kilometers left when reaching the urban area of Dengzhou. At this time, there are nearly 40 kilometers left from Liu Bin's hometown in Shilin Town.
"The remaining battery life should be enough for me to drive back to my hometown in town," Liu Bin said, "but there is no public charging station around Shilin Town." Liu Bin will have to drive to visit relatives and friends in the next few days, but because he has been away from home for a long time without a private charging station, he can only charge in the urban area.
Deng Zhou, Liu Bin's hometown, is a county-level city located in the southwest of Henan Province. It is also one of the major counties with a net outflow of population in Henan Province, and agriculture is the local basic industry. According to public data, Dengzhou has a registered residence population of 1.85 million, but its permanent population is only 1.2 million.
Every year during the Spring Festival, it is the peak time for migrant workers from other places to return to Deng. However, due to the sudden increase in the number of returning vehicles and the significant increase in the number of new energy vehicles in the short term, the local public charging facilities have suddenly become insufficient.
"There is no Tesla charging station in Dengzhou, so I had to go to the State Grid charging station to charge." Liu Bin said, "There were still three cars waiting in line to charge, and by the time it was my turn, more than an hour had passed."
New energy vehicles break the ice
For a long time, new energy vehicles have not been the mainstream choice for urban and rural residents in Dengzhou.
On the one hand, price is the primary consideration for local consumers when purchasing a car. In the past few years, due to the high cost of batteries, new energy vehicles have been higher than fuel vehicles of the same class, which is not conducive to attracting price sensitive consumers.
Meanwhile, the usage scenarios also limit the development of new energy vehicles in the local area. Several residents who have lived and worked in Dengzhou for a long time have told Time Finance that due to the majority of people engaged in agriculture and basic manufacturing in the local area, fuel powered vehicles are more suitable for production scenarios such as farmland and construction sites; For migrant workers, gasoline powered vehicles are more conducive to long-distance travel, so pure electric vehicles are the least popular.
In addition, on the policy side, the advantages of local new energy vehicles are not obvious. There is no local restriction policy for gasoline vehicles in Dengzhou, and there is no obvious preferential treatment for the registration and registration of new energy vehicles. This is a significant difference from cities with high penetration rates of new energy vehicles such as Beijing and Shanghai.
In fact, in addition to the specific factors mentioned above, the low acceptance of new energy vehicles by local residents is also an important reason that restricts the development of new energy vehicles in the local area.
"New energy vehicles require charging and are prone to spontaneous combustion, which is not as worry free as gasoline vehicles," said a Guangzhou Honda Accord owner in Dengzhou City. This car owner, who is over 50 years old and has been engaged in traditional industries for a long time, has a natural aversion to the "new thing" of new energy vehicles.
In this context, the vast majority of cars shuttling between urban and rural streets in Dengzhou are still fuel powered models. Even local taxis are still mainly fuel powered.
However, with the rapid development of the domestic automobile industry, the spring breeze of new energy vehicles still blows to the small town of Dengzhou.
During the Spring Festival of the the Year of the Loong in Jiachen, new energy vehicles of various brands began to drive into the streets, fields and villages of Dengzhou. In addition to Tesla, there are also many new energy vehicle models from car companies such as BYD, Geely, Changan, and Volkswagen.
In Dengzhou, different groups have different preferences when purchasing new energy vehicles.
In the selection of pure electric and hybrid models, local urban residents are more inclined to purchase pure electric models with lower prices, mainly used for urban commuting, such as BYD Seagull, etc; For local township residents and villagers, hybrid models are the main choice, such as the BYD Song PLUS DM-i, etc; Migrant workers from other regions tend to prefer hybrid vehicles that are convenient for long-distance travel, but their acceptance of pure electric vehicles is also increasing.
In terms of the price range of vehicle models, Time Finance randomly counted 20 new energy vehicles, of which 3 were priced above 300000 yuan, namely Ideal L8, Equation Leopard 5, and Tengshi D9; The models priced at 250000 yuan include Tesla Model 3, Model Y, Geely Krypton 001, BYD Han, etc; More than half of the models are priced within 200000 yuan, mainly including BYD Song PLUS, Haiou, Changan Qiyuan and other models.
