France's EV Charging Deserts Are Getting a Lifeline

TotalEnergies and Banque des Territoires launch a joint platform to bring public EV charging to France's underserved regions

10 Oct 2025

TotalEnergies and Banque des Territoires announced in October 2025 the creation of a jointly owned investment platform intended to accelerate the rollout of public electric vehicle charging infrastructure across French municipalities, with particular emphasis on suburban and rural communities where coverage remains thin. The platform is majority-owned by TotalEnergies, which holds a 51% stake, with Banque des Territoires, a state-backed financing institution, holding the remainder.

The structure pairs TotalEnergies's operational reach with the public financing expertise of its partner. The company currently operates close to 30,000 charge points across France, including roughly 4,500 within public concessions in metropolitan and peri-urban areas. The new platform will extend those concessions and launch fresh projects in response to specific territorial demand, with all infrastructure powered by electricity guaranteed to derive entirely from renewable sources.

The arrangement signals a broader shift in how private operators are approaching the French market. Rather than competing in fragmented tenders or depending on ad hoc subsidies, TotalEnergies is pursuing long-term concession agreements designed to offer local authorities greater financial predictability and operational continuity. Banque des Territoires brings considerable capacity to the effort, having mobilized more than 500 million euros in equity and quasi-equity across the electromobility sector since 2022.

Yet the geographic imbalance underlying the initiative remains stark. France's public charging network reached approximately 142,000 points by January 2026, an increase of roughly 18% from the prior year, but the Paris region alone accounts for nearly a fifth of all installations. Rural departments, by contrast, are served by far fewer options. The new platform is designed to address that disparity directly, offering structured concession-based service to municipalities that have struggled to attract investment on their own. France has set a national target of 400,000 public charging points by 2030, and whether partnerships of this kind can sustain the required pace of deployment across the country's most underserved regions may determine how credibly that goal is met.