So good morning again, everyone, and welcome for our next fireside chat this morning. We're very pleased to have EVgo speaking for the company is Badar Khan, who is the recently named CEO. EVgo, as many of you know, is the leading fast charging EV charging company in North America. Badar, excuse me, has joined, has been on the board since 2002, but became CEO back in November. Prior to EVgo, he was a senior advisor with Global Infrastructure Partners, and before that, president of National Grid. EVgo, as I mentioned, is the leading owner and operator of public fast charging solutions, a critical piece of EV infrastructure which will enable faster, we think, EV adoption in the U.S., particularly as we expect adoption to resume a better growth trajectory as we go into 2025 and 2026.
The company has over 1,000 fast charging locations across more than 35 states and has recently reached the 1 million customer mark. Congratulations on that, Badar. Thanks again for joining us today.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
And for those of you who may not know, I'm joined up here by my colleague, Chris McNally, who runs our mobility business. And I'm sure he'll have his own questions on EVs and adoption and how that's unfolding. But I think, Badar, to start, I'd love to get your perspective. You've been in the role since November. You've had some time to reflect, I think, in the CEO seat. You know, maybe, and you were on the board before, so maybe there weren't surprises, but has anything surprised you as you've stepped in on a full-time day-to-day? And what are the key priorities that you're focused on?
Yeah, so thanks again. Pleasure to be here. So I joined the board of EVgo about two years ago. I was lead independent director, but I took over in November last year. I think when I joined the board, I was curious about EVgo's business model. And maybe there are people that are unfamiliar with it. You know, why DC fast versus L2, why own and operate versus hardware or software or sell equipment? I would say that since taking over, I have been very pleasantly impressed with the returns of the business model that we have, own and operate DC fast focus. And I'm sure we'll talk about that over the course of this chat. Secondly, you know, people talk about headwinds. I see just a ton of tailwinds in this space. There are 70 electric vehicle models in the United States at the end of last year.
From what I can tell from J.D. Power, there's about over 35 more affordable vehicles being rolled out over the next year and a half. That's in the $25,000-$35,000 range. That is a phenomenally good thing for vehicle adoption. It's a great thing for our business because more affordable vehicles are more likely bought by people who are less affluent, who are more likely not to have a private driveway and therefore rely on public charging. I see charge rates rising. So this is the speed with which vehicles take energy. Those are rising. That's great for EV adoption if you can charge your vehicle faster. It's great for our business because you're less reliant on charging at home, more comfortable charging in public if you can charge it faster. Much longer-term autonomy, maybe autonomous vehicles aren't a today thing, but they're going to be here.
Autonomous vehicles is a great tailwind for our business in the longer term because these are going to be electric. These are going to be very highly utilized, very high miles driven, and charged at, I think, most likely DC fast than in other locations. So I see a ton of really good tailwinds.
Right. Before we get into the business, I want to just ask about the CFO search process. Obviously, Olga has moved on to continue with world domination. Where are we in the process? How soon do you think you may have a permanent person in the role?
Look, the process is going great. There's a ton of talent in the market. And I would say we've had more interest than I was expecting, a lot of interest, because I think it's a very exciting space. We've had even more than I was actually expecting. And so I'm looking forward to making that announcement as soon as I can.
Okay, got it. So maybe turning to the business, you continue to set network throughput quarterly records. What's driving the throughput, especially in the context of what I kind of believe is more of a media narrative about EVs? Because EV growth is still happening, but the media narrative has been the growth is the adoption rate has been slowing.
Yeah, so network throughput. So we own and operate our stations. We're not selling equipment. We're not a hardware company. We're not a software company. We own and operate DC fast. Our revenue model is selling energy. So that's a kilowatt hour times kilowatt hours. Kilowatt hours or throughput has trebled year-over-year. It practically trebled the year before that. This is not slow growth. Utilization on our network in Q1 was 19%. That's up from 6% two years ago. And so the business is doing great. A really important measure that we think about that might relate to some folks is the concept of same-store sales. So kilowatt hours per stall, that's a hugely important driver of unit economics, which again, I'm sure we'll talk about. Kilowatt hours per stall has gone up fourfold from Q1 of this year to two years prior to that.
