German discounters Lidl & Kaufland to add EV charging

The German Schwarz Group supermarket operator has announced a nationwide expansion of charging stations for electric vehicles. Every new Kaufland and Lidl store will in future be equipped with at least one charging station.

In the course of modernisation, each branch will have one column. In the medium term, the declared goal is to have a charging station on every parking lot in front of one of the approximately 3,900 Kaufland and Lidl stores in Germany. The average distance between two charging points of the Schwarz Group is to be reduced to less than 20 kilometres.

Different AC and DC charging points are to be combined, and in the communication, the company refers to an “intelligent mix of charging points with different performance levels”. High Power Chargers will also be installed at some locations. However, no further details are given – apart from the fact that 100 per cent of the electricity will be green, partly generated by the photovoltaic systems of the branches.

In February, Kaufland put the 100th charging station into operation and set a target of another 100 by the end of 2020. In March, Lidl announced that it would be equipping around 400 of its stores across Germany with charging stations within a year.

In Berlin, the Schwarz Group is already relying on a cooperation with VW’s WeShare EV sharing system. WeShare employees charge the car-sharing cars at night on the customer parking lots. This is to increase the utilisation of the chargers, as the car-sharing cars always charge when the market is closed, and no customers are inconvenienced. As part of the cooperation, a further 140 charging points are to be set up in Berlin, as announced in the June announcement. The Schwarz Group does not mention any interim results in the current press release.

In return, the company is calling for political relief – not financial relief. “We demand that politicians reduce bureaucratic hurdles that stand in the way of a nationwide, rapid and efficient expansion of the charging infrastructure,” says Gerd Chrzanowski, CEO of Schwarz Dienstleistungen. Together with their customers, they want to “make a greater contribution to the turnaround in mobility and climate protection”.

presseportal.de (in German)