Charging electric cars in Amsterdam

The Amsterdam success story

Amsterdam is one of the world’s leading cities in electric transportation. Voted Europe’s innovation capital of 2016, Amsterdam is a Living Lab for research institutes, businesses, and startups. Bringing these parties together, the city nurtures the growth of innovative solutions for clean and sustainable transportation aiming to improve air quality and public health. Thus, Amsterdam has set the ambitious goal to become a zero-emission city by 2025.

Why is Amsterdam City going electric?

To reach the 2025 plan suggests that all motorised road traffic would either be clean (including trucks, public buses, and private passenger cars) or emission-free (including taxis, vans, motor scooters and passenger ferries). Today, Amsterdam is home to almost 19,000 electric drivers and offers about 400 full-electric taxis and 300 fully-electric Car2Go-cars to help locals and tourists to get around town.

The city now invests in even more incentives, support and regulations for everyone to adopt electric vehicles. Some initiatives consist of: parking privileges for emission-free taxis, clean zones to keep out “dirty” vehicles, subsidies for business fleets and private owners, and even exclusion from parking permits for petrol-powered vehicles. In addition, the city plans to run a massive expansion of charging infrastructure. This project is taken care of by a collaboration between energy utility Nuon, installation partner Heijmans and charging station provider EVBox.

The role of charging infrastructure in driving mobility

Amsterdam signed in 2016 a new seven-year contract with Nuon/Heijmans for the roll-out of our charging infrastructure. This contract appointed EVBox as the key supplier of charging stations. Essential to this tender, was to build a charging network that can accommodate future innovations and new standards. As Bart Vertelman, Project Manager at Amsterdam Electric explained:

"The modular design of EVBox charging stations passed these requirements. EVBox will play an integral role in the expansion and innovation of charging infrastructure in Amsterdam."

Prior to this renewed collaboration, EVBox already helped the city to achieve about 1,500 charging ports throughout the city. These charging ports generated more than two million clean kilometres from approximately 30,000 charging sessions each month.

In the coming years, a network of smart charging ports and fast chargers will be placed in the public space. Commercial businesses and apartment buildings install charging facilities to provide infrastructure outside of the public space. Charging data is monitored to define usage patterns of various drivers, as well as how many chargers are needed in which locations.

With a significant increase in electrification, the generation and management of clean energy have become one of the top priorities for Amsterdam. All of the electricity needed for its public charging ports is currently generated from local windmills. In addition, the city aims to increase local production of solar energy from 5,000 to 92,000 households in the next three to four years. As Vertelman shared:

"Smart Charging allows everyone to charge affordable and sufficiently, without overloading the grid network. It’ll play a crucial part in our energy transition targets."