GRID · EV CHARGING
The Fast-Charging Network
Most of the Grid’s layers show where electricity is made and moved. This one shows where it is increasingly going: into electric cars. But not every charger matters equally for seeing the shape of the network — a slow socket on a lamppost charges overnight, while a DC fast charger refills a car in the time it takes to drink a coffee, and it is the fast chargers that decide where an EV can actually road-trip. So this layer maps the 28,887 fast-charging stationson Earth as lightning bolts, coloured by how fast they charge and sized by how many charging points they have. It is the natural companion to the supply layers — power plants, wind and solar make the electricity; the transmission backbone carries it; and this is where the new load lands. The roughly 400,000 everyday slow chargers are deliberately left out. Power is mapped on about 79% of stations, so anything unmarked reads as standard. Tap a bolt for its power, its connectors, and its number of points.
It’s all about speed
A charger’s power, in kilowatts, is what decides whether a stop is a five-minute top-up or an hour’s wait. The map colours every bolt by which band it falls into, and the brightest tier — ultra-rapid, 150 kW and up — is the one that makes long-distance electric driving practical. Here is how the mapped network divides:
A map of Europe, mostly
Be careful reading this map as a picture of the world’s charging. It isn’t — it is a picture of where charging is mapped in OpenStreetMap, and that is overwhelmingly Europe: about 90%of these stations sit there. The skew is even stronger than the wind and solar layers. The glaring gap is China, which has by far the most public fast chargers of any country on Earth and yet barely appears here, because its networks aren’t mapped into OSM. So read the European density as real, and read the sparseness elsewhere as missing data, not empty roads.
About this data
Every station comes from OpenStreetMap (the amenity=charging_stationtag, ODbL). From the roughly half a million charging points OSM knows about, we keep only the ones carrying a DC fast connector — CCS (socket:type2_combo), CHAdeMO (socket:chademo) or a Tesla Supercharger plug — because the everyday slow AC sockets are noise for seeing the road-trip backbone. A station’s power is read from its OSM power tags and sanity-clampedto a real 3–400 kW EV band (a stray reading of 250,000 kW is a watts-versus-kilowatts mistag, not a real charger); its size on the map is its number of charging points, clamped at 40 so one over-tagged site can’t balloon. Operators and networks are never shown (the no-recon rule). The honest limits: power is mapped on about 79% of stations, so unmarked ones default to the standard tier, and coverage is an OSM mapping artefact — about 90% Europe, with China and much of Asia badly under-mapped. Snapshot taken 2026-06-26.