Reference · The Charging Lexicon

Every term that decides a charging deal.

The vocabulary of EV charging development, defined the way our underwriting team actually uses it — hardware, power, economics, credits and deal structure. Linked from our Insights wherever they go deeper.

Hardware & Standards

Level 2 charging 7.6–19.2 kW AC: AC charging suited to places where vehicles park for hours — hotels, workplaces, retail, multifamily. An overnight stay on a single Level 2 port replenishes a full battery, which is why it dominates destination charging.
DC fast charging (DCFC) ≈150–500 kW: Direct-current charging that bypasses the vehicle's onboard AC converter and feeds the battery directly, returning meaningful range in minutes. The public, high-throughput tier of the market — and the electrically serious one: a multi-stall site is an industrial-scale load.
Megawatt charging MCS · Megacharger: Charging at 1 MW and above for heavy-duty vehicles. Tesla's Megacharger delivers up to 1.2 MW to the Semi; the industry's Megawatt Charging System (MCS) standard scales alongside. Sized to return usable range inside a federally mandated 30-minute driver rest break.
NACS North American Charging Standard: The connector standard originated by Tesla and since adopted across the North American auto industry. Connector convergence means a well-specified public site serves effectively the entire passenger EV fleet.
CCS Combined Charging System: The previous dominant DC fast-charging connector in North America. CCS vehicles remain on the road in volume and reach NACS equipment through adapters — relevant to stall planning during the transition years.
OCPP Open Charge Point Protocol: The open protocol through which chargers talk to management software. OCPP-networked hardware keeps pricing, monitoring, load control and payment portable across operators — the owner's insurance against being locked into one vendor's stack.
Stall vs. port: A stall is the parking position; a port is a connector that can charge one vehicle at a time. Program rules and utilization math frequently price by port, while site design and driver experience are governed by stalls — conflating them mis-sizes projects.
Charging curve / taper: Charging power falls as a battery fills; the ramp-and-taper shape is the charging curve. It is why sessions interleave, why nameplate arithmetic overstates site draw, and why the 20–80% state-of-charge window dominates fast-charging session design.

Power & Utility

kW vs. kWh: Kilowatts measure power — how hard energy flows right now. Kilowatt-hours measure energy — how much was delivered over time. Chargers are rated and utility capacity is billed in kW; drivers are billed and LCFS credits accrue in kWh dispensed.
Demand charge: A monthly utility charge priced on the single highest average draw over a short interval — typically fifteen minutes — rather than on energy consumed. On a young fast-charging site it can dwarf the energy bill, which is why batteries keep appearing next to chargers.
Time-of-use (TOU) rates: Tariffs that price energy by when it is used. Charging sites arbitrage them — storage charges in cheap windows, load management steers sessions away from peaks, and the tariff schedule chosen at interconnection shapes unit economics for years.
Interconnection: The utility process that connects a new load to the grid: application, circuit study, service design, utility construction. On high-power charging projects it is almost always the schedule's critical path — manage it like one.
Point of interconnection (POI): Where the utility's system meets the customer's. Every foot between the POI and the power cabinets is trench, conduit, copper and voltage drop — which is why transformer placement quietly decides project cost.
Make-ready: Utility programs that put charging infrastructure costs — service extension, transformer, often customer-side conduit and trench — on the utility's books for qualifying projects. Eligibility and design standards must be engineered in before construction, not claimed after.
Single-line diagram (SLD): The one-page electrical schematic of a site — service, switchgear, transformers, distribution, loads. The first technical document the utility, the AHJ and every incentive program will ask for; its quality sets the pace of every review.
Load management: Software-orchestrated sharing of a fixed power envelope across stalls — tapering in-progress sessions rather than letting simultaneous arrivals breach the service rating or a demand-charge target. Configured well it saves a tier of billed capacity; configured badly it makes a site feel slow.
Behind-the-meter storage: A battery on the customer's side of the utility meter. At charging sites it buffers simultaneous sessions so the utility sees a flattened load — capacity arbitrage against demand charges first, resilience second.

