Matthias SpeicherIn short
The comparison with the petrol station fails not only from the user’s side, it doesn’t hold economically either. A petrol station doesn’t make its money on fuel, but on the shop and food service, often more than sixty percent of the contribution margin. It serves a thousand customers a day, a fast-charging point ten to twenty. The charging park has no side business and no group cross-subsidy. Run a charging park like a petrol station and you calculate yourself poor.
The first part was about why charging shouldn’t be like refuelling from the user’s side. This is about the other side of the same confusion, the economic one. Because the petrol station isn’t just a misleading picture for the user experience. It’s also a misleading model for the business.
What a petrol station actually earns from
The common idea is that a petrol station lives off fuel. That’s not true. Margins in the fuel business are thin, often only a few cents a litre, and they swing with the purchase price. The real earnings come from somewhere else.
A petrol station makes its money on the shop and food service. Coffee, snacks, drinks, cigarettes, the quick purchase. In many cases well over half the contribution margin comes from this side business, not from the fuel. The fuel is the occasion that brings people to the place. The money is made on what they buy on top.
That’s a business with two legs, where one, the fuel, generates the traffic and the other, the shop, the profit. And it works because the frequency is high.
The calculation that doesn’t add up
This is exactly where the comparison breaks. A petrol station at a good location serves well over a thousand customers a day. Refuelling takes a few minutes, throughput is enormous, and the side business feeds off that mass.
A fast-charging point realistically serves ten to twenty sessions a day. A charging session takes not minutes but considerably longer. Even a well-used charging park comes nowhere near the customer frequency of a petrol station. So the mass that a viable side business would feed on simply isn’t there.
And the charging park usually doesn’t have that side business anyway. It’s mostly exactly that, a charging park. No shop, no food service, no second leg. The only source of income is the electricity sold. The business model that carries the petrol station doesn’t exist here.
No shop, no cross-subsidy
On top of that comes a structural difference that’s easy to overlook. Large petrol station brands are often part of integrated oil groups. The value chain runs from extraction through the refinery to the pump. A weak link can be carried by a strong one elsewhere in the chain. There’s group cross-subsidy.
The pure charging park operator doesn’t have that. They sit at the end of the chain, buy the electricity and sell it on. No upstream business that helps carry, no shop that offsets the thin energy margin. What isn’t earned at the single site isn’t caught anywhere else.
So comparing the charging park with the petrol station means comparing a single-product business with thin frequency against a two-leg business with high frequency and group backing. That’s not a comparison, it’s a category error.
Why that doesn’t mean the charging park can only do electricity
You could read this finding pessimistically, no shop, no cross-subsidy, so all that’s left is the thin margin on the kilowatt-hour. That’s the wrong conclusion. The charging park can absolutely sell more than electricity. Just completely differently from the petrol station, and precisely when it has no concession and no room for a shop.
Here lies the real strength of electricity. Electricity isn’t simply the electric replacement for petrol. Unlike diesel or petrol, it’s more than fuel for cars. It’s a tradeable, controllable, storable good that can move in both directions and whose value changes across the day. A charging park therefore doesn’t sit on a fuel store, but on an energy node. You can build on that, with grid services, with buffer storage, with flexible control, with local generation. Those are revenue layers a petrol station never structurally had.
The second layer lies in the difference between charging and refuelling itself. Because charging is mostly a passive activity that runs alongside something else, value comes not from speed but from the time the customer already has. And where charging turns active again, at flash charging, value comes from reliability. From the guarantee of a free slot, from reservation, from priority. Both are chargeable services that have nothing to do with a shop.
This is exactly what can be learned from the truck sector, which thinks in several revenue layers from the start, because a pure volume business on electricity would never have added up there. What such multi-layer revenue models look like for a charging park in concrete terms is a topic for its own article. For here the principle is enough: the charging park isn’t a petrol station, but that’s no disadvantage. It just forces it to earn its money differently than the petrol station ever could.
What follows from this
The consequence is uncomfortable but clear. The charging park can’t rely on a side business that doesn’t exist. It has to carry itself from the core business, and that first means it hangs on utilisation. But the core business is more than the kilowatt-hour sold, once you grasp electricity for what it is.
That closes the loop back to the actual market logic. A charging park doesn’t add up on the margin per kilowatt-hour alone, and not on an imagined shop business, but on throughput and on the revenue layers built on the energy node. On the number of sessions that happen daily, on whether enough drivers return, and on the value the electricity creates beyond charging. That’s the calculation that counts.
The charging park isn’t a petrol station. It only looks like one from the outside.