How Higher Supercharger Site Utilization Increases Your Profits
October 1, 2026
Commercial electricity billing is significantly different from residential billing. To make your Supercharger site more profitable, you’ll need to understand how your utility bill is structured and how utilization, measured by the number of charging sessions per stall per day, affects your average energy cost.
What Makes Up Your Supercharger Utility Bill
Your Supercharger utility bill typically includes: fixed costs, supply costs, delivery charges, demand charges, other costs and taxes.
Fixed costs: Set monthly fees for having the utility meter connected to the grid.
Supply costs: Costs of generating electricity, billed by total energy consumed and measured in kilowatt hours (kWh).1
Delivery charges: Costs of drawing electricity from the power source to your site. Includes poles, wires and transformers.2
Demand charges: Fees based on the maximum power (kW) your site draws during the billing period rather than the total energy (kWh) used.3 Often the most expensive line on a commercial bill.
Other costs: Miscellaneous utility fees, often tied to metering, environmental programs or grid modernization.
Taxes: Government levies applied to utility services.
To estimate your energy bill, combine supply costs and delivery charges. Demand charges should stay separate, since they don't scale with kilowatt hours the way energy costs do.
How Demand Charges Affect Your Energy Costs
Demand charges are based on your site's peak power draw (kW) during a billing period, not your total energy use (kWh). This peak is usually reached when several vehicles charge at the same time. Once it's set, demand charges are fixed for the rest of the billing period. Additional charging sessions within that same peak add to your total energy costs but add little or do not impact your demand charges.
Demand charges are hard to avoid because a single high moment sets the cost for the entire month, and charging load is inherently unpredictable: a single vehicle can draw a large share of a charging cabinet's capacity, and vehicles tend to arrive in clusters rather than staggered.
How Higher Utilization Lowers Your Average Energy Cost
Since demand charges are largely fixed once your peak is set, running more sessions within that same capacity spreads those charges across more energy delivered, a concept known as demand charge dilution.
Illustrative all-in average energy cost versus utilization. The curve is a screening example, not a quote for any specific utility.
Lower utilization leads to higher cost: With only a few sessions a day, demand charges are spread across very little energy, keeping all-in average cost per kWh high and cutting into your profit margins.
Higher utilization leads to lower cost: As daily sessions increase, those same charges are spread across a much larger energy volume, and all-in average cost per kWh falls. For example, moving from one session to five sessions per day could reduce average energy cost by more than half on the illustrative curve.
Order your Supercharger or contact our Supercharger for Business Team if you need help estimating a realistic utilization range for your location.
References
1 U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electricity explained: Factors affecting electricity prices, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/prices-and-factors-affecting-prices.php
2 State of Massachusetts, Understanding your electric bill, https://www.mass.gov/info-details/understanding-your-electric-bill
3 U.S. Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Identifying Potential Markets for Behind-the-Meter Battery Energy Storage: A Survey of U.S. Demand Charges, https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1374803