Local residents in Dengzhou also have a clear preference for new energy vehicle brands. Among the 20 new energy vehicles counted, except for Tesla and Ideal, all other models are from traditional car companies or their sub brands. New car brands such as NIO, Xiaopeng Motors, and Nezha Motors, which are highly regarded in major domestic cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, are very rare in the local area.
Lack of rural charging networks
This year's Chinese New Year, Liu Bin's biggest feeling was that various new energy vehicles began to appear in the streets and alleys between urban and rural areas. But the accompanying charging issues also made him feel a bit frustrated.
"I anticipated that there were no Tesla charging stations in Dengzhou, but I didn't expect that there were also very few charging stations from other mainstream brands."
The map information shows that the closest Tesla charging station to Dengzhou is located in Zhenping County, 41 kilometers away - another county under the jurisdiction of Nanyang City, Henan Province.
At the same time, with the location of the People's Government of Dengzhou City as the center, there are only more than ten charging stations within the urban area with a radius of about 3 kilometers, and the number of charging stations in the station is mostly 1-8.
In addition, charging stations in urban areas are mostly built by small and medium-sized brands or local brand operators, with State Grid and Star Charging each having only one or two charging stations; Another leading operator even called that there were no charging stations in the local area. New energy vehicle companies such as NIO and Xiaopeng Motors have not laid out their charging business locally.
Whether it is the size of operators, the number of charging stations, or the scale of charging stations, the charging facilities in the urban area of Dengzhou are relatively limited.
"I don't like to charge at small brand charging stations or mixed brand charging stations, so I usually only go to Tesla's own charging stations or State Grid," said Liu Bin.
Liu Bin's ideas have a certain degree of representativeness. Among many new energy vehicle owners returning from other places, mainstream brand charging stations are their preferred choice for charging their vehicles. However, due to the limited number of mainstream brand stations and high demand during the Spring Festival, charging stations for small and medium-sized brands or local brands are also overcrowded.
In towns and rural areas, public charging stations are even more struggling. In most towns and areas under the jurisdiction of Dengzhou, such as Shilin, Zhangcun, and Goulin, the number of public charging stations is mostly within one. This has led to many rural migrant workers returning to their hometowns having to first go to the urban area or highway sections to charge their vehicles.
In terms of private (household) charging facilities, Dengzhou's new energy vehicle owners face different situations.
On the one hand, it is more convenient for bungalow residents in townships and rural areas to install and use private charging stations, and some urban residents with fixed parking spaces can also conveniently use private charging stations.
However, at the same time, some streets and communities in the urban area of Dengzhou were planned earlier, and many new energy vehicle owners did not have fixed parking spaces or did not support the installation of charging stations on the lines, forcing them to charge outside, further increasing the frequency of using public charging stations during the Spring Festival.
The cost of charging stations in the urban area of Dengzhou is on par with prices in other areas. Taking the State Grid charging station as an example, the peak period is 1.59 yuan/kWh, and the low peak period is 0.85 yuan/kWh.
Spring Festival travel impacts supply and demand balance
As a major county for outdoor work, returning home during the Spring Festival and peak travel will disrupt the local charging supply and demand balance.
A staff member at a charging station in the southern first ring of Dengzhou told Time Finance that the charging stations in the urban area are sufficient for local new energy vehicles on weekdays. However, during peak periods such as the Spring Festival when returning home or traveling, the number of new energy vehicles traveling back and forth increases sharply, creating a huge gap between the scale of urban charging facilities.
"Almost every charging station has to queue up." Before the Chinese New Year, Chen Hong returned to Dengzhou from Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan. He drove a Geely Krypton 001, which is essential for charging as a pure electric vehicle. "I often have to run several charging stations in a row to find a spot," he said.