We haven't finished. We haven't obviously closed the quarter yet. We still got a few weeks to go. But I can tell you that kilowatt hours per stall in the month of May is up 15% from where it was in Q1. That's important because kilowatt hours per stall was flat Q4 to Q1, in which we were saying was about seasonality, which it was. We're really pleased to see that. Why is it happening? People are buying electric vehicles. They're maybe not buying as many Teslas as they were in the past, but non-Tesla sales, from what I can see, were up 30% in Q1 versus Q1 the year before. So the business is really doing great.
How do you think, or what's driving your ability to grow your revenue faster than that EV adoption rate?
So, just to your question, throughput, which is obviously the most important driver for revenue, throughput growth grew four times faster than the growth in VIO year-over-year. Why is that happening? It's happening because vehicles are becoming more affordable. That's attracting people who don't have private driveways. These vehicles, the vehicles in VIO today, vehicles in operation today, are increasingly charging at public charging locations versus people, more expensive vehicles who are charged at home. We're seeing rideshare. Rideshare is up from 11% two and a half years ago to about 25% of our kilowatt hours. And that's not going anywhere down. That's just going up. That's another phenomenal tailwind. That's going really well. Charge rates, as I said before, charge rates are getting faster. So it's more kilowatt hours per minute. That's encouraging EV adoption.
Vehicles are actually a little less efficient in some cases. And so that's more kilowatt hours per mile driven. And of course, VMT, so vehicle miles traveled. A couple of years ago, people weren't driving their EVs as much. And today, people are driving their electric vehicles as much as they are ICE vehicles. You put all that together, an hour throughput is growing so much faster than the growth in electric vehicles. That's a today thing. If I look forward over the next couple of years, I'm sure we'll talk about this, but there's this idea of a standard in the United States, a NACS connector. I can't wait for that. A NACS connector introducing standardization is a good thing for adoption. It's a great thing for us, our business. 2/3 of the electric vehicles on the roads are Tesla, roughly, are Teslas.
Yes, there will be around half of all new sales, but in terms of VIO, because they've been at it for a lot longer, Teslas, they typically aren't charging at our locations. With that NACS connector, which we expect to deploy later this year at our charging stations, either new or for retrofit or both, I expect to be able to encourage two-thirds of VIO that's not charging on my network to charge on my network. Why? Because we aren't highway-focused. We tend to build our charging stations in urban, high-traffic areas close to where people live and work. We're deploying 350 kW chargers, which are faster than Tesla's 250 kW network. And so I'm looking forward to that round of throughput growth that doesn't require any VIO.
Right. Right. Maybe that brings up a good point. When you guys choose your sites and you have a very strict process on doing that, maybe could you kind of talk about how you leverage your proprietary data and your algorithms and the model that you've built?
Yeah, so we are building EV charging stations to reduce the impact of emissions. Transportation is a large source of emissions in the United States, but we're also doing it to make money. Site selection is so important. We've been at it for 13 years. We ingest a huge amount of data at a census tract level, not a ZIP code, but something much smaller, where we ingest data on forecast revenue, costs and CapEx, EV adoption, density of housing, multifamily housing, retail amenities. We look at utility rates, demand rates, availability of incentives and grants, all the rest of it. We will not build unless we believe we can get the double-digit returns. I said, I think that's going great. That is what we do. That whole process, we think is a source of competitive advantage for us.
We backtest it continuously to see how well we forecasted throughput at a site location. We've actually published this in one of our earnings calls, actuals versus what we forecasted. We're doing actually better than we had forecasted.
All right.
