By Rohit Vaid
New Delhi, Jul 24 (IANS): Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, power PSUs' joint venture EESL plans to install around 10 electric vehicle (EV) charging plazas in the country during the 2020-21 fiscal.
The company, which has already set up such a facility in Central Delhi, will now erect another plaza around the national capital's Dilli Haat area.
The joint venture of PSUs has undertaken the project to boost the e-mobility ecosystem in India.
It plans to set-up around 10 plaza facilities, apart from erecting around 2,000 'single charger' based EV stations across the country during this fiscal.
Technically, a plaza has more than one charger of different type of power output to service different kinds of automobile models, whereas the 'single charger' can only charge one type of vehicle at any given time.
At present, EESL has installed India's first public EV charging plaza at the Chelmsford Club in New Delhi.
"Initially, we plan to have 10 such plazas at prominent locations across cities that we have identified," EESL Managing Director Saurabh Kumar told IANS.
"The population in these cities has a high potential to make the transition to electric vehicles," he added.
Besides the plazas, EESL plans to set-up around 2,000 EV ‘single charger' based facilities across the country during this fiscal.
Currently, it has installed over 300 such charging stations in India.
In the Delhi-NCR region, EESL aims to install around 500 charging stations in the current fiscal.
Eventually, the company plans to set up 10,000 charging stations over the next two to three years across India.
Presently, the state-run firm has tied up with various private and public companies such as Apollo Hospitals, BSNL, Maha-Metro, BHEL and HPCL, among others, to set up public charging infrastructure.
It has also partnered with urban local bodies in cities like Hyderabad, Noida, Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Chennai, and is in discussion with others to erect such infrastructure.
One of the main capital requirements to set up charging infrastructure is the availability of ''land'', which as of now is provided free of cost by most municipal bodies or firms for public chargers to EESL.
As of now, many automobile companies and other private players, including standalone charging infrastructure developers, are also installing these facilities.
Accordance to Kumar, these plazas make owing an EV convenient.
However, he cited that for a faster pick-up in EV adoption, country's automobile sector needs to come out with mid-priced range vehicles starting at around Rs 10 lakh onwards.
"Right now, either, we have entry level vehicles or high-end ones. For the mass adoption of EVs, we require mid-price ranged vehicles starting from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 15 lakh," he said.