Funding for the construction of a charging network for electric cars has been granted to Finland from the transport program of the Connecting Europe Facility.
Article continues below
The Finnish energy company St1 oy received EUR 8.28 million in funding for the construction of a fast charging network for electric cars.
The EU finances, among other things, the construction of electricity and gas distribution infrastructure and promotes the decarbonization of transport with the Europe-wide TEN-T network from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) transport program.
In the third application round of the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility (AFIF), the European Commission allocated a total of 188.8 million euros. The transport program committee decided on the granting of subsidies on 14 March 2023.
St1 applied for support together with the Swedish St1 Sverige AB in a joint project coordinated by the St1 Nordic oy group.
The companies applied for funding for a Finnish-Swedish project to build a charging network for electric cars, the total cost of which is 25.87 million euros. The share of Finnish investments is 12.7 million euros. In Finland, charging points are placed on the TEN-T traffic network.
The granted support is intended to finance 33 charging stations, which would have a total of 186 charging points for passenger cars.
The requirements for traffic distribution infrastructure are becoming significantly stricter with the EU's new distribution infrastructure regulation.
According to the proposal for a regulation issued by the European Commission in July 2021 (Proposal for a Regulation on the Deployment of alternative fuels infrastructure, AFIR), member states must ensure that a certain minimum number of public charging points are available.
For example, by 2025, there should be an electric charging station for passenger cars at least every 60 kilometers along the TEN-T core network. The proposal is still being negotiated in the EU, so the content of the regulation may change. ■