EV Revenue, Vendors, and the Uptime Reality

Revenue Models. Most garage charging will not be a profit center, and pretending otherwise produces bad procurement. Price charging to protect the parking revenue it supports (the twenty-eight-dollar transaction, the monthly contract, the tenant lease) and every model below has a place. Price it to become a fuel retailer, and the utilization math of a parking facility will not cooperate.

The workable models sort by what they are for. The amenity model, free or at-cost charging, buys retention: the monthly parker who stays, the office tenant whose lease renews, the hotel guest who books back. Cost-recovery, kWh pricing near the blended utility rate plus idle fees◆ after a grace period, keeps the amenity honest and the stalls turning; the idle fee is not revenue, it is stall management wearing a price tag. The network model, where a third party owns, operates, and revenue-shares, trades most of the upside for none of the capital risk, and is frequently the right answer for owners who took section 7.15's uptime lesson seriously and want the obligation to live with someone built for it.

The arbitrage temptation deserves its own sentence: pricing kWh well above cost because the location can bear it works exactly until the workplace charger, the competing garage, or the corridor DCFC opens, and the customer it loses was a parking customer, not a charging customer. The spread was never the business. The parking was.

WHERE THE EVIDENCE ENDS Break-even utilization is the least settled number in this chapter: it moves with local rates, demand charges, equipment class, and the accounting of the stall itself, and published figures disagree accordingly. What holds across markets is the ranking (retention value generally exceeds energy margin for structured parking) and the design rule that follows: choose the model by what it protects, not by what it projects. The Council will publish utilization benchmarks as operator data accumulates in PCC Research.

Vendors, Platforms, and the Lock-In Problem. Require OCPP◆ 2.0.1 as a floor and an OCPP 2.1 migration path as a condition. A vendor still shipping 1.6-only is telling you who they are. The open protocol is what keeps the hardware yours: chargers that speak OCPP can change network operators; chargers on a proprietary platform change owners instead, because the switching cost is a forklift.

The version numbers carry real freight. OCPP 2.1, published January 2025 and standardized as IEC 63584-210:2025, is where bidirectional power transfer and distributed-energy control live. An owner told to expect a vehicle-to-grid future by a vendor whose equipment cannot articulate a 2.1 migration path is being sold two incompatible stories at once. And insist on the credential, not the adjective: OCPP-certified◆ means tested and listed; "OCPP-compliant" is a brochure word that has preceded some expensive discoveries.

Underwrite the vendor like a counterparty, because that is what a networked charger makes them. The warranty is only as good as the balance sheet behind it; the software subscription is a dependency that outlives the sales engineer; and the exit provisions (who owns the data, what unlocks at termination, whether the hardware can be re-homed) belong in the contract while the owner still has leverage. This industry has already orphaned one generation of hardware behind failed networks. The owners who re-homed their equipment in an afternoon were the ones who had specified open protocol and written the exit clause.

MARGIN NOTE Red flags, in the order they appear: a proposal that leads with hardware before asking for dwell data (7.8); a projection built on the 2023 adoption curve (7.9); a live line item for the 30C credit (7.12); "compliant" where the question was "certified" (7.14, 7.16); and an uptime promise with no measurement definition (7.15). Any one is a conversation; three is an answer.

Uptime and the Maintenance Reality. A charger that is down is worse than no charger. It occupies a stall, generates no revenue, and teaches your customers to distrust the amenity you installed to keep them. Contract for uptime the way you contract for elevator service: as a measured obligation with defined response times, guaranteed parts availability, and remedies that bite.

The contract does the work, so write the definitions before the percentage. Uptime measured at the port◆, not the station or the network; measured continuously, not sampled; with the clock starting at fault detection, not at the service ticket. A "98% uptime" promise with soft definitions rounds to whatever the vendor needs it to; the same number with hard definitions is a service level an owner can enforce. Behind the percentage, the practical machinery: remote monitoring that catches the fault before the customer does, preventive maintenance on the manufacturer's schedule, and a spare-parts commitment. A charger is a computer standing outdoors in the weather, and computers standing outdoors in the weather fail in ordinary, predictable ways.

CASE IN POINT · HARBOR PARK GARAGE, BALTIMORE At Harbor Park Garage in Baltimore's Inner Harbor, a single broken connector clip, a component worth a few dollars, required replacement of the entire charging unit: no field-replaceable part, no repair path, a stall out of service for the duration, and a capital expense for what should have been a service call. The procurement lesson is not that clips break. It is that serviceability is a specification: field-replaceable connectors, published parts lists, and a repair-versus-replace policy in writing, before the first unit ships. (Disclosure: the editor holds an ownership interest in this facility; the case is reported from its operating records.)

The ownership decision follows from the obligation. An owner who will not staff or contract this discipline should not own the equipment; the network model of section 7.13 exists precisely to put uptime with a party built for it. What no owner escapes is the customer's verdict. The driver who found the broken charger does not blame the vendor. They blame the garage, and they remember.