Why Increasing Plug Count Boosts Public EV Charging Site Utilization More Than Power Capacity
Kempower's charging management software, ChargEye, shows that plug count drives utilization at public fast-charge sites roughly three times harder than installed megawatt capacity, according to a newly released white paper covering North American deployments.
Darren Prentiss·updated August 31, 2026
The data reframes the planning problem for site operators: queue throughput, not peak charge rate, is the binding constraint.
The numbers
ChargEye data indicates the number of charging points at a site increases utilization at a rate about three times greater than scaling total installed power. Sites running Kempower's distributed architecture — where available power is dynamically allocated between dispensers based on real-time vehicle demand — posted 83% higher average utilization than sites using fixed-power dispensers.
"Public charging is increasingly becoming an infrastructure utilization challenge, not simply a power deployment challenge," said Jed Routh, Kempower's Vice President of Markets & Products for North America.
Where utilization meets unit economics
The data lands while at least one site is being decommissioned. A four-stall Tesla Supercharger location in Gorham, New Hampshire — the only Supercharger north of the White Mountains — is scheduled to shut down on October 25, after the leaf-peeping traffic cycle. Site owner Terry MacGillivray reports net revenue near $15,900 through mid-August against an electricity bill exceeding $32,500, billed at roughly $0.69 per kWh. A single July invoice from Eversource totaled $13,211.73, of which $10,679.64 was delivery charges — poles, wires, and substations, not kilowatt-hours.
The site handled over 1,200 charging sessions since opening in May, with nearly half of those vehicles running non-Tesla connectors. Total build cost: $407,000 under Tesla's Supercharger for Business program.
What to watch
Two engineering takeaways. First, headroom beats headline power. A site with eight 150 kW dispensers on shared dynamic power can outperform four 350 kW stalls at fixed output, because more vehicles clear the queue per hour. Second, the unit economics fail when delivery and demand charges dominate the bill. Gorham is a clean field example: a 69-cent all-in rate is not a charging problem, it is a grid tariff problem.
For fleet operators and site hosts, the practical filter is stall count per site, not peak kW per dispenser. For individual buyers planning long-distance routes, the practical filter is whether the site you intend to use has spare plugs at the time of arrival — a metric that ChargEye-style telemetry is starting to make visible, even if the public app layer has not caught up.