James, maybe I can jump in, but that's a great point on site selection. I think as we talked about EV adoption, we all talk about maybe the growth rate slowing, but most people don't realize, given your car park play, a VIO play, the car park is growing at 40% or 50%, even though maybe adoption is growing at 20%. So when I think about density, I do think also what's interesting about the U.S. is you have such high penetration in California where you've had an initial footprint. What are some of the other markets that are starting to have sort of critical density on a geographic basis where maybe some of that site selection would work?
Whereas we're roughly in the Pacific Northwest, do you think you'll continue to build that out as they start to hit car park penetration that's almost in the double digits by 2025 and 2026?
Yeah, look, so we're very granular on this at site selection. We're at that census tract level. So we don't really talk at a, what's it like, across the whole state or a whole territory. We're at a very specific level. The utilization across our network in Q1 was 19%. Over 50% of our sites had utilization over 15%. And I've forgotten the rest of the numbers, but I think it's over 40% of our sites were over 20%. Our top 15% of our sites were 41% utilization. That was in Q4 2023.
Some of that is also a natural maturation process where essentially that EV park in that specific ZIP code building over time.
Yes.
Right? So it's a multiple-year process.
Multiple-month process. Yeah. So there will be state. We added almost 1,000 stations last year. We're at 3,000 stations this year. We're adding 800-900 stations this year. Our rate of growth is pretty high. And so there are going to be stations that have been around for less than six months who aren't going to be at that level of utilization today. We actually got some older stations, much lower speed, 50 kW speed as opposed to the 350 kW speed stations that we're deploying today, which where people are not as attracted to in some cases. And so those are some of the lower utilization stalls. But we're in 35 states across the United States today, 1,000 sites. And so our fastest growing states today are Texas, Florida, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania. So we're seeing this across the United States.
Then if I can ask one follow-up, when we talk about some of the different speeds of EV adoption globally, we use this term like carrot versus stick. Where is there a push versus a pull? And in the U.S., the stick really comes from some of the legislation like California in 2026, where it has to be 35% EV and plug-ins. And there is a certain amount of states that will follow it. Given you have to have some lead time to look at sites in that sort of granular data, are you incorporating some regulation, future regulation on the state level or city level incentives that will help drive where you think EV adoption will come next?
No.
Interesting. So it's all from the pull side, and that would just be plus on top.
Not at all. So I mean, we are looking at where incentives exist today.
Today.
I'm not assuming incentives are going to continue for the next forever. I don't think that makes sense.
And it could change at any point. Yeah.
But we've got over 50 site host partners, national and regional site hosts, grocery stores, retail, banks, whatever, who we've got great relationships with. They don't pay us. We're not selling them equipment. We pay them to lease a parking space at their sites. So we've got great relationships. We get affluent, potentially affluent foot traffic to their locations. We've got over 10,000 stalls that currently pencil to our double-digit returns expectations today, at today's level of EV penetration. As EV penetration rises, there'll be another 10,000 sites that will pencil to our expectations. And that's based on growth of EV adoption and our expectations of people charging at our sites.
Excellent. Excellent.
We talked a little bit about the NACS becoming more of a standard. I wonder if you could update us on kind of where your NACS rollout is today? And then do you think that Tesla can just drive that because they're the biggest right now and the OEMs are going to NACS? Or do you think there needs to be a federal kind of guideline, something like you have in the EU?
Yeah, look, it's important that we have a standard that's properly tested and safety tested, which is where we're going through. That's where the industry is today. And that's obviously super important. We expect that to be that is going well. It's not concluded, but assuming it does conclude over the course of this year, because our chargers, so we're mostly doing 350 kilowatt chargers. Tesla's network is 250 kilowatt. So we need to make sure that these cables are liquid-cooled cables to be able to take that higher speed. And so we're working that process with the suppliers of these cables, but we fully expect to be able to have NACS cables deployed in our network before the end of this year.
As I said, I think getting to some kind of standardization is a great thing for adoption in the United States. It's a great thing for our business because I believe that we'll be able to access and be attractive to two-thirds of VIO that's currently really not charging in our network. And again, that's to your point about how are we growing our throughput with that much faster than VIO. That's another round of growth for us over the next couple of years.
