All Bay Area Superchargers full this weekend....

[KarenRei]

I didn't read your lengthy post full of mistakes. But this is ridiculous. Commercial rates are lower, but not that low. A 15 sec google search would have shown you that. In California (this thread, bay area), commercial rate is ~15 cents/kwh, industrial is 12.20 c/kwh. Places where it is from pure coal, the rate is lower, but not that low.

EIA - Electricity Data

First off, if you think it's "full of mistakes", by all means, cite them. You can't just cast aspersions like that and then call it a day. Secondly, I said industrial, not commercial (talk about mistakes! And right off the bat!). A location drawing hundreds of kilowatts - soon to be measured in megawatts - is going to be getting industrial rates at the worst, not commercial. The US average for industrial power is 6,81 cents per kWh. They might even be able to buy it at wholesale rates with that kind of consumption, which average 3-4 cents per kWh. Of course, wholesale is more restrictive (including wide time-of-use variations) and requires larger capital investments.

We're not talking about an ice cream shop, we're talking about a station discharging huge amounts of electricity into batteries. When it comes to electricity, when you buy in bulk, you buy cheap. The only thing that can ruin it for you is, as mentioned previously, line fees (the "demand charge"), which are based on your peak 15-minute draw. If you only supercharge vehicles infrequently, and have no buffer, the few-tens-of-thousands of dollars a year in demand charges will kill you. If your demand charges for a 3-charger / 6 stall station are, say, $40k (not at all unreasonable, if the station ever has "busy periods" - although less if it's always sparsely used), and you buy power at say 7 cents per kWh (slightly above average for industrial, let alone wholesale), then you have to sell over 307k kWh per year. Relative to 100% utilization of 435kW, aka 3,8m kWh per year, for such a site you have to average 8% utilization to break even before maintenance (maintenance being a small cost relative to revenue) and capital cost amortization (the real thing we're concerned with).

Again, battery buffers change the picture, since they greatly reduce demand charges - while increasing capital costs and maintenance.

Why are you acting so shocked that it's possible for superchargers to pay for themselves once they get enough traffic? Did you think that the business plan was to convert the whole world to EVs while losing money every time someone charges? Of course it was designed as a loss-leader in the beginning, but their entire survivability as a business in the long term depends on supercharging being an economically viable activity.

 

[Economite]

Strongly disagree. My god, if I was a store owner I'd be begging Tesla to install a supercharger on my lot. A captive audience for 15-90 minutes? Said captive audience being people who can afford to spend large sums of money on expensive cars? All at no cost to me, just a couple parking spaces? Who on Earth would say no to that? "Yes, please, keep trapping some upper- and upper-middle-class people next to my store for significant lengths of time, thanks!"

That kind of logic might work in places like Barstow, where parking lots are huge and the core customer is random travelers. I don't think it works in urban areas where land is expensive and parking lots fill up.

Lots of supercharger users just hang out in their cars while they charge. And, with the new(ish) per minute overstay fees, Tesla is discouraging people from leaving their cars at the supercharger while leisurely doing business at neighboring businesses. No business owner wants their parking lot packed with cars waiting for a supercharger space to fill up (and if you want to have high overall utilization of stalls, there will be a line at peak periods). Plus, in-city superchargers will tend to attract a small group of locals who use the supercharger a lot. I'm betting these locals are more likely to hang out in their cars than make big impulse purchases at stores.

 

[KarenRei]

That kind of logic might work in places like Barstow, where parking lots are huge and the core customer is random travelers. I don't think it works in urban areas where land is expensive and parking lots fill up.

If available parking is too low for a business, then the business is going to lose customers. City planners and project manners lay out cities to have enough parking for residents and businesses. If businesses are having to turn away business because their parking is always full, that's a major design failure. And one that won't stand, because if there's anything businesses don't tolerate it's throwing away money. When parking is persistently insufficient in commercial areas, parking garages rise. They're a profitable industry on their own - $30B a year in the US. The value of the land sacrificed for a garage is nothing compared to the revenue that the thousands of extra customers bring to the surrounding area.

What number do we want to use as the "average" supercharger stay, between those just topping up a bit, and those going to 90-100%? Let's say half an hour? Let's say that only a quarter of the people who stop shop on the premises. Half hour stops often involve things like meals and such, with a meaningful cost, and there's often multiple people per vehicle - but let's be pessimistic and say that the average revenue from a person who buys something on the premises is only $10, and of that, $4 after taxes / expenses is profit. So an average of $1 profit per car that stops. Let's say that a supercharger stall in your "busy" location averages 15% occupancy over the course of a day. So there's $2630 in profit per year, from a space that's say 16 square meters, so $164 per square meter per year / $15.30 per square foot per year. The median cost to build a parking garage in the US is $55,66 per square foot (all costs included, including land), meaning that this pessimistic scenario still only takes 3 1/2 years to pay for the parking space. And that's assuming that the business has to actually buy the parking itself, rather than the city or another private company providing it (with parking fees associated, of course).