Economics & Operations

Utilization: The share of a site's capacity actually dispensing energy — the variable every charging pro forma lives or dies on. Fast-charging cost structure is inverted: fixed costs dominate early, so the expensive years are the empty ones and unit economics improve precisely as the site gets busy.
Dwell time: How long a vehicle naturally parks at a property. The whole design question of destination charging is matching session length to dwell — overnight at hotels, two hours at grocery-anchored retail — while short-dwell traffic belongs to DC fast.
Uptime: The fraction of time a stall can actually deliver a paid session — including payment. Navigation apps surface stall status in real time, so reliability compounds into utilization and unreliability into route-arounds. Uptime is the brand.
Session: One vehicle's charging event, from plug-in to unplug. The atomic unit of site revenue: sessions per stall per day × energy per session × margin per kWh is the skeleton of every honest charging model.
State of charge (SOC): A battery's fill level. Drivers at public fast chargers typically charge across the middle of the range, where the charging curve is strongest — the behavioral fact beneath throughput assumptions.
Commercial EV rate schedules: Tariffs California's investor-owned utilities designed for charging loads, replacing conventional demand charges with subscription-style capacity blocks bought in increments. Choosing the wrong schedule — or the right one at the wrong block size — is a self-inflicted cost that persists for the life of the account.

Credits & Programs

LCFS Low Carbon Fuel Standard: California's carbon-intensity market, administered by CARB. Fuels cleaner than the annual benchmark — grid electricity dispensed into vehicles included — generate credits that petroleum refiners and importers must retire, giving the credit a regulated, market-priced demand. The revenue line most hosts never collect.
Carbon intensity (CI): Grams of CO₂-equivalent per unit of fuel energy, assessed across the fuel's lifecycle. The distance between a fuel's CI and the LCFS benchmark determines how many credits (or deficits) each unit of fuel generates.
LCFS credit: The tradable instrument the program mints: one metric ton of CO₂-equivalent reduction. For charging, credits accrue to the registered fuel-supply equipment owner, computed from metered dispensed energy, reported quarterly. Prices float with the market — real revenue, never guaranteed revenue.
FCI pathway Fast Charging Infrastructure: The LCFS pathway built specifically for DC fast charging, able to credit qualifying sites on installed capacity as well as dispensed energy in their early years — a deliberate bridge across the utilization ramp that historically made fast charging hard to finance.
CARB California Air Resources Board: The state agency that administers the LCFS — registration, pathway rules, quarterly reporting, verification. From the 2026 compliance year, only directly metered electricity earns credits, with meters accurate to ±5% on a six-year calibration cycle.
CALeVIP: California's incentive project offering rebates toward charging equipment and installation through regional, application-window-based funding rounds. Budgets are finite and rounds close — sequencing the application before construction is the whole game.
EnergIIZE: California's funding program for medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission vehicle infrastructure — the freight-side counterpart to light-duty programs, relevant to depot and corridor truck-charging projects.
NEVI National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: The federal formula program funding DC fast charging along designated corridors, administered state by state with siting, power and uptime requirements attached to the money.
Section 30C credit: The federal Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property tax credit for qualifying charging property in eligible census tracts, subject to prevailing-wage and apprenticeship conditions for the full rate. Tax-position specific — model it with your advisor, not a brochure.
Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF): California's regulation phasing zero-emission trucks into drayage and fleet operations on statutory timelines — the demand floor beneath freight-corridor charging.

Deal Structures

Host agreement: The standard network offer: the network leases your stalls, owns the equipment, sets pricing, collects the charging revenue and registers the credits in its own name; the property receives rent for ten to fifteen years. Clean — and the smallest possible share of what the site produces.
Owner-owned model: The property owner owns the charging equipment outright; drivers pay at the stall; charging revenue, LCFS credits, depreciation and terminal asset value stay with the property. Operations are delegated by contract without surrendering the asset. The asset case in full.
Public charging: Charging open to any driver who pulls in — a statement about access, not ownership. A site can be public to drivers and privately owned by the property: that combination is precisely the owner-owned model.
Site screen: The pre-engineering read on a parcel: utility territory, service capacity outlook, traffic and dwell profile, credit eligibility, geometry. What our site scan begins in seconds and our underwriting team finishes.

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