More Chargers ≠ More Impact… on Their Own

One Minute Charge #8

This is a series of quick hits on the overlooked fundamentals of fleet electrification

We often track progress in electrification by counting chargers. 

• How many have been installed. 

• How many are planned. 

• How fast the number is growing. 

  
  

That makes sense. Visibility matters. Knowing chargers are out there can help drive adoption. More chargers do help, especially for awareness and access. 

But charger count doesn’t tell the whole story. Two charging sites can have the same number of chargers and deliver very different outcomes. 

As previously discussed, it’s the energy delivered (kWh) that creates value—by displacing fuel, generating savings, and reducing emissions. 

That means what really matters is not how many chargers are installed. It’s how much work they do. 

A small number of highly utilized chargers can deliver more impact than a much larger network that sits idle most of the time. And because the charging infrastructure is largely a fixed cost, the more it gets used, the energy or kWh being delivered will cost less.  

None of this means charger count doesn’t matter. It does. But if we focus too much on how much we build (and not enough on how much it gets used) we risk optimizing for the wrong thing. 

You don’t create impact by installing chargers. You create impact by using them. 

More One Minute Charge articles can be found at https://www.mitra-ev.com/insights