More plugs beat more power, a Finnish charger maker says

A white paper from the Finnish charger maker Kempower argues that adding connectors raises site utilisation far more than adding power, with eight-plug sites reaching almost 10% against 2% for two-plug sites. Every AFIR target is expressed in kilowatts or kilometres rather than in numbers of connectors.

A Finnish charger maker has published a white paper arguing that charging networks make more money by adding plugs than by adding power. Kempower’s data comes from its own analytics platform and from North American sites, InsideEVs reported.

The claim is that the number of connectors at a site correlates with utilisation more strongly than total installed power. “Installed power barely moves the needle,” the company said.

The figures behind it are modest in both directions. Utilisation rises from roughly 3% at 100kW sites to a little over 5% at 400kW sites.

Connector count moves it further. Going from two plugs to eight takes utilisation from about 2% to almost 10%, and eight-plug sites delivered 128,342 kWh on average against 61,453 kWh at four-plug sites.

Kempower puts the ideal output at around 100kW. A car advertising a 300kW peak often averages 100kW to 150kW across a 10 to 80% session, so the headline number is rarely the number that matters.

The interest should be declared. Kempower builds distributed-power chargers with dynamic power management, so a paper concluding that connector count beats peak power is describing its own architecture.

That does not make the data wrong. It makes it a vendor argument, and TNW has written about how hard the underlying charging conundrum is to solve in Europe.

The European complication is that the law counts the other thing.

AFIR requires member states to provide at least 1.3kW of public charging capacity for every registered battery-electric car, and 0.8kW for every plug-in hybrid.

Along the trans-European transport core network it requires a fast-charging pool every 60km in each direction, with individual points of at least 150kW for cars and vans.

Heavy vehicles need 350kW. Kempower’s own compliance guide lists all of it in kilowatts and kilometres, because that is how the regulation is written.

None of those targets is expressed as a number of connectors. An operator can meet the fleet ratio with fewer and larger chargers, which is the configuration this white paper says sits idle.

Europe also has a distribution problem, with 70% of stations concentrated in three countries. If Kempower is right, the rule book is measuring the input that converts least well into use.