When it comes to public EV charging, more plugs may matter a whole lot more than bigger power numbers, according to new North American data from Kempower.

The Finnish EV charger maker analyzed public charging sites connected to its ChargEye cloud software and found that plug count had roughly three times the relationship with site utilization as total installed charging power.

Put simply, giving more EV drivers somewhere to plug in appears to be more useful than installing fewer chargers with a huge amount of power behind them.

Kempower found a correlation of 0.63 between plug count and site utilization, compared with just 0.228 between installed power and utilization. In its dataset, sites with eight plugs delivered more than twice as much energy as four-plug sites – 128,342 kWh versus 61,453 kWh.

That doesn’t mean charging speed isn’t important. It means installing a whole lot of power that sits unused won’t automatically attract more drivers or sell more electricity.

“Public charging is increasingly becoming an infrastructure utilization challenge, not simply a power deployment challenge,” said Jed Routh, vice president of markets and products for Kempower North America. “Our ChargEye data shows that giving more vehicles access to charging and dynamically distributing available power can help operators get more from their charging infrastructure.”

Kempower’s distributed charging setup connects multiple plugs to a centralized power unit. Its software then shifts the available power between vehicles in 25 kW increments, depending on what each EV can accept in real time.

For example, if one EV’s charging curve drops from 250 kW to 100 kW, the system can send that unused capacity to another vehicle instead of letting it sit idle.

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