Listen, I mentioned what we have actually DONE and are providing right now. You seem to know far better than myself, without anything but your keyboard. That makes me not particularly impressed. Let's see... 2500 paid recharge events at a hotel already, and you have how many?
Honestly, you are telling ME how much it costs and what impact a transformer has? Really dude? Seriously?
End of "debate"... you keep telling yourself all that over and over.
Dear kind and polite Sir,
I appreciate your effort of "winning an argument" by yelling.
I admire the fact that you have amassed 2500 paid recharge events.
I am certain that makes you the biggest and baddest of them all.
But for the point at hand, my statement that a DC charger makes less sense than half a dozen L2 chargers to a HOTEL, i.e., a place where people predominantly spend the night and not come by for a couple of hours during the day... sorry, Sir, you have provided no data at all to contribute to that conversation. The fact that your facility which will soon open as a hotel (!) and that is in a major metropolitan area, at the intersection of three freeways, right next to a shopping mall / restaurants / movie theater and close to a university campus has been able to attract 2500 paid charges gives me hope that with heavy subsidies (like in your case, based on the data on PlugShare, through Nissan's commercial CHAdeMO program where Nissan pays a good chunk of the cost of the actual charger) a CHAdeMO station at an extremely attractive location (three freeways, lots of restaurants, a movie theater - places where it's easy to spend an hour or two while your car charges) can make sense.
Which, Oh By The Way, has been my point all along.
But this provides no new information to the question of having a DC charger at an actual hotel that does not happen to be a major generator of short term visitors who come for an hour or two and leave again.
It also does not answer the question if this has a positive ROI. The plugshare page doesn't list the cost and you are not listed on the ChargePoint page, so I am speculating here while you have the hard data... let's assume $5-8 per charge (that's what Blink and some others seem to charge), then your gross revenue so far is about $6-15k (the network providers tend to pass through less than 50% of the money they get - if you actually have a credit card machine there or if your prices are higher, the revenue might be somewhat higher as well, but sadly, that data you didn't provide. Let's also assume that given that Leafs have only a 24kWh battery your average charge was only 16kWh (those numbers would be quite different with Teslas), so that adds about 40MWh or around a buck a charge for a commercial installation. Then add maintenance, opportunity cost for the space... OK, that's impossible for me to know.
So based on my completely made up numbers (feel free to refute any of them and replace them with hard data from your station), your income after running cost per DC charging session is somewhere between $1 and $4 (that last number feels quite optimistic, but let's say you charge $8 a charge, mostly have people using credit cards (and can piggy back on a bigger CC contract and avoid the massive small business fees) and have little alternative paid use for the space which makes sense in a place that is intended to become a hotel). An unsubsidized DC charger is still (according to PluginAmerica) going to cost you $15k plus installation. The two local non-Nissan CHAdeMO stations where I talked to management said that their total cost for charger plus installation cost was north of $20k.
So even for a highly desirable location with lots of traffic from people coming by for an hour or two... it still is not an obvious winner. But as we discussed earlier in this thread - if you can generate 6-8 charge events a day then yes, over time this may pencil out or at least break even, assuming the maintenance cost doesn't kill you (some of the early DC chargers broke quite frequently - and not only the Blink ones - the local Nissan dealer where we got our Leaf tells me that in the beginning theirs worked less than half of the time).
I understand that you are proud of what you have done. I understand that you would like to tell the world about all the wonderful news. I even understand a little that you then don't want to provide details (especially since they would seriously weaken the point), but please try to be civil about it. And please try to stay reasonably close to the facts. "at a hotel" for a place that will open as a hotel "soon"?
tl;dr: a DC charger at a hotel, predominantly intended to be used by overnight guests makes less sense than the cheaper installation of half a dozen L2 chargers.
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We offer free charging.[...]
In 6 months, with 14k drivers passing the facility daily, it has been used a few dozen times last I checked, all by Nissan users, and most from the same user. Economically, we could not charge enough (even with much heavier utilization) to make the unit provide net gains.
Wow. "a few dozen" in 180 days, so maybe one or two a week. And this is
free
It is worth contemplating for superchargers at hotels, malls, workplaces, etc, is that they are a very 'peaky' load. For us, peak demand comes from the 15 minute period of highest draw during a month during on-peak, shoulder peak, and off-peak times. Peak demand charges for us comprised (in pre-solar days) roughly half of the electric bill. Our supercharger has pushed our peak demand charges higher, even when we have produced more electricity then we have consumed. Having a handful of peaky superchargers may be suboptimal for hotels, esp when they may be used during on-peak time (noon to 6pm, and 6-8pm in summer here).
I hadn't even considered the peak aspect of this - so my estimates for cost per charge in the above might actually be low...