Right. Right. Okay. You have a number of partnerships with site hosts, with OEMs, with fleet customers and technology partners. What's your approach to building these partnerships and how do you see them continuing to accelerate the growth?
We've got about a dozen relationships with OEMs that range from infrastructure funding. So as a for instance, General Motors pays us $33,000 per stall that we deploy in exchange for advantageous benefits for their drivers. But we've got other relationships with OEMs will be charging credits where customers get credits if they buy an electric vehicle on our network, data integration, so it's easy to find and locate chargers. So great relationships with the OEMs. The site hosts, again, I think, as we talked about earlier, fantastic relationships because site hosts generally want charging infrastructure. They're getting paid. We pay them to put it in. For some, it meets ESG requirements or just foot traffic. We've got great relationships with their suppliers of the hardware. And again, we have reached a level of scale. You talked about the million customers.
We've reached a level of scale in our business where we can work with the charging hardware companies to design equipment that better meets customer needs. These charging hardware companies are typically not interfacing with the customer. We are. We're experiencing customer frustration. We know where the pain points are. That's why I announced in our Q1 call an initiative we've been working on for a better part of 6-9 months where we are partnering with one of our leading charging suppliers to jointly develop and design. They will build it, but we will jointly design it that will transform the customer experience, address many of the customer pain points that we know exist, and lower the cost. And we're targeting a 30% improvement in costs. That's another great example of a relationship. We have relationships with utility.
Now, I used to run a utility, but EVgo has been doing this for a very long time. Great relationships with utilities where we can get ahead of delays that I think other companies are facing in deploying equipment. I think that ecosystem of relationships from local authorities, utilities, OEMs, site hosts, supply chain, I think is actually a competitive moat for us because we've been doing it for so long and we're operating at the scale that we're operating and it's providing benefits to us and for EV adoption.
Sure.
Maybe you could talk in that regard, some of the consumer-facing initiatives that you have, given that you are in some high retail areas, so you have a lot of repeat charging as opposed to highway where sometimes the customer is changing over. You've had many initiatives over the years, but maybe you could just go through some of the ones that have been successful.
I mean, look, so 50% of our roughly half of our kilowatt hours are coming from fleet customers who are on subscription programs. So this is the rideshare and the Ubers and actually other citywide fleets where they've got discounted rates to come to our locations on a frequent basis. We've got subscription programs that anybody could sign up to, which encourages more frequent use at our locations. We've got these charging incentive programs with the OEMs. That roughly represents half of our kilowatt hours. I look at that and I think that's sticky kilowatt hours. This is repeat kilowatt hours. Yes, it's a little discounted, but I think it's very attractive. In terms of other customer-facing initiatives, I mean, we've got this feature we call reservations where you don't want to be, you go to a station and there's a stall waiting for you because you reserved it.
You can't reserve it forever. That's not appropriate, but that's a great benefit for customers. We have something we call Autocharge+ where a lot of the customer frustration is actually the payment process. You have to swipe something or you go to your app and have to figure it out. You just plug it in and it takes the payment. That's doubled. The percentage of our sessions with Autocharge+ has doubled year-over-year. And those are the kinds of things that we've been doing with customers. And yes, our locations tend not to be. Yes, we do have some highways, but our locations tend to be urban locations, high traffic, great for rideshare, great for multifamily customers who don't have private driveways. And so I think that's a big part of our throughput success that you alluded earlier.
Sure. Sure.
Now, how are you thinking about the eXtend program? We understand your priority is the owner-operator model, but there is the opportunity in the eXtend program. And so how are you thinking about this as you stepped into the CEO role?
So again, I joined the board two years ago. It's become very clear to me that the returns, which I know we'll get to in the next 15 minutes, the returns in our owner-operator business are very compelling. So owning the equipment for DC fast, the extend business, we don't capture those returns. It's like a model that other charging companies deploy where they're selling equipment. And so it's just not as compelling for us. That's not to say that the relationship isn't; it's a great relationship we have. It's primarily one relationship, Pilot Flying J, big large cloud company. We're doing 2,000 stalls across 500 sites. But that's allowing us to add a lot of scale. It's benefiting us in the supply chain negotiations. We had network effect.
