This is the first post in a two-part series on EV charging economics. Here I stay close to the ground, focusing on how charging actually behaves as a real-estate asset, why utilization matters more than hardware counts, and what that looks like week-to-week for me. A follow-up essay zooms out to the capital-markets view, going into my theory on who ends up owning the economics of all this infrastructure.

Over the last few years, EV charging has been framed as a straightforward scaling problem. More electric vehicles require more chargers; therefore the job of governments, utilities, and startups is to pour concrete, pull wire, and install as many ports as possible. From the vantage point of a driver, the system already feels contradictory. In some places, there are no chargers at all. In others, there are shiny new chargers that sit empty. Elsewhere, chargers exist but are constantly full, broken, or ICE'd. The felt reality oscillates between scarcity and mismanagement. Either nothing is available, or what is available doesn't work the way it needs to.

From the vantage point of property owners and capital providers, another reality emerges. Chargers are no longer abstract symbols of "infrastructure;" they are line items in an underwriting model. They sit somewhere between a gym and a boiler as an amenity that may or may not move rent, occupancy, or NOI, and an electrical asset that may or may not generate enough revenue to justify its cost.

This essay is an attempt to spell out a thesis that has been forming while I work at BreatheEV: EV charging is not primarily a hardware problem or even an energy problem. It is a utilization problem embedded in real estate, governed by incentive structures that often push capital into the wrong places, on the wrong terms, with the wrong operating model.

Charging as a Real-Estate Asset

Almost every non-highway charger is physically attached to a specific property with a specific owner, capital stack, and tenant base. That property operator has a mental model that has very little to do with kilowatts or connector types. Their questions sound more like:

• Will this investment make the building easier to lease or sell?
• Will it raise rents, reduce vacancy, improve retention/foot traffic?
• Will it consume management time and create new sources of tenant complaints?

In that sense, chargers behave like other real-estate-linked amenities. They sit alongside pools, package lockers, co-working rooms, and gyms. They are not national infrastructure in the mind of the owner; they are local choices that must compete with other uses of capital and attention.

At the same time, they are not purely amenities. A charger can also generate direct revenue. That pushes it toward the category of "operating asset" rather than "pure cost center," especially when external capital is involved. Infrastructure funds, utilities, or even electricians willing to finance installations begin to treat chargers less as a nice-to-have feature and more as a small but growing asset class.

The tension in the system is that these two perspectives, amenity and asset, often coexist in the same project. The property owner is primarily interested in tenant experience and NOI; the capital provider is primarily interested in utilization and long-term cash flows; the network is primarily interested in throughput and growth; the driver simply wants a working, predictable experience. Aligning these perspectives, or at least preventing them from pulling directly against each other, is what determines whether EV charging feels abundant or broken.

Overbuilding Hardware versus Coordinating Usage

A simple thought experiment helps clarify the problem.

Imagine a 200-unit apartment building with a growing number of EV drivers. You are deciding how to deploy a given amount of capital toward Level 2 chargers in the garage.

One option is to overbuild hardware. You install ten chargers, scatter them through the lot, and adopt a first-come, first-served model. Tenants are told that chargers are available and that they can plug in whenever they like. You are betting that sheer quantity will smooth out behavioral noise.

The second option is to right-size hardware and introduce coordination. You install three or four chargers instead of ten, but you require tenants to reserve specific time windows.

On a whiteboard, the first option looks generous. More physical chargers mean more concurrent plugs and less visible scarcity. But the economics that matter are not based on installed ports; they are based on effective utilization and who is exposed to its variance.

In the first configuration, cars are likely to occupy charging spots for far longer than they actually need to. Drivers plug in when they get home from work and leave the car until morning, even if charging only takes two or three hours. Others will avoid the system entirely after a few frustrating experiences. Aggregated across the building, each port's actual charging time per day may be surprisingly low, even though chargers are frequently occupied.

In the second configuration, the number of physical plugs is lower, but each hour of hardware time is more densely packed with useful charging. Tenants book two- or three-hour windows, know when they are expected to move their cars, and can see availability in advance. Even if human behavior is imperfect, the average number of useful charging hours per port per day is much higher.

From a capital perspective, these are very different assets. Ten unmanaged chargers require more capex, more potential maintenance, and more parking friction, yet they may underperform dramatically on a kWh-per-dollar basis. Three or four disciplined chargers may generate similar or even greater total utilization, with less capital at risk and a clearer operating model.

This is the core intuition behind BreatheEV's focus on reservations. The point is not merely to offer a more convenient user experience. It is to convert scarce hardware and electrical capacity into a schedulable resource. Once you view chargers as real-estate-linked assets whose value depends on utilization, it becomes possible to talk about incentives more precisely.

Consider a stylized commercial project financed with external capital. The property owner contributes little or no capex, provides the physical site and tenant access, and receives a modest share of revenue, a fixed ground lease, or an amenity they can market to residents. A capital provider funds most of the installation and expects to earn back their investment over time through session revenue. A network like BreatheEV provides software, reservations, and operational management in exchange for a platform fee or revenue share.

