Key points in this article
Hainan's urban-rural answer
Hainan's lesson is less about how many piles and more about full coverage plus one network: basic township piles first as a floor, then high-power super charging in cities. Haikou and Sanya build 25-minute convenience circles, and the province targets a 100 km intercity fast-charge radius by 2026 with full township basic-pile coverage. Some far-suburban towns in Yantai's 13 districts already show early signs of cars without piles.
Solar-storage heavy-truck benchmark
The Baimajing station totals 8,000 kW with 40 high-power terminals serving 20 trucks at once, over 200 trips a day, fully charging a truck in an hour and cutting 200,000 kg of carbon a year. It shows heavy-truck replenishment need not rely only on swap; an integrated solar-storage-charge super station runs a sound business model too. Yantai's port and logistics parks have comparable demand.
The value of one platform
Hainan folds 6,027 charging stations, 110 swap stations and 75,900 public guns into unified management, one app for the island, with IoT, big data and AI enabling fault warning and smart dispatch. If Yantai operators push cross-compound, cross-site platform interconnection, the experience improves sharply and the pain of finding a pile truly eases.
Dongshang New Energy and Dongdian Huichong in Yantai follow the same logic: community slow charging as the base, public fast and solar-storage-charge as the upgrade, then a platform linking scattered sites. Township reach and old-community retrofits are the two fronts to push next, with charging carports as the standard base for both towns and communities, overlaying PV and storage so slow piles use green power off-peak and shift load at peaks.