Vattenfall InCharge says its German public charging network has never been worked this hard. Energy drawn from it is up around 65% since the start of 2026, and its fast chargers passed 10 GWh by the end of August — about 47% more than they delivered in the whole of 2025, with four months still to run.
Ten gigawatt-hours is roughly 55 million kilometres of driving, on the company's own conversion.
The numbers Vattenfall gave
| Measure | 2026 to date | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Energy drawn, full network | about +65% since January | baseline |
| Fast-charging energy | over 10 GWh by 31 August | about 7 GWh, full year |
| Equivalent driving | about 55 million km | — |
Fabian Hagmann, who runs Vattenfall's charging business, framed it as an adoption signal: rising utilisation "shows that increasing numbers of people are choosing electric mobility" and are charging publicly as a matter of routine.
One number is missing, and it is the important one
Vattenfall called this record utilisation. Utilisation is energy per charge point, and the company did not publish how many charge points it operates in Germany or how many it added during the period.
Without that denominator, a 65% rise in delivered energy is consistent with two quite different stories: the same chargers working much harder, or a materially larger network running at a similar rate each. Both would be good news for German drivers, but only the first one means what "Rekordauslastung" claims.
Treat the growth as real and the framing as unverified. The fast-charging figure is the stronger of the two: beating a full prior year inside eight months is a large enough step that network expansion alone is an unlikely explanation.
The fuel-rebate argument
Hagmann used the figures to push back on a German fuel rebate, the Tankrabatt proposed in response to high pump prices. His case is that subsidising petrol sets "wrong incentives", and that "we gain more price stability in the long run when we electrify mobility more thoroughly".
That is an operator arguing its own book, and worth reading as such. It is also the live policy question behind every EV running-cost comparison in Germany: a rebate narrows the gap between a kilometre on petrol and a kilometre on electricity, which is the gap the whole buying case rests on. Vattenfall puts EV energy costs at roughly half those of petrol or diesel per kilometre, though it did not publish the tariffs or consumption figures behind that.
The gap is contested in both directions. TeslAnt found that Verivox's claim of home charging being 70% cheaper than petrol leaned on 2025 public-charging prices, which is the sort of detail that decides whether a headline comparison survives contact with a real tariff.
Why a Tesla driver in Europe should care
A Supercharger is not the whole of anyone's charging life here. Away from the network — and on routes where a CCS stop is simply closer — Vattenfall is one of the operators a Tesla ends up plugged into, and a network carrying substantially more energy than last year is a network more likely to have a queue at it.
The pricing half is separate and unresolved. TeslAnt's coverage of the connect charging-network test, which did not rate Tesla, showed how wide German per-kWh spreads have become between operators and tariffs. Vattenfall's announcement is about how much energy moved, not what it cost, and the company did not publish a price with it.
What it does establish is direction. German public charging demand is outgrowing the network's own prior-year record, and the operator reporting it would rather the government spent the money on anything but cheaper diesel.