In that structure, the property owner is effectively long tenant satisfaction and property value, but only weakly exposed to utilization downside. If tenants use the chargers heavily, that can marginally support rents and retention and may even produce a small revenue stream. If they do not, the owner has still added a line item to their amenities list and invested relatively little.

The capital provider, by contrast, is directly long utilization. They are underwriting an uncertain stream of future sessions at a particular price, under a particular regulatory regime, in a particular building with a particular tenant mix. If utilization is low or policy changes, they may never hit their target IRR.

The network sits somewhere between them. It is long throughput and long the durability of relationships with both property owners and drivers. If utilization is robust, it earns more per-session fees and has a stronger story for future growth. If utilization is weak, it can still earn some baseline revenue per site, but churn risk rises^* and the platform's reputation may be harmed.

*OCPP (Open Charge Point Protocol) is an open communication standard that allows EV chargers to "talk to" any compatible network management system, regardless of who manufactured the hardware. For network providers, OCPP compliance is a double-edged sword: it makes initial sales easier (property owners aren't locked into one ecosystem), but it dramatically increases churn risk because a site host can swap to a competing network without ripping out and replacing their physical chargers.

Drivers occupy a different axis altogether. They do not care who owns the charger; they care whether it works when they arrive, and how seamless the overall experience is.

The effective design question is: can we structure deployments such that the parties best positioned to influence utilization also have meaningful skin in the game?

The Coordination Layer in Practice

In abstract, this sounds like another incentive alignment problem. In practice, it becomes a series of very specific workflows. For context, my role sits squarely in that operational middle.

On the front end, a large portion of my time is spent on site selection and early underwriting. I regularly pull down sets of properties that share certain traits: unit counts within a particular band, rent levels suggesting a meaningful penetration of early EV adopters, certain headliner retailers, parking configurations that can accommodate charging without heroic construction, ownership structures that would allow success at one property to be replicated across a portfolio.

From there, each candidate site is translated into a rough demand model. How many existing EVs might be in the lot today? How quickly is that likely to grow over the next five to seven years? What is the split between residents who can charge at work versus those who can only charge at home? How many hours per day is it realistic to expect a single port to operate under a reservation regime? What incentives are available in the jurisdiction?

These are not perfect forecasts, but they are a disciplined alternative to "tenants like EVs, so let's put in some chargers." They determine whether we present a property to a capital partner as a ready candidate or quietly drop it from the pipeline.

Once a site clears that bar, the work becomes relational and contractual. Ownership groups, capital providers, and BreatheEV all have different starting points about what "fair" looks like. A property may balk at long terms or revenue shares that encumber future sale. A capital provider may demand minimums or protections that assume a certain adoption curve. We are continually trying to carve out structures where no one is implicitly writing a free option for someone else.

Underneath all of that, the reservation system is treated not as an add-on feature but as a core risk management tool. Because we can see booking patterns in detail, we can quickly tell whether a site is tracking to its expected utilization curve or diverging. That, in turn, informs whether we propose hardware expansions, adjust pricing and time-window policies, or accept that a given site will remain a modest performer and calibrate future project selection accordingly.

Correlation, and What Happens When the World Changes

Policy is the most obvious. Incentive programs that make a project attractive at one moment can be revised, capped, or canceled in response to budget constraints or political change.

Behavioral regimes exist as well. Early adopters of EVs are often willing to tolerate friction. They plan around limited infrastructure and accept that the system is still maturing. As adoption moves into the next generation, expectations harden. Drivers are less willing to drive across town, wait for an open stall, or wrestle with inconsistent apps.

Macroeconomic regimes matter too. Slower rent growth, higher interest rates, or stress in the broader real estate market can make property owners more conservative. Projects that could be justified as part of a "premium amenity strategy" in good times may be deferred if they threaten short-term cash flow.

Why Treat This as a Utilization Trade at All?

It is fair to ask why any of this framing matters. One could argue that as EV adoption rises, these issues will resolve naturally. More drivers will demand charging. More owners will respond. The system will scale.

I do not think that is guaranteed. Infrastructure history is full of examples where misaligned incentives produced distorted build-outs. The fact that EV charging has a climate lens and a feel-good narrative does not exempt it from those dynamics.

Treating EV charging as a utilization trade forces certain disciplines. It forces you to care less about raw charger counts and more about kWh delivered per dollar of equipment and construction. It forces you to build tools and contracts that can manage behavior, not just hardware.

The built environment is already a massive exercise in coordination between people, capital, and engineering. EV charging adds another layer on top of that stack. I do not pretend that this essay is a complete model of the space. There are DC fast-charging networks with different dynamics, fleet charging with its own patterns, utility-owned infrastructure with different constraints. But the underlying wager is the same: that utilization, not installation, is what makes infrastructure real. I spend my weeks trying to get that wager right.

It is slow, unglamorous work. But so is most of what holds the built world together.

Taken on its own, this is a very local story: specific buildings, specific tenants, specific capital stacks, and a lot of unglamorous work to squeeze more useful hours out of a few metal boxes. In the companion post, I flip the vantage point, asking who actually captures the long-term economics of all this, why software struggles to capture value on its own, and why I believe the center of gravity is drifting toward vertically integrated owners of real estate and customer relationships.