Blog
Notes from the business of EV charging: what is changing, what it costs, and what I would do about it. Plus a weekly screen of the news that actually matters to people who own or plan charging sites.
- Nobody lends on a charger. They lend on you.The worst loan I was offered for a charging site was 22% over two years, with my house as collateral. Here's why, and what actually gets financed.
- Charging is a business, not a charityI raised my price 5 cents at a time to 65 cents a kWh and utilization went up. Price for convenience, not for apology.
- Nobody gets ten sessions on day oneThe line in a charging pro forma that everyone gets wrong isn't capex or opex. It's utilization, and it's wrong because it's the easiest one to wish up.
- Uptime says the charger is online. It doesn't say it works.A site can report great uptime and still send drivers away. The number that matters is whether the first charge attempt works.
- Flat utilization is a good signSessions up 26% while utilization held flat, Tesla's 15% price increase, and Fastned borrowing from its own drivers at 6%.
- What I'd tell a hotel owner about a free chargerA no-cost charger deal means handing part of your property to someone else's business. If you control the land, own the chargers.
- Half the cables should still be CCSIonna opened its first NACS-only sites, the Tesla Semi hit volume production, and Colorado funded 270 fast-charging ports.
- 2,500 electric semis ordered, zero chargers announcedThe biggest US electric truck order yet says nothing about where the trucks plug in. That is the part that decides whether they beat diesel.
- Why I built The Charge SheetSix years of running a charging business, plus the home charging questions everyone asks, written down for the next person.