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Since EvGO and Chargepoint seem to be public companies, I looked up their financial statements. It's not pretty. They are all bleeding money and that's with machines that people complain are down a lot. Chargepoint is in a slightly better spot because their Level 2 chargers seem to be somewhat better in the profitability department, but still losing tons of money. And that's not really surprising. If you look around at quotes, installing a single DCFC charging stall of 150Kw or better looks to run about $100k per stall plus significant installation costs almost matching that. At $100k for the stall itself, and if we assume $.50/kwh (a bit higher than most EVGO stations I see around here) and we assume $0.16/kwh electricity (residential rate here), that means each kwh sent to a car has a profit of $0.34. So the stall would need to dispense 294,117kwh of energy to pay for the stall itself. If the average rate of dispensing to a car is 100kw (which is probably high even without leafs and bolts due to charging curves) in 15 minute intervals, that's 11,765 cars that need to charge for 15 minute intervals to break even on the equipment itself, so an average of 32 cars charging per day (assuming my math is right, which it may not be). 32 cars per day at 15 minute average charge times means the stall has to be utilized 33% of the day. That paypack doesn't count maintenance, install fees, repairs (they are always breaking down), kickbacks to the land/building owners, etc... And many areas of North America doesn't get electricity for $0.16/kwh (though some are cheaper) The math definitely feels to me like it's really hard to make DCFC stations profitable in much of the US, especially until EVs become more prevalent. |
EIA average for industrial electricity is ~$0.14/kWh. I know around here its not uncommon for industrial users to pay all the way down to ~$0.07/kWh, there's a good bit of difference depending on how far up the line the industrial user owns which varies the delivery cost a good bit.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
I definitely agree these early days in DCFC is mostly a brand mindshare and land grab play for a lot of these companies, I'm guessing they're trying to already be in the ground in all the places for when/if the market for DCFC really swings to higher demand.