Public charging infrastructure and electric vehicles in Norway

We study whether public charging infrastructure drives battery electric vehicle adoption. Our analysis is based on granular, annual information on the location of public charging infrastructure and the battery electric vehicle ownership rate across 356 Norwegian LAU-2 municipalities between 2009 and 2019. We focus on areas in which the first public charging infrastructure was installed in this time period. In these mostly rural areas, the establishment of a first public charging station initiated adoption. We find, on average, an increase of the local electric vehicle ownership rate by 1.5 percentage points or 200% over 5 years. Our results are robust to anticipatory effects. They also remain unaffected from different treatment thresholds: the median number of public chargers in a municipality between 2009 and 2019 or the median density of public charging points per 1000 inhabitants in the same time frame. While we cannot fully rule out reverse effects, we identify public charging infrastructure to serve as a stimulus to the diffusion of battery electric vehicles.