To a large extent, plug-in hybrid cars appear effortless during the local Spring Festival period. Whether it is an extended range vehicle or a vehicle using parallel technology, the dependence on charging is minimal. Even many plug-in hybrid car owners give up charging in their daily lives and rely mainly on fuel powered vehicles.
"I rarely charge, usually it's driven by oil," said a BYD Qin PLUS DM-i owner who returned from work in Zhengzhou. "I charge it every once in a while, mainly to maintain battery activity."
This is also the core reason why plug-in hybrid cars are popular among migrant workers.
Despite this, most local new energy vehicle owners still hope to expand the scale of charging facilities and increase the number of charging stations. In their view, the lack of charging facilities has become a direct reason limiting the further increase in the penetration rate of new energy vehicles in urban and rural areas.
Tong Zongqi, Deputy Secretary General of the Charging and Swapping Branch of the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers and the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance, previously stated that the rural new energy vehicle market has vast space and will become the main incremental market for new energy vehicles in China in the future. However, problems such as insufficient construction of public charging infrastructure in rural areas have constrained the release of the consumption potential of new energy vehicles in rural areas.
As a small agricultural city with a high number of migrant workers, Dengzhou is just a microcosm of Henan Province. In fact, Henan, a traditional agricultural province with a population of nearly 100 million, does not have a prominent number of charging facilities in the entire region.
According to data from the China Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Promotion Alliance, the total increase in public charging stations in China in 2023 was 929000 units, a year-on-year increase of 42.7%. As of December 2023, the number of public charging stations in China is 2.726 million.
Among them, the total number of public charging stations in Henan Province is only 116000, accounting for an overall proportion of 4.3%. This total amount is much lower than that of coastal industrial provinces and cities such as Guangdong Province, Zhejiang Province, and Shanghai. The total number of public charging stations in the latter three provinces during the same period was 563000, 224000, and 171000, respectively. If calculated on a per capita basis, the per capita ownership of charging stations in Henan Province is even lower.
In fact, China's regulatory authorities have been accelerating the promotion of new energy vehicles and charging facilities in rural areas in recent years. On February 4, 2024, the General Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued opinions on learning and applying the experience of the "Thousand Village Demonstration and Ten Thousand Village Rectification" project to effectively promote comprehensive rural revitalization, clarifying the promotion of rural power grid consolidation and upgrading projects, promoting the development of distributed new energy in rural areas, and strengthening the planning and construction of new energy vehicle charging and swapping facilities in key villages and towns.
This is undoubtedly a good news for traditional agricultural provinces, cities, and counties such as Dengzhou. However, there are multiple obstacles in the practical operation of new energy vehicles and charging facilities going to rural areas.
"From the market side's response, in the process of sinking the charging infrastructure layout into the market, the capital investment and investment return are not directly proportional in the short term, and the supporting construction, operation services, operation and maintenance are not yet perfect." The Chairman of the Battery Hundred Association, Yu Qingjiao, told Time Finance, "Due to the characteristics of vast rural areas and sparse population, the construction of charging infrastructure is relatively scattered. Moreover, based on the current popularity situation, the number of new energy vehicles is relatively small, and the utilization rate of charging stations is relatively low compared to cities. The two have not entered a virtuous cycle."
As a practitioner in the power battery industry, Yu Qingjiao believes that at the policy level, various regions can moderately advance the construction of charging infrastructure and reasonably utilize the implementation of the new integrated model of "light storage and charging" in rural areas; For car companies, in order to seize the sinking market, they also need to accelerate the construction and installation of charging infrastructure in county and township areas, enrich and improve the operation and maintenance of charging facilities and network services.
On February 16th (the seventh day of the first lunar month), Liu Bin went to the State Grid charging station again to charge his car before leaving. He feels that in the small town of Dengzhou in Henan, the charging of new energy vehicles is far less convenient than refueling for gasoline vehicles.
"There are more and more new energy vehicles now, and it is estimated that there will be more charging stations in the city next year." Liu Bin said, "I also hope to have a few charging stations in the town."
(All names in the text are pseudonyms)