EV Charging Stations DO Benefit Local Businesses
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It has long been theorized that EV charging stations located in a business’s parking lot should help that business to earn more money. It’s not complicated, and on the surface, it just makes sense. If you attract more people to your parking lot, or if they are compelled to stay there longer than the average person while their car is charged, why would you not get more money out of them, get more spending in your shop?
This is something that has been argued by EV drivers and EV charging stations for several years. The good news is we’re now getting more research showing this is the case.
Interestingly, aside from businesses closer to charging stations earning more revenue, a new study found that charging stations located in lower-income areas especially benefited nearby businesses.
The MIT study, focused on California and now published in the journal Nature Communications, found that “opening a charging station boosted annual spending at each nearby business by an average of about $1,500 in 2019 and about $400 between January 2021 and June 2023.” Naturally, those kind of savings could easily cover the costs of installing a station. “These increases are equal to a significant chunk of the cost of installing an EV charger, and I hope this study sheds light on these economic benefits,” said Yunhan Zheng, a postdoc at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and lead author of the study. “The findings could also diversify the income stream for charger providers and site hosts, and lead to more informed business models for EV charging stations.”
Notably, whereas much research on this subject had previously relied on surveys (which is what we at CleanTechnica had conducted and also mostly seen) or were quite small scale, this MIT research team went further. “For their study, the researchers collected data from over 4,000 charging stations in California and 140,000 businesses, relying on anonymized credit and debit card transactions to measure changes in consumer spending. The researchers used data from 2019 through June of 2023, skipping the year 2020 to minimize the impact of the pandemic.” Now that’s data collection! “To judge whether charging stations caused customer spending increases, the researchers compared data from businesses within 500 meters of new charging stations before and after their installation. They also analyzed transactions from similar businesses in the same time frame that weren’t near charging stations.” Well done. There’s not much more you could do for better research on this topic.
The conclusion was that a new charging station boosted spending at a nearby business by 1.4% in 2019 and by 0.8% per year from January 2021 to June 2023. “While that might sound like a small amount per business, it amounts to thousands of dollars in overall consumer spending increases. Specifically, those percentages translate to almost $23,000 in cumulative spending increases in 2019 and about $3,400 per year from 2021 through June 2023,” MIT summarizes.
Again, this matches what we’d always found when surveying EV drivers — and simply living our lives as EV drivers. Charging stations pull you into places you wouldn’t normally go, can also cause you to hang out in that place for longer, and thus easily leads to you spending more money there than you would have otherwise.
All of that said, there is one clear point to not miss: the more EV charging infrastructure is added, the more it’s everywhere, and thus the less it might entice you to a business you wouldn’t normally stop at. “Zheng says the decline in spending increases over the two time periods might be due to a saturation of EV chargers, leading to lower utilization, as well as an overall decrease in spending per business after the Covid-19 pandemic and a reduced number of businesses served by each EV charging station in the second period. Despite this decline, the annual impact of a charging station on all its surrounding businesses would still cover approximately 11.2 percent of the average infrastructure and installation cost of a standard charging station.” Indeed.
In any case, for now especially, the quicker a business installs an EV charger, the more likely it is to outsell and outcompete it competitors. As I discussed with other charging, EV, and hotel experts several years ago at EV conferences we hosted in Europe and Abu Dhabi, it’s a bit like offering WiFi — early on, that was a great way to appeal to people and get more business; and then later, it’s just an expected convenience. And then, even later … it’s expected to be free. Though, I don’t think we’ll be going there with charging, unless ad-based charging stations become more popular and the costs of the station are covered by advertisers.
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