The dilemma boils down to demand, and there s a certain chicken-and-egg quality to it.
(Bloomberg) President Joe Biden’s plan to wean U.S. drivers off fossil fuels requires massive investment in public charging stations to power the electric-car revolution. So far, none of the companies that deploy the equipment has figured out how to make a profit.
The dilemma boils down to demand, and there’s a certain chicken-and-egg quality to it. Most electric-vehicle drivers charge their cars at home, so many public charging stations get little use. But lots of people still driving gasoline-powered cars won’t consider going electric until they see charging stations widely deployed, for fear that they will run out of juice on the road.
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Cathy Zoi, CEO of EVgo, pays a lot of attention to the economics of public electric vehicle charging, both in terms of the widely varying upfront costs from location to location, and the long-term calculations that go into making sure their revenue exceeds their costs over their lifetime.
“We have a first-mover advantage, but we also have a first-learner advantage,” she said, with data collected from about 1,500 fast chargers across 800 locations to date. That s allowed the decade-old EV charging provider to develop “proprietary utilization forecasting tools” aimed at ensuring that the early years of a fast-charging site, when relatively few EVs are on the roads to use it, can eventually be made up by the end of its life as EVs proliferate in its region. “That’s some of our secret sauce.”