6.711 million charging sessions! China's highways drew 163 million kWh over the 7-day National Day holiday, up over 51 percent

On October 8, China's National Energy Administration released its National Day highway charging statistics, showing that monitored highway charging guns completed a total of 6.711 million charging sessions from October 1 to October 7.

Total charging volume reached 163 million kWh, with a daily average of 23.2566 million kWh, up 51.42 percent year on year.

The statistics covered 62,700 highway charging facilities, and the holiday travel peak pushed charging demand to a new high. Charging volume on October 1 set a holiday single-day record of 28.0469 million kWh, up 60.4 percent from the first day of last year's National Day holiday.

The data shows that more and more owners are choosing to drive new energy vehicles on long trips, with green travel taking a steadily larger share.

Although the overall number of charging facilities keeps rising, the tidal surge in demand during holidays still causes charging queues at some service areas.

Charging piles are sufficient most of the time, but during the daytime hours of the outbound and return peak days, popular highway service areas see large numbers of vehicles waiting to charge.

In addition, in August this year the National Energy Administration released August charging facility statistics, showing that as of the end of August China had 24.223 million charging guns in total, up 39.6 percent from a year earlier.

Among them, 5.16 million were public charging guns and 19.063 million were private home charging guns. The total rated power of public piles reached 262 million kilowatts, an average of 50.69 kW per gun.

At present, China is the world's largest owner of new energy vehicles and ranks first globally in charging piles, while electric vehicles take an increasingly high share of new car purchases, now above 60 percent.