Last time I looked at this data, customers that are charging at a Pilot Flying J highway location that have never previously been to an EVgo station, roughly half of them go on to charge at an EVgo site. So there's a network effect, and I think that's great. That's great for our business. But it's not our priority.
Okay. Okay. And maybe just to touch on the NEVI program, it's been a little bit slower to roll out than maybe initially expected, although it's government program, so maybe we should have all expected it to be slower. But what role do you see for government in encouraging charging infrastructure development?
I think it's important today. We've got two programs, as I think many of you may know. The NEVI program from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $5 billion for highway charging. I'll come back to that in a second. But also the IRA provides a 30C, which is this investment tax credit. Both are important. Both are helpful. Both are needed. We need to encourage infrastructure build-out to encourage EV adoption. We'll get to a place where they're not needed, but I think they're important today. In terms of NEVI, there are, I think was it The New York Times or whoever was reporting that there's eight locations that have been energized. 25% of them are ours. We built 25%. They're not owned and operated. Not all owned and operated by us.
They may be operated by one of our partners, but they're ours because we've been at it for a long time. We know how long this process takes. But I would just say we have won 25 awards, sorry, 50 awards that adds up to 250 stalls, $35 million so far in NEVI. But to your question about NEVI more broadly, as I look at the data, there are 600 sites or 600 awards made by the states that adds up to $400 million and 3,500 stalls. Of the 600 awards or sites that have been awarded, roughly 250 were in 2023. The first six months of this year, 2024, the states made 350 awards. So they're getting faster.
You got to remember that NEVI program, it's the feds hand out the money to the states, the state DOTs run RFP processes, and then people have to bid for them. That takes a while, and then it takes 18 months to actually get something built. This stuff is being deployed. It's not being deployed as quickly as people may have expected, but it's absolutely being deployed.
Sure. Sure. And then maybe let's get into financials. So path to EBITDA positive. Could you maybe outline or provide some of the math on how you see yourself getting there? And maybe for our audience who may not be as familiar, breaking it between the existing company and then what I think of as developing the company and then returns associated with it.
So this is, I think, really important. So we will be EBITDA positive next. We expect to be EBITDA positive next year. And how do you get there? It's throughput per stall, so kilowatt hours per stall times the number of stalls. That generates cash flow per stall. We passed the point where cash flow per stall was positive last year. And so the greater the throughput per stall, the more kilowatt hours flowing, the more cash that we generate per stall. We have tremendous operating leverage in this business. Throughput per stall has gone up fourfold in the last couple of years just on the back of that very rising utilization. Throughput per stall is driven by utilization and charge rates. It's gone up fourfold. As I said before, it's continuing to rise.
We expect to see that continue to rise as VIO grows and as our throughput grows faster than VIO. There is tremendous operating leverage in this business in both gross margin. 40% of our cost of goods sold, cost of sales in our charging business is fixed. So as throughput per stall rises, gross margin rises. Our margins in our charging business in 2022 were 15%. Margins in our charging business in 2023 were 28%. Margins in Q1 were 40%. We're not raising prices here. We're just getting tremendous utilization. And that's just operating leverage that's showing up in our margins. We've got phenomenal operating leverage in SG&A. Our G&A, 70% of it is fixed, which is what you're calling the development business. It's the costs of expanding the network, and it's overhead. It's overhead. And a few other people. That's fixed.
So what we're talking about is charging cash flow per stall rising because throughput per stall is rising, phenomenal operating leverage, covering our fixed costs once we reach a certain level of scale. We're at 3,000 stalls at the beginning of this year, beginning of 2024. We're adding 800-900 this year. We'll be between 4,000-5,000 stalls with the throughput per stall growth that we've been seeing and continue to see and be very happy with. We'll have reached breakeven. And it's not that complicated. What's actually more interesting to me is that once we've covered our fixed costs, 70% of our costs that are fixed, once we've covered our fixed costs, that cash flow per stall goes straight to the bottom line.
