“The growth is very significant”, said the Minister of the Environment and Climate Action, Duarte Cordeiro, during his opening speech at the Portugal Mobi Summit, at Nova SBE, in Cascais, adding that Portugal should “continue to break records” in electrical charging by the end of the year.

In July, the public network Mobi.E had already reported an 87% jump in the number of electric car charges to 222,945, the highest monthly figure since the network was created in 2015.

According to the official, the 1.6 million recharges accumulated until September translate into consumption of more than 24,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, well above the 13,000 MW of electricity recorded in the same period last year. “We're talking about nearly six thousand outlets available across the charging network,” he said.

At the same time, the minister pointed out that this figure resulted in a drop of 7.3 million liters of diesel consumed by the road sector — “at a time when the country needs this reduction to happen” — and also in a decrease in the ecological footprint of transport. 19.5 thousand tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) on land. In 2021, this value had reached 9.5 thousand tons of CO2. “This is equivalent to the carbon absorbed by a forest with more than 323,000 mature trees,” he said during his speech.