With the transition to electric vehicles, utilities are becoming the new “gasoline wholesalers” as they provide critical fuel for transportation. Understanding their complex energy rate structures could make or break your EV charging business. Demand charges, in particular, can be toxic to your bottom line.
There’s an ongoing industry-wide debate about how utilities should handle demand charges. Fully disbanding demand charges would cost utilities something like $2.9 billion per year in opportunity cost, not to mention their initial $90 billion or so capex outlay to support getting power to the charging stations in the first place.
