Europe’s EV Charging Problems & How EVRA Offers a Solution

Europe has over 9.3 million fully electric vehicles and 5.2 million plug-in hybrids as of March 2025. By 2030, the EU plans to have 3.5 million public chargers, meaning roughly 2.6 million more must be installed in just five years.

However, the huge challenge is that there aren’t enough chargers to keep up with demand. Inadequate infrastructure slows EV adoption, frustrates drivers, and threatens to stall Europe’s clean mobility ambitions. But while the challenges facing Europe’s EV charging rollout are significant, they’re not insurmountable. You’ll understand more about that as we present how EVRA specifically tackles the very bottlenecks slowing down infrastructure growth.

What Is EVRA?

EVRA is an intelligent EV charging management platform designed to make running charging networks simpler, smarter, and more cost-effective. Instead of operators juggling complex systems for scheduling, maintenance, and energy costs, EVRA brings everything together into one streamlined solution.

The Growing EV Charging Problems in Europe

Here are some of the challenges in the EV charging industry in Europe, and how EVRA can help.

1. Grid Limitations

Europe’s power grid is aging. Many of the low-voltage lines that feed homes, businesses, and public charger sites are over 40 years old, and are increasingly under strain. Unfortunately, upgrading those feeders, replacing worn components, and reinforcing substations, can be expensive and slow processes. Without those upgrades, high-powered chargers (fast or ultra-fast) may be constrained by the capacity of the grid at a given location, either outright unavailable or throttled back to avoid overload.

Beyond the age of wires, another part of the problem is that spending on grid upgrades has lagged what is needed to support the surge in EV charging demand. In fact, €67 billion per year is needed to support the energy demands of expanding EV infrastructure, but current investment falls well short. This gap means delays in ensuring feeder capacity and transformer availability.

How This May Affect You

For fleet operators, public charger providers, or municipalities, not having sufficient grid capacity means long lead times for new charger installations; higher costs when special grid reinforcements or new sub-stations are required; the possibility that planned charging hubs cannot actually deliver power at the speeds advertised (which hurts reliability and user trust).

How EVRA Helps: Smart Energy Optimization

When the grid can’t keep up with demand, chargers often underperform or sit idle waiting for upgrades. EVRA minimizes this problem by letting you distribute available power intelligently across chargers, ensuring that every vehicle connected gets the energy it needs, without overwhelming local capacity.

The platform can also adjust charging rates based on real-time electricity costs and grid conditions, turning grid constraints into an opportunity for smarter load balancing. This means operators can deploy more chargers today, without always waiting years for grid reinforcements.

2. Operational Complexity

Deploying high-power DC chargers often requires navigating complex logistics: scheduling, hardware maintenance, monitoring energy usage, ensuring battery health, and dealing with failures or downtime. Many charger operators still handle these tasks manually or with minimal automation, which leads to inefficiencies.

To add, managing the staffing, security, and access rights across multiple locations, especially as systems scale from small pilot projects to large networks, becomes exponentially more difficult. All of these make operational costs rise, slow response times when things go wrong, and degrade user satisfaction.

How This May Affect You

If these complexities grow, operators might need to hire more people or outsource maintenance; they must invest in software and data systems; and must plan carefully for worst-case scenarios. All of this slows deployment and increases cost.

How EVRA Helps: AI-Powered Scheduling & Automation

Managing fleets of chargers across multiple sites is complicated, from scheduling and monitoring to handling downtime. EVRA removes much of that manual overhead through AI-powered scheduling. Drivers simply plug in, and EVRA takes care of session timing, prioritizing vehicles based on departure schedules.

Meanwhile, operators can gain real-time insights into energy consumption, charger health, and alerts, so they can keep everything running smoothly. This results in less staffing, faster problem detection, and higher charger uptime.

3. High Upfront Investment

One of the biggest barriers to building enough chargers is the cost. It’s estimated that over €80 billion will be needed by 2035 to meet the charging infrastructure demands in Europe, with €50 billion of that for private chargers and €30 billion for public chargers.

But it’s not just the charger hardware. There are other costs like grid connection (transformers, substations, wiring), civil works (digging, paving, foundations), power electronics, installation, safety systems, operating systems (software), permitting, signage, and more. In under-served or rural areas these costs per charger are especially high, because distances from existing infrastructure are larger and grid upgrades more likely.

How This May Affect You

What makes this problem worse for people and organizations in the industry is risk. Returns can be uncertain, especially where utilization (how much the charger is used) is low. Investors and operators can weigh the possibility that a new public charger in a rural area may sit idle for long periods. The longer time it takes to break even, the less attractive the investment.

This can also slow expansion, particularly in places that most need it to serve EV users outside well-covered urban zones.

How EVRA Helps: Maximized ROI Through Utilization

The biggest fear for investors and operators is installing expensive chargers that sit underused. EVRA helps maximize return on investment by optimizing charger utilization. Predictive analytics highlight when and where chargers are most in demand, while remote diagnostics and predictive maintenance prevent costly downtime.

By squeezing more value out of each charger and lowering operational costs, EVRA shortens the payback period and makes it financially viable to expand even into regions where demand is still growing

4. Regulatory Hurdles

Even when the funding and hardware are ready, regulatory and permitting delays tend to slow things down. Obtaining planning permissions and completing construction for high-power DC chargers can often take over 14 months in some countries. That’s before accounting for delays in securing grid connections or hardware delivery.

Permitting often involves multiple agencies: local planning authorities, transport departments (for roadside chargers), utility companies, environmental and safety regulators. Different jurisdictions may have different requirements, codes, inspection practices. In many places, the approval process is non-transparent, inconsistent, or poorly staffed, meaning longer delays. Also, approvals for grid connection (new substations or upgraded transformers) can take 5 to 8 months, and delivery of critical hardware like transformers up to 20 months.

How This May Affect You

Regulatory hurdles can add risk, cost, and time. For operators, delays can hurt cash flow, increase overhead, and make project budgeting difficult. For public policy goals (for example, hitting certain charger-deployment targets by 2030), delays can aggregate to significant shortfalls. And for EV drivers, it means slower rollout of charging infrastructure, longer “charging deserts,” and less confidence in the EV ecosystem.

How EVRA Helps: Faster Deployment with Integration & Remote Management

Lengthy permitting and grid connection delays mean every charger rollout risks slipping months behind schedule. While EVRA can’t shorten government paperwork, it does streamline everything operators control.

Integration-ready APIs allow operators to plug EVRA into existing systems quickly, while remote diagnostics and control via OCPP reduce the need for on-site intervention. This helps operators get chargers online faster once approvals are cleared, and ensures that when hardware is finally installed, it performs at full capacity from day one.

The Bottom Line

Europe’s EV future is exciting, but the road ahead is not without obstacles. Grid limitations, operational complexity, high upfront investment, and regulatory hurdles all stand in the way of a truly seamless charging network. Left unchecked, these issues risk slowing down EV adoption, creating uneven access to charging, and undermining Europe’s climate and mobility goals.

But like we said, these problems aren’t unsolvable. EVRA demonstrates that with the right technology, charging infrastructure can overcome today’s bottlenecks and scale for tomorrow. Through optimizing energy use, automating operations, maximizing charger utilization, and streamlining management, EVRA helps operators, fleets, and manufacturers build networks that are reliable, efficient, and cost-effective.