GERMANY. IKEA promotes electric mobility: Over 1,000 new charging points throughout Germany

A man charges his electric car in front of one of the 54 IKEA stores in Germany.

Hofheim-Wallau, March 11, 2024.

IKEA wants to make a relevant contribution to ensuring that electric mobility becomes even faster and stronger in Germany. We already provide our customers with charging points in the parking lots of IKEA stores that are powered by green electricity and provide a CO2savings of almost 4,000 tonnes per year. Now IKEA is joining forces with Mer, a leading provider of charging solutions, and goes even further: By 2028, we will expand the charging infrastructure across Germany across all 54 IKEA stores and other IKEA locations, creating over 1,000 charging points with the potential to emit around 71,000 tons of CO annually.2 Save. This corresponds to the emissions of 395,000,000 kilometres driven by a diesel vehicle – the distance from Munich to Stockholm could be covered 247,000 times.

One of the most powerful charging networks in the German retail sector

The charging points are built and operated by Mer. Planning for the first six IKEA stores in Bielefeld, Bremen, Chemnitz, Freiburg, Kaarst and Mannheim is now underway. The first new charging points are expected to be available from the beginning of 2025. They will be powered by 100 percent green electricity from renewable energies and will be accessible around the clock almost everywhere.

“We are proud to make electric mobility accessible to even more people with the newly emerging charging network. At IKEA, we want to improve people’s everyday lives. This includes finding ways to make it as easy as possible for them to make more sustainable choices. The charging points that we are creating with our partner Mer will be available for delivery vehicles as well as for our employees, customers and all electric car drivers,” explains Walter Kadnar, Managing Director and CSO (Chief Sustainability Officer) of IKEA Germany.

“We are very pleased to be able to support IKEA in its ambitious sustainability goals,” says Otto Loserth, Managing Director at Mer Germany GmbH. “Our companies share their Scandinavian roots: together we want to change the world for the better and shape the future more sustainably. Mer’s vision of thinking about electric mobility holistically, customer-friendly and sustainably is in perfect harmony with IKEA’s goal of becoming a company with a positive carbon footprint.”

A wide range of emission-free mobility offers from IKEA

The extensive expansion of the charging infrastructure is only one part of IKEA’s commitment to mobility: IKEA plans to use locally emission-free delivery vehicles for last-mile freight forwarding deliveries by the end of the 2025 financial year. Emissions from employee and customer mobility are also to be reduced: we want to halve them by 2030. The provision of an adequate charging infrastructure at our sites, which has now been initiated, is the prerequisite for achieving these goals.

Some IKEA stores also offer their customers other attractive offers at the local level: IKEA Karlsruhe has battery charging cabinets for e-bike batteries. At IKEA Freiburg, customers can rent an electric vehicle free of charge to transport furniture home. Six furniture stores offer e-cargo trailers for hire (IKEA Berlin-Spandau, IKEA Freiburg, IKEA Hamburg-Altona, IKEA Karlsruhe, IKEA Magdeburg, IKEA Osnabrück). Customers can rent e-cargo bikes at nine stores (IKEA Braunschweig, IKEA Dortmund, IKEA Hamburg-Altona, IKEA Hamburg-Moorfleet, IKEA Hanau, IKEA Karlsruhe, IKEA Magdeburg, IKEA Osnabrück, IKEA Wuppertal).

Full speed ahead to a green future

As part of our holistic sustainability agenda, IKEA’s mission is to become a circular company with a positive carbon footprint and to reduce our CO2footprint by 2030. In order to achieve these goals and further reduce our emissions in our own business operations, we see a major lever in particular in the area of mobility.

An important milestone has been reached: Since 2020, we have been generating more renewable energy in Germany than is consumed in our entire operation.