The infrastructure that will be needed to juice up electric vehicles as they begin to roll onto U.S. streets in significant numbers over the next few years presents a huge potential market for electrical products, a market that comes along just when many electrical distributors and contractors are hungry for new opportunities, said Chris Bowler, general manager of Industrial Solutions Marketing for GE Energy Industrial Solutions.
Bowler spoke in a phone conference following the introduction of GE's new electric vehicle (EV) charging station, the WattStation, a futuristic-looking piece of equipment GE hopes will become ubiquitous worldwide over the next few years as part of a new market estimated at $1.5 billion in North America by 2015.
“Roughly by 2015, when we hit full-ramp on this thing, there will be somewhere under 1.6 million charging stations being installed every year, globally,” said Mike Mahan, senior product manager for GE Energy Industrial Solutions, citing a rough average from a variety of analyst reports. “In North America, it looks like the number will be around half-a-million to 600,000 charging stations installed every year. We announced an average selling price somewhere between $3,000 to $7,000, depending on the feature set, so if we stick with the low end, this will be close to a $5 billion (global) market by 2015. That doesn't include pull-through equipment to that will be required to support these chargers. So this is a very big emerging market for the electrical industry.”
“The economy is not great at the moment,” Bowler added, “but when these types of opportunities come about, it's a great opportunity to grow sales for both distributors and contractors.”