Beyond the Port Count: Simon Ouellette on the Real Metrics of Charging Success

For most of the past decade, "charging at retail locations" and "retail charging" have been used interchangeably. Ouellette draws a hard line between the two.

The first describes geography. The second describes intent.

"We've had charging at retail locations for a long time. But in my book, we've never had retail charging up until today, because to me, retail charging means you have retail at a charging location with an actual purpose of serving the driver their exact needs. Whereas for so many years, what we've had is marketing budgets that would deploy chargers so that the brand of that retail location would look like they are supporting the industry."

The downstream consequences are real. A charger placed to satisfy a franchise requirement or capture a subsidy is rarely sited, maintained, or priced with the driver in mind. It fills a checkbox. Retail charging, in Ouellette's framing, fills a need, and that difference shows up in utilization, driver loyalty, and, eventually, whether a site host sees charging as a cost center or a competitive advantage.

There's a counterintuitive ceiling built into public charging economics, and most operators don't see it until they've already hit it.

By the time a site reaches 30% weekly utilization, drivers are often already complaining. Not because the chargers are broken, but because they're occupied. Utilization spikes hard on weekends, on holidays, and in the two hours before a long drive. The right response isn't always a faster charger.

Good site design starts with port count, then lets the site's real constraints, electrical, physical, budgetary, determine what power makes sense per port. Speed and scale are both part of the answer. The order in which you ask the questions changes what you build.

According to Paren, the national average for public DC fast charger utilization sits at 16.4%, well below that threshold. The room to grow isn't just in hardware specs. It's in site design.

As Ouellette puts it: "A driver will not complain for as long as there's at least one available charger for them." The math is simple. The infrastructure decisions that follow from it are not.

The more structural problem is compatibility. The EV charging ecosystem was built in layers of systems that don't naturally talk to each other.

"We are still living with a lot of walled gardens that would just start piling up. They are starting to open up, but at the same time the ecosystem has grown a lot. And so you essentially have a lot of walled gardens to interconnect. That is literally our role, to interconnect this entire ecosystem in the back end."

For automakers, this created a negotiation problem that compounded as the market grew. What started as one-by-one EV network integrations became an impossible list. As Ouellette describes it, the moment an OEM looked up from its deal pipeline and realized the number of networks had tripled, the calculus shifted entirely.

This is also the infrastructure problem underlying pricing transparency. ChargeHub's contribution to the Cal ITP EV Charging Pricing Transparency report documents exactly this: without aggregation, neither third-party apps nor in-vehicle dashboards can surface reliable, complete pricing data to a driver before they arrive at a station. Interoperability isn't a backend detail. It's a consumer-facing problem.

Ouellette's read on OEM maturity is direct, but not pessimistic.

"They're still learning. If I had to summarize it in one sentence, they're still learning."

The arc he describes is familiar: initial confidence that the automaker's scale would bend the ecosystem to its integration requirements, followed by the realization that hundreds of independent networks weren't going to rebuild their systems on demand, followed by a more pragmatic posture. The shift toward aggregators wasn't a concession. It was an acknowledgment of how the infrastructure actually works.

There's also a structural reason the gap between OEM capability and network reality persists, one that has nothing to do with intent.

"The cars that you see coming out today, they were designed and spec'd out four or five years ago. So everything that comes out to the customer is based on whatever the evolution of their knowledge was years ago."

A vehicle sold in 2026 reflects decisions made in 2021 or 2022, before the charging standards landscape clarified, before utilization data matured, before the walled garden problem was widely acknowledged. The lag is built in. Which means the role of the aggregator as a live, continuously updated layer between the vehicle and a rapidly changing EV charging network isn't a transitional fix. It's a permanent feature of the architecture.

Ouellette draws a direct line from Buc-ee's to the future of public charging. The gas station that became a destination didn't win on fuel price. It won on dwell. The parallel for EV charging is already visible.

"Charging is rarely just charging. It can be parking. If I'm going downtown to the game and there's chargers curbside, it's really parking that I'm looking for. And if there's one that has a charger, I'm adding charging on top of that."

The retailers who haven't yet entered the space, convenience stores, shopping centers, anyone with a parking lot, will. Not because charging is their business, but because a parked EV is a captive customer. And when every parking lot has a charger, the charger itself stops being the differentiator.

"In the way that molecules have become commoditized, electrons will become commoditized."

What remains is experience: whether the driver could find the station, whether the price made sense before they arrived, whether the session fit naturally into something they were already doing. Port count got the industry to where it is. It won't be what takes it further.

The port count era is winding down. What comes next will be built on experience, interoperability, and a clearer understanding of what drivers actually need. Simon Ouellette's full Hub Stage conversation is a good place to start.