But, but, but, we’ve been told that plug-in electric vehicles are the wave of the future! From The Wall Street Journal:

Investors Sour on EV Charging Companies

EV charging companies have fallen from lofty valuations as concerns mount about their profitability

by Jennifer Hiller | Boxing Day, December 26, 2023 | 7:00 AM EST

The companies that install and operate electric-vehicle charging networks are in the middle of a building boom, but their share prices are sputtering.

ChargePoint Holdings CHPT: (%) shares have tumbled 74% this year, and the company missed initial revenue projections for the third quarter. Blink Charging BLNK: (%) shares have dropped 67%, while EVgo EVGO: (%) is down 21%, and both project annual losses.

The charging providers don’t expect to turn profitable for about a year and face the prospect of EV market leader Tesla TSLA: (%) opening much of its popular charging network to other drivers starting in 2024. The blistering pace of U.S. sales growth for EVs has moderated. Some charging executives say they are running into challenges that include customer unease about the direction of the economy, higher costs and delayed deliveries of EVs to fleet customers.

Companies say that with more EVs hitting the road, their chargers are in use more steadily—an important metric for the burgeoning industry. However, selling jolts of electricity to drivers still isn’t a moneymaker because of relatively low use rates.

“I think the investor class has grown weary of the industry’s lack of profitability,” said Blink Charging’s chief executive, Brendan Jones, who added that charging stocks had previously frothy valuations.

There’s more at the original.

As we have previous reported, the Biden Administration is bribing is awarding $7.5 billion in federal grants for building new public electric vehicle charging stations.

The problem is simple economics: people are not going to want to buy plug-in electric vehicles if they don’t have a good and reliable way to charge them, but if not enough people are using them, then it doesn’t make economic sense to spend your own money to build them. The Journal article mentioned that part, but I’d add another point: the vast majority, roughly 80%, of the people who have already bought EVs charge their vehicles at home. If the market for EVs remains that heavily concentrated among homeowners who have the capability to charge from home, adding new commercial charging stations doesn’t look terribly profitable.

The Journal included a photo that I am reproducing under Fair Use rules, because it illustrates something I’ve said before. I have seen, at the Wawa at the junction of Interstate 78 and Pennsylvania Route 61, six very new looking Tesla charging stations, none of which were in use, while what looked like twelve gasoline pump alleys were full, with other cars lined up to refuel when the vehicles ahead of them in line pulled out. The Journal photo shows twelve Tesla chargers, with only one in use.

The particular station I’ve mentioned is along busy I-78, and is roughly halfway between Allentown and the state capital of Harrisburg, but the specific area isn’t in a city of any size, making it easy in, easy out.

Plus, it’s at a Wawa, which means great coffee! 🙂 And you’ll need that great coffee if your car’s battery is down too much, and you have to spend an hour recharging.

Think more about that photo. Twelve stations there, and six at the Wawa I’ve described, all for a recharging session that can last an hour.  If we’re generous, and assume that most customers only stop to top off when they still have a lot of range left, and the average recharging time is only 30 minutes, that twelve-charger station in the picture is still planning on seeing only 24 customers an hour. When you look at the big fueling stations along the freeways, you’re looking at stations which are geared for 24 customers every ten minutes.

If that particular station isn’t seeing that much use of the Tesla chargers — and, admittedly, my observation was in one and only one stop — I have to ask: what is the actual market for commercial charging stations? Investors, at least, don’t see it as a particularly great market!

President Biden aims to have 500,000 public chargers in the ground by 2030. Consulting firm McKinsey estimates that around 1.5 million public chargers would be needed by then if half of car sales are electric.

The U.S. has around 159,000 public charging ports now at 60,000 locations, according to government data.

Out of 21,676 Direct Current Fast Charging ports, 12,580, or 58.04%, are Tesla’s, and the Tesla chargers are currently Tesla-specific. These numbers are different from the 159,000 “public charging ports” listed by the Journal because it includes only the fast chargers which can recharge your vehicle in under an hour. ChargePoint Network has 47,114 Level 2 chargers, 51.5% of the total, but these are 220-volt stations, and take hours and hours to fully recharge your EV. This is important because non-Tesla EVs cannot just pull up to a Tesla supercharger and use it. You need to apply for and receive a monthly fee “Supercharging Membership (which) allows non-Tesla vehicles to Supercharge at the same price as Tesla vehicle owners,” or pay a higher price, if you have the right equipment:

Tesla’s U.S. Superchargers use a proprietary charging plug. To enable non-Tesla EVs to use its chargers, the company has developed an adapter called the “Magic Dock,” which incorporates the popular Combined Charging System (CCS) charging standard into the existing Tesla plug. It will work with nearly all EVs but the Nissan Leaf, which uses a different plug standard.

The economics are interesting. In a business the government is not just pushing, but will eventually try to require, and with (possible) government grants to reduce construction costs, investors are still not seeing enough potential return to want to put their money into it. Any individual investor can be wrong, and some are as dumb as a box of rocks, but when you see trends like this, trends which cover thousands and thousands of investors, you are seeing, in the aggregate, some very smart and market savvy people at work. The market is telling you something, and that something is that the electric car future isn’t what President Biden and the activists believe it is.