The French charging infrastructure specialist Electra has opened its first fast-charging station in Belgium at the shopping site of Maasmechelen Village (in the east of Limburg province).

Electra is teaming up with LSGI Group, one of the largest developers and operators of large shopping malls, to build these stations in places where many people come shopping.

Ambitious

The station in Maasmechelen counts 4 charging columns of 300 kW max with 8 charging points in total. The plans are ambitious: by the end of 2025, Electra wants 250 of these stations in Belgium and Luxembourg. By 2030, there have to be 1 500 fast-charging stations with 8 000 charging points of Electra all over Europe. At the moment, it is already present in France, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria.

Electra is owned by the French holding Eurazeo but also counts the French railway company SNCF and the public transport company RATP among its shareholders. It raised over € 400 million last year to build a new fast-charging network as soon as possible.

To accelerate the expansion, Electra has agreements with several partners, most of them in the retail business. LSGI Group is a developer in real estate, which is also specialized in building big shopping areas, like the one in Maasmechelen. Apart from that, there’s also an agreement with the Delhaize supermarkets (now part of Albert Heyn Group) to install 1 800 fast-charging points on their parking lots.

Competitive

To be competitive with the already existing and rapidly growing fast-charging networks of Tesla (the pioneer), Fastned, and Ionity (to name the more important ones), Electra is charging a fairly low price for fast-charging (0,65 euro per kWh) and proposing ‘autocharge’, where the charger recognizes the car and charging can begin instantly, without fiddling with passes, bankcards and the lot. The app also permits you to reserve a charging point up to half an hour in advance.

Electra pays a monthly rental fee to the owners of the parking lots where its stations are situated according to the amount of electricity that has been charged. “We are very happy to inaugurate this first station in Belgium,” says Louis-Charles Mosseray, General Manager of Electra Belux. “We will offer services with high added value and hope to contribute to and accelerate the energy transition toward sustainable mobility.”

Many players

Developing charging infrastructure has become one of the favorite activities of many companies in the past years, from ambitious start-ups like Sparki to multinationals like TotalEnergies or Engie. With the disappearance of the tax incentives for plug-in hybrids in Belgium, for example, the popularity of fully electric cars is expected to rise significantly, especially in the company car sector.

Just recently, energy giant Engie has announced to put up a supercharging network in Belgium via its charging infrastructure daughter Vianeo, and competitor TotalEnergies has just won the public tender in Wallonia to build up the (overdue) charging infrastructure in the south of the country, while it had to share the Flemish tender with Engie.

Meanwhile, the Dutch supercharger specialist Fastned is expanding its network rapidly throughout the country, also in the south. A serious battle for a (hopefully) lucrative business is coming up in the following years.