The Ministry of Power (MoP) has issued an amendment to its guidelines and standards for the charging infrastructure of electric vehicles (EVs).

The guidelines were issued by the Ministry in December 2018 and were revised in October 2019.

The amendment has now specified that the tariff for the supply of electricity to the EV public charging stations should not be more than 15% of the average cost of supply of power. This ceiling was not given in the earlier guidelines.

Besides this, the amendment has added a few more important points to the existing guidelines.

The amendment has now added a clause to say that for all practical purposes, the battery charging station (BCS) will be treated at par with the public charging station (PCS), and the applicable tariff for electricity supply will also be the same as for the PCS. Here, PCS means any EV charging station, while BCS implies a station where the discharged or partially discharged batteries of EVs can be recharged electrically.

As per the amendment, the captive charging station for EVs will be fully owned by the owner of the charging station, and it will not be used for commercial purposes.

According to the revised guidelines issued in October last year, a phase-wise installation of an appropriate network of charging infrastructure throughout the country was envisioned. The aim was to make sure that at least one charging station will be available in a grid of 3 km x 3 km in the cities and one such station to be set up at every 25 km on both sides of the highways.

Regarding the public charging stations, the ministry previously clarified that setting them up will be a de-licensed activity, and any individual or entity has the freedom to set up these stations.

In January this year, the Department of Heavy Industries (DHI) announced that it had approved 2,636 EV charging stations in 62 cities across 24 states and union territories under the second phase of FAME India (Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles in India) program.