EV charging sites with more plugs get more use, Kempower finds

A new analysis from charger maker Kempower looked at public EV charging stations across North America and found that the number of plugs at a site matters more than how much raw power it has installed. Sites with more plugs saw much higher use than sites with fewer, even when total power capacity was similar. In the data, eight-plug sites delivered more than twice the energy of four-plug sites.

The reason has to do with how charging power gets shared. Some charging setups link several plugs to one shared power source and shift electricity between cars in real time, based on what each vehicle can actually accept at that moment. If one car's charging slows down, the system can redirect that unused power to another car instead of it going to waste. Sites using this approach saw notably higher use than sites where each plug has a fixed amount of power, whether a car needs it or not.

For homeowners, this isn't about upgrades to your own house, but it does affect the public charging network an EV owner might rely on. Kempower's own paper doesn't say how many sites were studied or over what time period, so the results show a pattern rather than proof. Still, the practical idea is straightforward: more plugs, with power shared smartly between cars, may serve more drivers than fewer plugs with high-speed capability at each one.