I have seen a lot of people complaining about the price of Ultra Rapid chargers and Superchargers. Here is a bit of an explainer.

TLDR: Disregarding setup, maintenance and backend services costs, EV charging companies are paying somewhere in the vicinity of 0.8885c / kWh....

How did I calculate that.
The problem is not just a high setup cost for Ultra Rapid chargers (which is high BTW, since they need to pay for all the electricity infrastructure to be installed, and then the electricity distributer "OWNS" that equipment)...

But, lets just ignore that, and look at raw electricity use.
Companies like EVIE, Chargefox and Tesla need to pay a "Demand Tariff", which is very different to flat rate and time of use tariffs you pay at home....

A "Demand Tariff" is a rate that is charged for each kW of electricity consumed, but it is calculated on the maximum "instantaneous" demand on the network at any point in time over the previous 12 months.
i.e. (Max Demand in kW) x (Demand Tariff) = (Price per kW)...

Now, since a company like EVIE uses a low voltage supply (415V), so they pay the LV Demand Tariff.
Lets look at Sydney, Endeavour Energy supplies electricity to the Sydney basin, and according to their 2019-2020 pricing (Page 38).
https://www.endeavourenergy.com.au/.../NUOS+Price+List ...

EVIE would have to pay the following charges during High Season Peak (Nov - Mar)
• Daily charge of $20.54 per day
• Per kWh charge of 3.9541c / kWh
• Per month demand tariff charge of $10.0345 / maximum kW per month...

So based on those rates, and assuming that at one point in time during that month both Ultra Rapid chargers are pushing out 350kW (i.e. 700kW total), and lets assume that a site has 5 cars charge a day with each car consuming 60kW of electricity....

• Total electricity usage for 30 days: 5 cars x 60kWh x 30 days = 9000kWh
• Daily charge for 30 days: 30 days x $20.54 = $616.20
• Demand Tariff: $10.0345 x 700 kW = $7024.15
• Electricity Use: $0.039541 x 9000 kWh = $355.869
....

• Total Cost for 1 Month: $616.20 + $7024.15 + $355.87 = $7996.22
Now lets divide that by the number of kWh consumed in that month (9000kW) to find the price per kW they are being charged
• $7996.22 ÷ 9000 kW = 0.8885c / kWh
....

So there you have it, they are being charged 89c/kWh, and charging you 60c/kWh. And we have not even considered the setup and maintenance costs, costs of running the back end services (servers, website, app, payment methods). So the cost per kWh is likely closer to double....

They are not making bank, they are all loosing money providing a service to a very small customer base. Until the usage numbers increase significantly, or the government changes the way EV charging companies are being charged, these companies are going to be loosing...

... money on every kWh delivered.
So before you go on a big song and dance about it costing too much, consider what it actually costs to deliver that kWh to you. Be grateful that you can charge at home 99% of the time a lot cheaper than ICE cars...

And for those longer trips, accept that until we have a change in government policy, or until EV uptake reaches a critical point, these companies are loose a lot of money to provide this service to us....

This is also likely the reason that we do not have V3 Superchargers in Australia, it would be prohibitively expensive for @Tesla to run them.

@sydney_ev @TeslaGong @TeslaStraya @_TeslaTom @EvieNetworks @Chargefox @PhantomLaneFour