That's why we did a unit economics webinar a couple of months ago, back in April, where we showed that today the top 15% of our stalls are generating $30,000. This is back in Q4 2023. Generating $30,000 per stall. We expect that to be $40,000 per stall across the entire network just because of rising charge rates. Nothing to do with our business. Just charge rates are improving because VIO charge rates are improving. People are buying vehicles that have higher speeds. And we get to $40,000 a stall. If I'm adding 1,000 stalls a year, that's $40 million going straight to the bottom line once we've covered our fixed rates. That's why I look at this and I think the returns and the EBITDA profile here is very attractive. That's how we get the $200 million EBITDA, 7,000 stalls times $40,000 a stall minus $70 million fixed costs.
The math's not that complicated. And you get to $200 million in 3-5 years. So I think EBITDA breakeven, I think we've shown the trajectory is very clear. And we think the trajectory beyond that is very compelling. And on the returns, just on the returns, it costs us $96,000. This is we've articulated this in our economics webinars. It costs us $96,000 net today, this year, to build a stall. In 3-5 years, we're making $40,000 a stall. In a few years after that, with improving charge rates and utilization, nowhere near the top 15% of our network today, we're making $60,000-$70,000 a stall. I mean, to me.
That's a pretty good return.
Yeah. And I talked about the program that I announced in Q1 where we're working with the supplier because we have the scale to co-design this equipment, aiming for a 30% reduction on 96K, generating 40, 50, 60K a year. I think that, to me, that represents pretty compelling returns. And that's because of our business model choice. Owning and operating DC fast. We're not a hardware company. We're not selling equipment. I think that's what makes us, I think, interesting in this EV landscape.
Sure. Sure. And the current build program, you're seeking to build 8-900 per year.
Yes.
But you could accelerate that.
Very interesting.
I know you don't want to be dilutive. There's got to be other financing options as you're looking at. So what kind of financing options are you evaluating?
Well, let's just take a step back. So Tesla was doing, as I understand, 6,000 stalls a year. They're not doing that right now. They fired everybody and they're hiring a selected number of people back in that supercharger business. But the market, there was easily enough demand for that amount of charging stations. And so I think the market, the industry needs the infrastructure to be built. And it certainly supports it. The economics support it. And so I would love to be able to expand my growth rate from that 8 to 900. Let's call it 1,000 a year. Materially higher. And so that's an important, that's a very important objective for us. On the financing, as I said before, I think I said before, 40% of the capital that we deploy is not shareholder funds.
We either get payments from OEMs paying us to build the infrastructure or we've got grants or incentives that we've got a decade-long track record of collecting. Beyond that, we are talking to, as I've been public about, the DOE LPO Title 17 program. That's non-recourse project financing. That is a significant quantum. I haven't disclosed the quantum of capital, but it's a significant quantum of attractively priced capital. And it's a very important part of President Biden's agenda. We're unaware of anybody else of our scale, track record, or frankly, credibility in the charging space that's looking for a loan from the DOE LPO program. And we think that if we're successful, which is a 2024 thing, not a 2025 thing, if we are successful, we would expect to be able to materially increase the rate of growth.
Since we've been so transparent about our economics, which again, you mentioned in this unit economics webinar that we've been disclosing, we've received a lot of inbound. And we are in commercial dialogue with commercial banks on similar kind of terms, not the same quantum of capital and maybe not as attractively priced capital, but that's all allowing us to grow our rate of growth and reach the point of free cash flow breakeven ahead of time.
Any questions from the audience?
The GE partnership, DOE OEM partnership where they provide infra funding. What's really in it for GM to pay that much CapEx and reap the benefits of this partnership?
