Croatia does not have too many options. Electrification of transport is not just an administrative condition imposed by Brussels but also a necessity. This is known by everyone who spends winters in the center of Zagreb, where one sometimes literally has to fight for air against the exhaust fumes of cars. The problem exists, the diagnosis is there, but the prescribed remedy does not yet offer a solution. The number of electric vehicles is growing shyly: in 2024, 1,915 new ones were registered in Croatia, which is 297 vehicles (or 18.36 percent) more compared to 2023. However, this is much less than in some other countries. That is not the only problem; it is barely possible to travel from one end of Croatia to the other in an electric car. There are chargers, but few; there are even fewer fast chargers that require a lot of electricity, and there is no investment in the grid, so it can hardly bear new investments. It is already so strained that in the middle of summer, when we return from the beaches, it can barely hold up.
Dalmacija and Lika lag behind
Our country, instead of seriously addressing all these problems, continues to solve the electrification of mobility through subsidies, which is commendable but not enough. The first and fundamental problem is the lack of charging stations. Both fast ones on highways and slow ones in homes, buildings, public garages, and elsewhere. While we can still cover ourselves somewhat in the capital and the north, the challenge is to travel from Zagreb to, for example, Split or, God forbid, Dubrovnik. Problems mainly arise in Dalmatia, which does not have enough slow destination chargers that are ideal for home and long-term use, into which, for example, apartment owners could invest. The president of the association Strujni krug Hrvoje Prpić publicly calls on all of them to come forward and install a free or subsidized charger. But that is just part of the story. A bigger problem is the capacity of the electricity grid in some parts of Croatia, which makes it very challenging to install fast chargers.
– In this, Dalmatia and Lika lag behind. Lika needs fast chargers that consume up to 350 kW, and the grid is simply not ready for that, which is why large crowds occur in Otočac during the summer, where such a charger is located – warns Prpić.
Questionable usability
That regions like Lika and the Adriatic coastal areas experience energy shocks during the summer due to the tourist season is also noted by professor Hrvoje Pandžić from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), who confirms that the highest loads on the grid occur at this time of year, particularly on weekends between 8 PM and 10 PM, when everyone returns from swimming, turns on water heaters, cooks, and charges cars. During these periods, the electricity grid is the most burdened, while the rest of the year it is relatively underloaded. Therefore, it is a significant problem to justify investments in it that are fully utilized for only a few hours a year, but this can be addressed by limiting charging power during periods of high electricity consumption.
– Croatia is a tourist country that attracts guests from predominantly more developed northern countries, whose citizens adopt electric vehicles more quickly, which only means that appropriate infrastructure is necessary. However, the problem is the usability of that infrastructure, which will remain underutilized for most of the year, i.e., outside the tourist season. This diminishes the profitability of such chargers, so it might be better to redirect state incentive funds from the purchase of electric vehicles to the development of infrastructure – explains Pandžić, who believes that it would be best to have fast chargers every fifty to sixty kilometers on highways so that electric vehicle owners feel comfortable when thinking about charging, just like owners of gasoline and diesel vehicles.
– It should be noted that the infrastructure for gasoline and diesel vehicles has been developing for about a hundred years, so it is unrealistic to expect extremely rapid development of electric vehicle chargers solely on a market basis – says Pandžić, who is already offering solutions.
Solution in dynamic pricing
Namely, he says, fast electric vehicle chargers have fifty kilowatts, which corresponds to the power of about twenty households. From this perspective, fast charging of electric vehicles as the main method is not sustainable, so he expects that most of the energy for chargers in the future will come from low-power home chargers (3.6 kW), while fast chargers will be used on highways for longer trips. For easier and faster construction of electric vehicle chargers, it is necessary to align their demand with the available cheap energy on the market. Therefore, Pandžić expects dynamic tariffs under which vehicles will be charged cheaper during periods of low prices, especially during sunny periods when the production of photovoltaic panels drives down market electricity prices.
– For this purpose, it is necessary to optimize charging periods in accordance with the technical and economic limitations of the grid, but also with the needs of users, whose comfort and requirements must not be compromised – emphasized professor Pandžić.
The state is generous
When it comes to incentives for purchasing e-vehicles, they continue to be generously distributed. From 2014 to the present, more than 63 million euros have been allocated for 12 thousand vehicles, say the Environmental Protection and Energy Efficiency Fund. This program, they say, has significantly impacted the number of registered electric passenger cars in Croatia. On our roads, more than 18 thousand e-vehicles were registered just last year, while only 74 such vehicles were registered in the year when they started providing incentives.
