Charging stations mapped: this is how Belgium compares to its neighboring countries (2024)

The European Union has just voted a new rule regarding public charging points. In addition to an obligation to display the price per kWh and to offer payment options with a bank card, the states must provide at least one fast charger every 60 kilometers of highway. That got us thinking: is our Belgian country still far from that requirement? And what about the rest of the EU?

50,000 charging stations

Fortunately, the European Union collects a lot of data about this, and they even bundle it into a series of interactive maps. For example, one of them literally shows all publicly accessible charging points and you can already tell by the number of blue dots where we are going. By far the largest inkblot in Europe may be the neighboring country of the Netherlands, but Belgium is not far away… Or at least: the northern side of Belgium, because while Flanders turns exemplary blue, the number of charging stations clearly decreases as you look further towards Wallonia.

However, if you put everything together, Belgium appears to be doing surprisingly well in terms of public charging points. At the time of writing, our country has no fewer than 49,739 AC chargers — the average charging station along the street. That’s about half of what France and Germany manage to present, but don’t forget that Belgium is more than ten times smaller. The Netherlands appears to be the best student in the EU with over 150,000 AC charging points, but if we look at DC chargers or fast chargers, Germany takes the lead. Of these, they have 25,522, followed by France with 20,631, while the Netherlands has 4,177 fast chargers and Belgium 2,690.

Work ahead?

So it is those DC chargers that, from next year, the European Union will require that every Member State have one per 60 kilometers of highway, and you can also track that progress in the maps… In other words: if anything keep fell. Only very sporadically do you come across a strip of highway in our country that does not yet meet the requirements, especially in Wallonia. Furthermore, our road network is predominantly green, so Belgium no longer has much work to do to meet the 2025 deadline.

The reason why we sometimes complain about a shortage of charging stations is probably due to the growth figures. Especially in terms of AC charging stations, Belgium appears to be one of the strongest increases in the past year with an increase of 18.7 percent, because all our neighboring countries remain stuck at around 6 to 7 percent. In other words, Belgium seems to be adding charging stations at a rapid pace, so we don’t have to dig too far into our memories to remember the last time we couldn’t find a charging point… But if you look around the rest of Europe, it seems We no longer have much reason to complain.