This is a very common misconception. Charging is not really about selling the electrical energy. That's gasoline thinking, where you buy it by the gallon. Charging is 90% service and 10% energy for sale. That's why a fast charger costs you a lot more than a slow charger for the same energy. Charging isn't the business of selling electricity, while gas stations are technically in the business of selling you gasoline (at low profit, they actually make more money from the convenience store.)
Tesla has claimed the supercharger network is not to make money. It's to sell Teslas. I don't know if they still do that.
Electricity in Ontario is fairly cheap. Wholesale prices are probably like 3 cents/kwh. If you pay 50 cents/kwh all the rest is delivery. Not just Hydro delivery but the big expensive charging machine, and raised costs during peak times and more.
Once the kwh are in our cars then we feel we have bought kwh, and want to pay a flat rate for them like people do at gas stations for gallons. But while they are going in, we care a lot about how and when it goes in and don't pay a flat rate. We are so used to buying energy by the gallon that it takes time to get the head wrapped around this approach, and we also like very simple prices. The station's costs are:
- Generation cost from some contracted generation provider (usually just 3c/kwh)
- Transmission cost from a power company
- Time of day surcharges (which vary a great deal)
- Minutes of time on a $100,000 machine that is a DC Fast charger plus cost of the land
The last one, the minutes of time on the expensive machine, is actually the largest factor for most chargers.
And BTW, while residential electrical customers pay by the kwh (though they may also have time of use, in fact you want that if you have an electric car) but commercial customers have prices that are based on their peak use in many cases.