Benchmarking DC Fast Charging Station Utilization Against Neighboring Sites
As utilization at fast charging stations increases along with growing competition, benchmarking your station’s performance against nearby stations will become a key tool for understanding opportunities to increase revenue and profits (we call this Competitor & Market Opportunity Analysis). Utilization rates at surrounding stations, however, only tell part of the story and it is critical to understand what is driving the differences across sites.
Last Saturday, I saw an unoccupied charging station that I had never noticed before and wondered what utilization rates were for nearby charging stations. When I got home, I jumped on the Paren Site Lookup tool and pulled the data file of all the fast-charging stations within a 3-mile radius of that location.
Wanting to analyze just recent utilization trends, I filtered the data for the period from February 1 through March 9. In the table below, I’ve included utilization rates of 10 stations within the 3-mile radius. There were 12 stations in the area, but one was completely out of service for this time frame, and the other was only operational for a few days. As such, I decided to not include these stations in the analysis as they would have skewed the overall data much lower.
As you can see in the table, utilization for this period varied widely, from a low of 13% to a high of 47% — meaning the station with the highest rate was 3.6 times more utilized than the lowest. On the positive side, six of these fast-charging stations had an average daily utilization over this period of greater than 34%, with eight of the 10 stations seeing utilization north of 20%.
The mean across the 10 was 31.5% and the median 36%. The top quartile rate is just over 41%, with the bottom quartile being just above 20%. These levels of utilization compare well to the US average of 16% and California average of 23%.
While this is a very small and random sample in a high EV adopting market in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are a few things we can potentially learn from this analysis.
More Ports and Higher Power Doesn’t Always Lead to Higher Utilization
First, at least for this group of stations, the number of charging ports didn’t necessarily drive a higher utilization rate. As you can see in the table, stations #7 and #8 had roughly the same utilization, but #7 had three times as many ports and its chargers are high-power versus the low-power chargers at station #8. You might be wondering if perhaps the CPO/charging network brand and popularity of station #8 played a role, but in fact, both stations are operated by the same well-known charging network.
The difference in location types, however, may explain why station #8 (which has fewer, and lower-power ports), nearly matches the utilization of station #7. This latter station is next to a major freeway and is located in a well-lit major shopping center with a popular national retail chain as an anchor tenant and a large parking area. It is also located in an area near many apartments and condos, where some drivers — likely ride-share drivers — use the station at a high frequency.
Station #8, however, is located roughly 1.5 miles from the freeway at a small neighborhood shopping center, with a Starbucks but no other major draw. It is also located in an area of mostly single-family homes, where most EV drivers would not have to rely on public charging stations for their daily trips.
At the top of the table, you will notice that two stations with 2 to 4 ports had higher utilization than a nearby station with 6 to 12 ports, but with similar high-power chargers. In general, it is reasonable to assume that fast-charging stations with 8+ stalls and 250 kW or higher-power chargers, for example, will be more attractive to EV drivers and result in higher utilization. This combination of more charging stalls with high-power chargers isn’t always going to ensure a much higher utilization rate than nearby stations, as many other factors can greatly affect session volume.
In future articles, we will further explore some of the variables that can determine how your station might perform relative to others in the same area, but they can include:
- Proximity to freeways
- Ease of access (e.g., distance from a major freeway, highway, or road)
- General visibility and signage
- Location within a parking area
- Amenities such as restrooms and food
- Co-location of major retailers and/or restaurant and coffee shop chains
- Safety of the area throughout the day
- Charging network/CPO brand awareness and reputation
- Automaker and other partnerships (e.g., free charging)
- Number of stalls
- Power-level (e.g., 250 kW or higher vs below 150 kW)
- Reliability of the network/CPO overall and this specific charging station
- Pricing
- Composition of area (ride-share drivers, apartment dwellers, etc.)
- Inclusion of canopies and pull-through lanes
When determining the best site to locate a new charging station, there are cost factors to consider, such as access to the grid, site host revenue share costs, utility rate tariffs, potential demand charges, and more. But it is also possible that a site that is more expensive to deploy might be more financially attractive than a less expensive location a mile away due to more convenient access, being co-located with popular retailers, better amenities and food service options, and proximity to dense housing with a large number of high-volume charging EV-driving ride-share drivers.
Interested in benchmarking an existing or planned fast-charging station? Request a demo of our Site Lookup tool.
In future articles in this series, we’ll look at “Share of Charge” across these 10 sites, time of day session behavior, pricing and other factors. And we’ll then outline steps CPOs can take to increase utilization and profitability. And we’ll then share some national data to convey how some of the above factors are generally affecting utilization.
By Loren McDonald, Chief Analyst