Yeah, it's not the only. We've had others in the past. We continue to have dialogue with other OEMs on similar or related types of deals. Why is it in it for OEMs? OEMs want to sell cars. They want to sell the EVs. They need the charging infrastructure. Tesla began its supercharger business over a decade ago, as you know, to be able to sell cars. The OEMs are very focused on charging infrastructure to be able to sell electric vehicles. That's hugely important for them. In terms of our relationships that we strike, clearly we want to be able to offer an advantageous offering for the drivers of those vehicles. GM drivers get preferential treatment, preferential pricing. I think that's an attractive proposition for them.
I mean, range anxiety, charging anxiety still always comes up on top of affordability as top three in terms of all the consumer studies about any form of what is holding back EV adoption.
So, I mean, I want not just ourselves. I want the market to be building out charging infrastructure. I think that's great for EV adoption. I think it's great for us because of our site selection, which we think we do better than anybody else. And so people will come to our sites, whether we were building those sites or not. And EV adoption rises, our business benefits. Yeah.
Just to talk a little bit about the transportation credits, the LCFS, the RAN. I know you've got, I think last quarter, 53 GWh. That's a huge amount of work. That represents a pathway. Talk about how you're monetizing that, how that's marketed and how you seek to monetize that.
Well, yeah, the LCFS credits are; they were an important part of this business, a very important part of revenue when prices were higher and when our throughput was much lower. And I'm not trying to diminish them by any means. Today, LCFS revenue is, I think it's like 3% or 4% of our revenue today. It goes straight to the bottom line. So it's attractive, but it's a much smaller portion of our revenue. We expect prices. Prices aren't great, as you, I'm sure, know right now, but we expect prices to improve over the course of next year.
So obviously, the uptime of the chargers is a really big component of the throughput. So my team is calculating uptime around like 80% or so. So first question, is that a reasonable estimate for EVgo? And can you describe kind of your general plan for improving uptime? Obviously, you have things to do.
I don't recognize the 80%, to be clear. When we think about the customer experience, there are multiple components to it. People want to be able to go to a charging station and have a stall available. They don't want to have to wait. So we're increasing the number of stalls per site. We've actually doubled that over the course of this last year. When they would go to a charging station, they want it to be faster. So 22% of our stalls were 350 kW power or speed at the beginning of 2023. Today, it's around 40%. I expect that to be 50% because that's pretty much what we're deploying. And out in the future, it'll be the majority. That's important for customers. The payment process is important for customers, as well as what we call one and done.
So being able to charge first time without any issues quickly. And that's what we measure. We think that's an important customer measure. I've been running asset businesses for a long time. And so you can look at asset measures, but the customer measure, I think, is a more holistic measure. And in terms of that, there's a ton of work that we're doing in terms of remote diagnostics, in terms of renewing or replacing or upgrading our equipment. As of the beginning of this year, we'd replaced or renewed about 500 stalls, give or take. We'll probably do another 150 over the course of this year. That takes out some of the older stalls. We've been doing this for a long time. We've got stalls that we were deploying back in the mid-2010s, so almost a decade ago. And so that's what we're doing.
It's a hugely important part of our agenda.
Back.
You emphasized site selection.
Yes.
Where do you expect, if you were to move forward with a new stall, to be at a utilization rate in 12 months from kind of construction completion and on a stabilized basis?
Yeah, look, so we will not build a station unless we get the double-digit returns. And that'll depend upon availability of grants. It'll depend upon what we think we can get in terms of revenue. So for any one site, the expected utilization will vary depending upon these other drivers. Generally speaking, we expect utilization for double-digit returns to be in the low 20s. We're at 19% across our network as of Q1. Top 15% of our locations, we're at 41% utilization. It's a matter of months, frankly, it's not years before stalls get to the expected utilization that we were expecting to get.
Any final questions? Sure.
Just for clarification, what do you see happening when a lot of these setup programs go away? Obviously, the building business goes long term. Give a little insight on how you see that.
