China's National Energy Administration reported a sharp rise in electric vehicle charging on highways during the opening three days of the Lunar New Year holiday. From Feb. 15 to Feb. 17 the national charging monitoring platform logged 1.4099 million charging sessions across 53,300 highway chargers, with a daily average electricity throughput of 11.8008 million kilowatt-hours — a 63.05% jump from the same period last year.
The raw figures suggest both deeper penetration of EVs into long-distance travel and a change in behavior: dividing the daily throughput by sessions implies roughly 25 kWh per charging event, consistent with brief top-ups rather than full battery replacements. That pattern fits a travel model in which drivers supplement range during longer journeys rather than relying on single, full charges, reflecting growing confidence in highway charging networks for family visits and tourism during China's busiest travel season.
Authorities say the highway charging infrastructure operated smoothly during the period, credited in part to advance planning and strengthened dispatch from the central monitoring platform. The platform aggregates telemetry from tens of thousands of chargers and allows regulators to track utilization and faults in near real time; the National Energy Administration also signaled it will intensify monitoring ahead of the expected return-trip peak later in the holiday.
The episode matters because Spring Festival migration — the world’s largest annual human migration — is a stress test for both chargers and the regional grids that feed them. Rapid year-on-year growth in highway charging highlights the speed of electrification and the importance of system-level coordination: grid operators, charging-station operators and local authorities must manage sharp temporal spikes in demand, ensure interoperable fast-charging availability, and maintain reliability across provincial boundaries.
Looking ahead, the coming return peak will be instructive. If charging demand continues to grow at this pace, it will pressure investment in higher-power chargers, energy storage and smart dispatch tools to smooth load. For policymakers and investors the data are a signal that China's habits are shifting from urban overnight charging to frequent, distributed fast charging on intercity corridors — a development that carries both emissions benefits and new operational challenges for the power system.