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The public charge points that refuel electric vehicles, owned and run by a charge-point operator (CPO). Not a regulated network but a utilisation business: the chargers cost the same to run whether busy or idle, so profitability turns almost entirely on how heavily they are used and the margin earned per kilowatt-hour. Pick a real operator below and work through its sites, its economics and a live returns model.
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Drag the sliders to see what earns the money: the number of chargers, the margin per kilowatt-hour, and above all the utilisation. At low utilisation the fixed costs swamp the margin and the site loses money.
An EV charging business owns charge points and resells electricity to drivers at a margin. The catch is that almost all of a charger's cost (the grid connection, site rent, network and maintenance) is fixed: it is incurred whether the charger sits idle or runs all day. So profitability is a utilisation flywheel. At low utilisation the fixed cost per charger swamps the thin energy margin and the site loses money; as utilisation climbs, the same cost base spreads over far more kilowatt-hours and the margin turns sharply positive. The two levers are therefore utilisation (how busy the chargers are) and the margin per kWh (retail price minus wholesale power). It is a growth/ramp asset, often part-funded by public subsidy, that re-rates as EV adoption fills the chargers.
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See also the EV charging sim and the Cash-flow & DCF model.