So the question is, what do I see expecting when the setup programs go away? I mean, there's incentives to build the infrastructure. The highway, we don't tend to go after highway infrastructure as much. Actually, our business is focused on urban locations. 30C is a piece of an incentive that's helpful for us today. If you're also talking about incentives to sell vehicles, so there's incentives that lower the cost of the electric vehicles. Frankly, as a result of vehicles being more affordable, 35, roughly, more affordable vehicles being brought onto the U.S. market between now and the end of 2025. This is in that $25K-$35K range. That is, it's going to transform the affordability question for the mass market. We've seen the early adopters. We now need to get to the mass market. And so I think those incentives just start to not become relevant.
As I said before in our unit economics, it's cost us just under $100,000 if we're generating $40,000-$60,000 a year to build this equipment. The infrastructure incentives start to become irrelevant over time as well.
Can you talk a little bit about how you view or when you view charging as having more of a flexible grid resource given the grid being a major constraint? I mean, I'm sure we're in early days there, but what about your thoughts on that? And then you also talked about how you view charging competing with other sources of electricity today.
So charging is a grid resource. There's tons of stuff going on. There's tons of software companies, charging station companies, arena utility, utility companies who are working on that question today. And there's all sorts of pilots going on. This is not a thing for DC fast. DC fast, you're charging your vehicle for 30 minutes. For charging stations to be a resource for utilities, it's more of a level two thing where you're charging over multiple hours. So it's not really a driver of my business model, DC fast. It is for the L2, the slower charging equipment, of which there's going to be tons, overnight charging, parking lots, workplace charging, etc., etc. So I think it's just a matter of time. It's just a matter of time. We do have this issue that we've got a lot of states.
We've got 50 states, and every state does things differently. And so that tends to, in my experience in 25 years of doing this, that has tended to make things go a little slower than elsewhere. What was your second question?
Just how you view the load constraints.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, EV charging is obviously going to add a lot of load. So is data centers. So is electrifying heat here in the Northeast, cold climates. To meet most of these net zero mandates across the United States, we're going to need to electrify heating, actually. And that is, I mean, yes, people are working in R&D, which is all very attractive, but that's also going to add a ton of electric load. And so we're going to need to build out generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure. So you could have asked me that in my last job. I'm not going to answer any more questions about that today, but I think it's a huge need for the United States. And it's a multi-decade thing. That's not a solve it tomorrow. That's over the next two or three decades.
Claire?
Could you share a bit more about existing rideshare partnerships and how you see that kind of going forward?
As I said before, rideshare has gone from 11% of our network two and a half years ago to 25% of our kilowatt hours today. It's growing great. And I think it's another one of these tailwinds for our business. Companies like Uber and Lyft are setting their own mandates around or targets or requirements for rideshare drivers to be electric. Cities, New York City, other cities in the United States are requiring rideshare to be electric. And so rideshare is another one of those many tailwinds I see for our business model, the own and operate DC fast. Rideshare is going to charge at DC fast. It doesn't make any economic sense for a rideshare driver to be sitting at eight hours at a Level 2. And so I see that as a great tailwind for our business, and I see continued growth. And frankly, that's a near-term thing.
I think longer term is that autonomous vehicle space is another enormous opportunity for charging electric vehicles because these are going to be very highly utilized and very high miles traveled. Rideshare drivers typically charge five times more than the regular commuter on our network.
Question about storage. I'm wondering under what conditions is energy storage helpful to the economics of the site? And how do you see that playing out as a thing or maybe not much of a thing over the next couple of years?
Yeah, look, so we've been very successful in lowering demand charges, which is really where storage makes a big impact in regulatory proceedings across the United States. I think it's something like 75% of our kilowatt hours today have lower or eliminated demand charges that the regulators have set for EV rates as a mechanism to encourage EV adoption. So that translates into lower prices fundamentally for customers. Storage is a tremendously attractive resource when demand charges are higher. When there's a demand charge holiday or reduced rates, the economics aren't so attractive, certainly in the DC fast space. Those demand reductions phase out over time where I think storage at a site therefore becomes more attractive. So that's my answer to that question.
Okay.
Badar, thanks for your time this morning.
Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.