What decides charging payback is the cost of the grid connection
A growth stage venture investor was looking at a business that builds and runs electric vehicle charging sites. The payback model behind it turned on a short list of inputs. The one that moves the answer most is the cost of getting power to the site. That varies by grid region, by how much spare capacity the nearby substation has, and by how long the network operator takes to connect.
Published research on charging installation economics is thin and dated. The numbers that matter sit with the contractors and connection engineers who quote the work, not with executives, so they do not appear in a data room or a sector report. Utilization is the number everyone debates. Connection cost is the number that decides the outcome.
We asked the contractors who quote the connection work
We ran moderated calls with former installation contractors, grid connection engineers and network operators, the people who price this work and then carry it out. The guide was written around the connection question rather than around the business model, so the calls stayed on what a site actually costs to connect. Because the calls were moderated, follow up questions could be asked live, which is how a modeled range becomes a number for a particular site.
Coverage followed the grid regions the network planned to build in. Part of the group was recruited for this brief rather than drawn from people already on our books, because contractors working in specific grid regions are not a population anyone keeps on a list.
A site level range on the number that decides payback
What came back was a range for connection cost built from the people who quote the work, region by region, rather than from a sector average. It was the one input the payback model could not be tested without, and it now had a site level number behind it.
The investor revised the model and put the capital elsewhere in the sector. The group we sourced stayed relevant, because charging economics questions come back, and the next brief started from people we had already found.
