Have you ever wondered how many Tesla Supercharging sites are now live?  In early June 2023, Tesla officially gave us a number when it revealed that its Supercharging network has 2,000 sites live in North America – mostly in the United States.

That’s the largest electric vehicle fast-charging network on the continent, although currently used almost solely by Tesla EVs (a small number of stations were recently opened for non-Tesla EVs) because of its proprietary charging connector – the North American Charging Standard (NACS), which in the future will also be used by Ford and General Motors. For reference, the Electrify America network has over 800 locations, while EVgo reports around 900 stations.

Tesla has not included information about how many individual charging stalls were installed at those 2,000 stations, but we know that its average number of stalls per station on a global level exceeds 9. That indicates that there might be about 18,000-20,000 stalls with Tesla Superchargers live across the country.

A Tesla Supercharging station.

According to Tesla, its North American Superchargers deliver the energy equivalent of up to 500 million miles per month.

That sounds very interesting, so let’s try to estimate what it really means and what it can tell us about network usage.

Tesla’s most popular model – the Model Y, Long Range AWD version – has an EPA combined energy consumption (including charging losses) of 122 MPGe, which is about 276 Wh/mile. Other models from the 2023 model year vary from 91 to 132 MPGe (255 to 370 Wh/mile), but the average of the fleet is probably closer to 275-300 Wh/mile.

If we assume 300 Wh/mile and 500 million miles of range, replenished over a period of one month, we can calculate a network delivery of about 150 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity.

What would that be per station? Well, 250,000 miles or 75 megawatt-hours (MWh) per month per station. If the average station had ten stalls, it would be 25,000 miles or 7.5 MWh per stall.

A Tesla Supercharging station.

And here comes another interesting thing, because we can further assume that about 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) are dispensed per average charging session (which, by the way, takes less than 30 minutes). This brings us to 1,500 charging sessions per station or 150 charging sessions per stall over the period of a month. The daily average would be then respectively: 50 and 5.

Five cars per stall per twenty-four hours (mostly during the day) sounds like up to 2.5-3 hours of daily usage (once again assuming 30 minutes per session). This indicates that the Tesla Supercharging network, on average, is probably running at just over 10 percent of its theoretical capacity (25 percent of its capacity during the day, if we exclude nighttime when there is a lower demand).

Those intriguing stats suggest that Tesla has a healthy reserve of charging capacity on average – although an average is one thing, and peak periods are another. Sometimes the network must be oversized by more than four times to handle peak demand.

Tesla Supercharging Network in North America – Estimated Usage:

• 2,000+ charging stations (official)
• 20,000 charging stalls (theoretical assumption)
• Up to 500 million miles of range replenished per month (official)
• 150 GWh of energy delivered per month (5 GWh/day), assuming 300 Wh/mile of average energy consumption
• 3 million charging sessions per month (100,000/day), assuming 50 kWh per session on average
• 1.5 million hours per month (50,000/day), assuming 30 minutes per session on average

Station Level Average:

• 250,000 miles of range replenished per month (8,333 miles/day)
• 75 MWh of energy delivered per month (2.5 MWh/day)
• 1,500 charging sessions per month (50/day)
• 750 hours per month (25 hours/day)

Stall Level Average:

• 25,000 miles of range replenished per month (833 miles/day)
• 7.5 MWh of energy delivered per month (250 kWh/day)
• 150 charging sessions per month (5/day)
• 75 hours per month (2.5 hours/day)