find_charging_station
Read-onlyIdempotent
Returns EV charging sites near a place or coordinate with operator, connector types, maximum power, price per kWh where published, and how many points are free right now where the operator publishes live status. Use when an EV driver asks where to charge ("Wo kann ich laden?", "CCS 150 kW near Leipzig", "ist gerade eine Säule frei?"). Do NOT use for petrol or diesel — call find_cheapest_fuel; for E-Kennzeichen or Ladekarte rules — call get_driving_rules. Radius ≤ 25 km, ≤ 10 sites; availability is missing for most operators and is then unknown, never free. Show the attribution line.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| lat | No | Latitude in WGS 84, e.g. 48.137. Use with lon when the caller already holds coordinates; otherwise use place. | |
| lon | No | Longitude in WGS 84, e.g. 11.576. Use with lat; otherwise use place. | |
| limit | No | How many lines to return, nearest first (1–10, default 5). Records of one place within 50 m that read alike are folded into one line that says how many units it holds; structuredContent.sites lists every record of the lines shown, so it can be longer than limit. | |
| place | No | Where to look, as free text: a city ("München", "Munich"), a district or Kreis ("Kreis Fulda"), a Bundesland, a station or stop ("Hamburg Hbf"), a motorway junction ("AK Neufahrn"), or a street address with a house number ("Bahnhofstraße 12, 36037 Fulda"). A motorway number alone ("A7") resolves to the road, which has no single point — name a town or junction on it instead. Use this instead of coordinates whenever the person named a place. An address needs its town or postcode — a street and a number alone exist in many towns. Give either place OR lat+lon, never both. | |
| language | No | Set this on every call to the language the person is writing in: "en" if they wrote English, "de" if they wrote German. Do not leave it out: it defaults to German ("de"), which is only the fallback when the language is genuinely unclear, so an English question sent without it is answered in German — a wrong answer. Place names, station names and road numbers are never translated in either language; in English the German term is kept in parentheses so the person recognises it on signs and in local apps. | de |
| connector | No | Plug the car needs: "ccs2" (CCS Combo 2 — the DC fast-charging standard on almost every European EV), "type2" (Typ 2 / Mennekes, the AC socket) or "chademo" (older Japanese DC, e.g. Nissan Leaf). Omit unless the person named their plug or their car model — filtering on a guess hides chargers they could have used. | |
| radius_km | No | Search radius around the place in kilometres (1–25, default 10). A charging stop is worth a detour, so this is wider than the fuel radius — but 25 km is the cap, and a larger circle is a dataset request rather than a driver's question. | |
| min_power_kw | No | Only charging points of at least this many kW (1–1000). Use when the person names a number or asks for fast charging: 50 = DC fast (a bare "fast"/"schnell"/"Schnelllader"), 150 = HPC ("HPC", "ultra", "ultraschnell"), 300 = the fastest posts in Germany. Omit for "where can I charge" — 11 kW overnight is a valid answer to that question. | |
| only_available | No | When true, return only sites with at least one point reported FREE right now. Default false. Use it when the person asks what is free at this moment. Note that only some operators publish live status: the result always says how many nearby sites were dropped because their status is unknown, so the filter never silently hides a charger that may well be free. |