In the United States, bp is planning to invest up to $1 billion in EV charging by 2030—and it will spend half of that just in the next three years, said Sujay Sharma, CEO of bp pulse Americas, the oil company’s electric charging branch.
bp’s EV charging business has installed more than 27,000 charge points worldwide and aims to expand its network of public EV charging stations to more than 100,000 worldwide by 2030.
bp’s strategy is driven by its reinvention goals of moving from an oil company to an integrated energy company, Sharma said, and going from fuel to electricity is a natural extension of the services they provide.
“And it’s the context of giving consumers choice, because what we have seen is … we’re going from a market that was generally dominated by diesel and gasoline, and it’s moving to now where the consumers are more varied in their selection of the fuel that they choose to use,” said Sharma, who previously led the EV charge in bp’s Asia Pacific business.
bp currently has about 100 charge points in the United States, Sharma said, with plans to grow rapidly over the next two years. In October, bp pulse announced it would purchase $100 million of ultra-fast charging hardware units from Tesla.
“We are looking to work alongside [Tesla], but also stand on our own and provide reliability,” Sharma said. “We are really focused on level-three fast-charging; we think that’s what the consumer wants, they want convenience of that fast charging.”