ChargeUp Europe has just welcomed ABL + reev as its newest member. The Association says it is gaining ground in its mission to accelerate the rollout of EV charging infrastructure and enable seamless charging for drivers across the EU.

Highland Electric Transportation, a US startup providing turnkey zero-emission fleet solutions for school districts and fleet managers, has raised $253 million of corporate equity to accelerate its growth.

In the UK, Pod Point has just announced that they will be expanding their existing agreement with Lidl stores with the installation 50 more fast chargers than originally envisaged. This means that the total number should soon be 350 fast chargers in total.

Volkswagen has just announced in a talk with electrive that it will develop Vehicle2Grid functions for its electric vehicles. VW called for much closer cooperation between the automotive industry, the energy sector and politicians to make bidirectional charging a success.

Lion announced today that it will now offer its clients across North America the lineup of AddEnergie charging stations provided by FLO, including AC and DC smart chargers, as well as its associated charging and energy management cloud software services.

California’s Governor Newsom has proposed a 4.5-billion-dollar budget for economic stimulus in 2021. This includes $1.5Bn earmarked to help people and businesses purchase electric or hydrogen vehicles and equipment as well as funds for relevant charging and refilling infrastructure.

Wind turbine manufacturer Vestas has contracted Enel X to provide charging infrastructure for the electrification of its corporate fleet in the top 15 markets in Europe and the Americas.

Hamburger Hochbahn, the largest local transport provider in the German city of Hamburg, has charged Siemens with installing charging infrastructure at one of the largest electric bus depots in Europe.

The European Commission, in a strategy due next week, will lay out measures to tackle EU greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector. Reports speak of 30 million electric vehicles by 2030 and related infrastructure.

A couple from Kent said it took more than nine hours to drive 130 miles home from Bournemouth as they struggled to find a working charger. Most were either broken, occupied or too slow to provide a meaningful charge on the powerful EV.

FLO, an established charging network in North America, teamed up with Electrada to deploy charging stations across the Midwest. Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky are first to receive Level 2 and DC Fast charging stations over the “next several years”.

The Belgian town of Ghent is increasing its public charging infrastructure and published plans to install another 100 charge points by 2022. They will join the existing networks that are to reach 300 charging stations at the time.

In an online meeting between Berlin and Los Angeles, Carrie Hampel interviewed Hubject’s Senior Director of Corporate and Business Development Barton Sidles about the new Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) rule set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB).

Startup company Trojan Energy is trialling electric vehicle chargers that are only visible when a car is charging. The Subsurface Technology for Electric Pathways (STEP) project will see 200 kerbside chargers installed across the London boroughs of Brent and Camden.

Ford has announced the installation of 750 charging points at its Cologne factory premises in Niehl and Merkenich, Germany. Construction has already begun and should be completed by the beginning of 2022 at the latest.

The mineral oil company Aral has announced that it intends to set up more than 100 fast-charging points at its German filling stations within the next twelve months. The expansion is to continue as the oil giant’s long-term planning envisages “several hundred locations”.

With over 14,000 DC charging stations installed, the Swiss ABB group is among the biggest suppliers of charging infrastructure. The market is developing quickly and will continue to change at a rapid pace in the coming years.

In Germany, applications for funding for the development of charging infrastructure can be submitted again with immediate effect and all online. An important exception for customer parking spaces is new.

Gridserve has today announced that the first of a nationwide network of over 100 Electric Forecourts is now under construction and will open this summer. UK firm’s first solar-powered site in Essex will house 24 rapid chargers, a supermarket and an EV education centre.

In the German town of Mettmann, a Tesla driver charged his car via a socket in a construction site toilet. The driver showed a lot of chutzpah– the construction site was for a new police building, right next to an existing police building.

North and South Lanarkshire Councils are collaborating with Transport Scotland and Scottish Power Energy Networks (SPEN) to install 220 EV chargers at 37 sites across the Scottish county just below Glasgow.

Porsche is expanding high power charging infrastructure in central Germany with the opening of a new charging park called Porsche Turbo Charging in Leipzig. The park has a total capacity of seven megawatts drawn entirely from renewable energy.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the TfL and London Councils are investing £4 million across 29 boroughs to install 1,000 new electric vehicle charging points in residential areas throughout the British capital.

One year after the announcement of the “Electric City” project in Germany, which will provide a total of 1,300 charging points for the city of Rüsselsheim, Opel has set up the 350 charging points for fleet vehicles on the company campus.

The state-owned utility company PLN has signed memorandums of understanding with 20 companies to push EV adoption in Indonesia. 13 of the companies are set to provide support with the installing charging stations, six companies will help build the vehicles and one company aims to develop their own charger.

In Takoma Park, Maryland, the first gas station in the USA has stopped offering fossil fuels and replaced petrol pumps with charging stations. Just last month, the first gas station in Norway had just done the same.

EVBox has connected its charging station network to the French roaming platform Gireve, which currently unites 60,000 charging points from various networks throughout Europe.

Nine local authorities across Wales are set to receive hundreds of thousands of pounds from the UK Government’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) to install electric vehicle charge points in car parks in residential areas.

In Sweden, there are more than 8,000 charging stations for electric vehicles, but only about 20 official signs leading to them. Nathalie Kinell, CMO at Bee Charging Solutions, had a few good ideas about how to change this.

Together with its automotive partners, Enel has completed the construction of all 200 fast-charging stations of EU project EVA+ (Electric Vehicle Arteries) in Italy and Austria. In both countries the 50 kW multi-chargers now add up to 400 charging points for all kinds of electric cars.