Or let's forget about all of that and assume that Tesla paid for the parking space. We were averaging a mere $1 per customer, right, for that 3 1/2 year parking payback? And a 30 minute charge? So let's say an average charge rate of, what, 70kW? So $1 spread over 35kWh = 2,8 cents per kWh. Stop the presses!

 

[Economite]

If available parking is too low for a business, then the business is going to lose customers. City planners and project manners lay out cities to have enough parking for residents and businesses. If businesses are having to turn away business because their parking is always full, that's a major design failure. And one that won't stand, because if there's anything businesses don't tolerate it's throwing away money. When parking is persistently insufficient in commercial areas, parking garages rise. They're a profitable industry on their own - $30B a year in the US. The value of the land sacrificed for a garage is nothing compared to the revenue that the thousands of extra customers bring to the surrounding area.

What number do we want to use as the "average" supercharger stay, between those just topping up a bit, and those going to 90-100%? Let's say half an hour? Let's say that only a quarter of the people who stop shop on the premises. Half hour stops often involve things like meals and such, with a meaningful cost, and there's often multiple people per vehicle - but let's be pessimistic and say that the average revenue from a person who buys something on the premises is only $10, and of that, $4 after taxes / expenses is profit. So an average of $1 profit per car that stops. Let's say that a supercharger stall in your "busy" location averages 15% occupancy over the course of a day. So there's $2630 in profit per year, from a space that's say 16 square meters, so $164 per square meter per year / $15.30 per square foot per year. The median cost to build a parking garage in the US is $55,66 per square foot (all costs included, including land), meaning that this pessimistic scenario still only takes 3 1/2 years to pay for the parking space. And that's assuming that the business has to actually buy the parking itself, rather than the city or another private company providing it (with parking fees associated, of course).

Or let's forget about all of that and assume that Tesla paid for the parking space. We were averaging a mere $1 per customer, right, for that 3 1/2 year parking payback? And a 30 minute charge? So let's say an average charge rate of, what, 70kW? So $1 spread over 35kWh = 2,8 cents per kWh. Stop the presses!

1) That source you cite for the $55.66 per square foot figure does not include land costs, just construction costs. In denser urban areas, the cost of land is extremely high.

2) The article says that the construction cost per space is around $20,000. That's because the cost of constructing a parking space includes not just the square footage of the space itself, but also a proportional share of the driving lane square footage in the garage.

3) It is very difficult and expensive to build new parking in most urban areas. In many places, zoning laws actively discourage it.

4) "If businesses are having to turn away business because their parking is always full, that's a major design failure. And one that won't stand, because if there's anything businesses don't tolerate it's throwing away money." Have you ever visited a trader joes or a post office (or a shopping mall in December)? Everyone has to spend time hunting for spaces. No way the landlord (or the business being served) wants those spaces used by folks who are basically there to charge their cars and might sit in their cars while charging.

5) No merchant/restaurant makes a profit of 40% on gross receipts.

 

[KarenRei]

Make it simpler then. Just assume that the person pays for parking at the garage (aka they don't get free parking), so that you're not privileging EV drivers. Then the supercharger is purely a bonus to the garage owner, helping them keep spaces busy, with a shorter-than-average stay time.

3) It is very difficult and expensive to build new parking in most urban areas. In many places, zoning laws actively discourage it.

If your city isn't letting people park, then no types of cars - electric or otherwise - can get into it.

4) "If businesses are having to turn away business because their parking is always full, that's a major design failure. And one that won't stand, because if there's anything businesses don't tolerate it's throwing away money." Have you ever visited a trader joes or a post office (or a shopping mall in December)? Everyone has to spend time hunting for spaces

If your parking lots are too full, then you're throwing away business. It's virtually never justified unless your store itself is also at capacity. If your whole city is experiencing the same then you need to build upwards. If you decide you're not going to allow either then you've decided that your city's growth is dead.

5) No merchant/restaurant makes a profit of 40% on gross receipts.

The entire gas station business model is built on using gasoline as nearly a loss leader (margins are generally razor thin) in order to get people into the store, where they can sell them fizzy sugarwater at ten times the price they pay for it, in a 30-second transaction. As for restaurants, just the tip alone in the US is 15-20% of the bill. Meaning that the person is paying 15-20% more than their meal cost to make if the restaurant itself was making no profit whatsoever.

Remember, we're not talking total business profitability. We're talking about the profitability for each incremental customer. An empty table earns you no money. A restaurant typically spends a third of its revenue on the food itself. Salary and wages is the biggest component. If people are idle, you're only losing money.

Regardless, we're talking an average of $1 profit per vehicle who stops. There's nothing at all unreasonable about that. And additionally, if you don't want to credit that to boosted profit for store owners, then you can (as mentioned) roll the $1 into supercharger fees and have the land owner be paid in that manner.