Build a charging site
Six million kronor and a 400 kW grid connection. Spend it however you like, then watch a real day of traffic arrive. Most people overbuild the chargers, hit the connection limit by mid-morning, and lose a third of their drivers to a queue. See if you do better.
What the game is actually about
The numbers are tuned to be plausible rather than exact, but the shape is real and it is the thing I spend most of my working life on.
- Grid capacity is the binding constraint, not hardware. Twelve 300 kW chargers behind a 400 kW connection is 3 600 kW of equipment that can never draw more than 400. You paid for power you cannot use.
- Upgrading the connection is expensive and slow. In the game it costs money. In reality it also costs years, and on many urban sites it is simply unavailable at any price.
- Storage buys you peak power without buying peak connection. That is the real argument for a battery on a charging site, and it is why the economics of the two are inseparable.
- Peak draw is charged, not just energy. The effekttariff means your single worst quarter-hour sets a monthly cost. A site that flattens its peak keeps more of what it earns.
The part the game cannot show you is what happens next: the grid-service revenue that used to make the battery pay for itself is shrinking for structural reasons, and the sessions you did serve fail more often than any operator dashboard admits. If you want the other half of the storage argument, try holding the grid at 50 Hz. And to see your queue from the driver’s seat, drive Stockholm to Åre in February.