Shell Hong Kong · EV Charging · For discussion
The build-out is won, and the December app upgrade already fixed per-kWh billing, the wallet and idle fees. What follows is a view from outside on where the next margin sits — and one idea Shell’s published forecourt footprint may make it well placed to test.
Start here
70 charging sites. 43 forecourts. One site is both.
The customers are on one estate and everything you could sell them is on the other. Your own Recharge page already invites drivers to shop at Shell Select while they charge — one of the seventy can deliver that.
Someone is selling below the cost of the electricity.
Sinopec sells at HK$1.68/kWh on 500 kW kit at Fo Tan, on government land with a twelve-year lease. Electricity alone costs HK$1.50. That looks less like a price than a state balance sheet buying position — which may make a discount war the wrong fight to accept.
On these numbers the biggest lever isn’t loyalty — it’s which electricity tariff a site sits on.
CLP’s Bulk tariff carries a demand charge on peak kVA, payable whether the site sells anything or not. Below 29% utilisation the EV tariff is cheaper despite a higher energy rate — roughly HK$235,000 a year on a single six-bay site. Which tariff your sites sit on isn’t public, so this may already be handled — but if it isn’t, it needs no capital and no customer to change anything.
HK$966,000 a year. No capital.
One lead, three part-time analysts, tooling included. On these assumptions it returns HK$2.7M a year at full run-rate — about 2.8× cost, positive in 75% of the sensitivity cases run — a spread of assumptions, not a probability forecast.
And here is what would kill it.
The whole case rests on two numbers I cannot see from outside: how many of your sites are on the wrong tariff, and whether a redemption pulls HK$220 of basket that would not otherwise have been spent. Set the tariff slider to zero and this goes to minus HK$1.7M. That is what the pilot exists to measure — and if it comes back short, the answer is don’t roll it out.
Everything after this is the working, if it’s useful. All of it is built from public sources — your own published pages, the EPD charger register, the two utilities’ tariff tables and a listed competitor’s audited accounts — so every figure is an outsider’s estimate you’ll know better than I do.
Act 1
Two estates that never touch — and a promise Shell has already published.
Two estates, no bridge between them. The forecourts carry the retail. The charging sites carry the customers. They are almost entirely different places.
43 forecourts
Shell's own sites. Shell controls the environment.
1 has EV charging.
70 EV sites
Mostly bays rented inside somebody else's car park.
The dwell time happens on someone else's property.
So the opportunity is not “sell them something while they wait” — at a mall site the mall already does that, and keeps it. It is to give the charging customer a reason to visit a Shell forecourt at all.
A reward is only worth something if the driver can reach the place that honours it. So: how far is each EV site from the nearest Shell location that could actually hand over the reward — a Select shop, a car wash, or a service bay? 67 of the 70 sites carry usable coordinates in Shell’s own locator; the other three are excluded rather than guessed:
| Redeem at | Sites | Median | Within 2 km | Worst |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Select shop | 29 | 1.3 km | 70% | 7.4 km |
| Car wash | 16 | 1.8 km | 52% | 9.0 km |
| Service bay | 13 | 2.7 km | 34% | 12.3 km |
That table decides the design. A reward redeemed at a service bay is an errand — only a third of charging customers have one within 2 km. A reward redeemed at a Select shop or car wash is a detour most drivers already make. Start there.
Largest fast-charging network in Hong Kong. This is an asset to exploit, not a gap to fix.
Public location data show almost no overlap between the two estates. It cannot show how often a charging customer later visits a forecourt — only that the opportunity is not in front of them.
The shops, washes and bays exist. They are simply not where the EV customers are.
Act 2
A state-owned competitor is selling near cost. Price is not the way out.
中石化 PIT is the Hong Kong charging arm of a Chinese state-owned oil major. All figures below are from their own listings and public tender records.
PIT Ultra, Fo Tan
HK$1.68/kWh
On 500 kW equipment. The lowest per-kWh price in Hong Kong. Electricity alone costs HK$1.500 on the CLP EV tariff — so that is an energy-price spread of about HK$0.18/kWh, roughly 11% of revenue, before demand charges, land, equipment and operating cost.
On the published tariff assumed here that sits close to energy cost. Sinopec’s actual unit economics and pricing rationale are not public.
| Network | Sites | Points | Fast | HK$/kWh |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shell Recharge | ~70 | 693 | 188 | 3.35–4.20 |
| Sinopec PIT | 21 | 284 | 74 | 1.68–3.70 |
| CrazyCharge | 8 | 31 | 31 | 2.40–3.50 |
| Speedy Base | 1 | 80 | 80 | not published |
Sinopec won a Government land tender at 山尾街, Sha Tin Town Lot 646, Fo Tan — about 370 m² on a 12-year lease, specifically for EV charging. That is a different cost structure, not just a different price.
| Mall or car-park site | Government land tender | |
|---|---|---|
| Landlord share | ~15% of revenue, ongoing | none |
| Tenure | at the landlord's discretion | 12 years |
| Electricity | often shared — may attract a demand charge | dedicated EV tariff |
| Rival on site | the mall can add one | exclusive |
A 15% landlord share on a HK$3.60 sale is HK$0.54 a unit — three times Sinopec's entire gross margin at Fo Tan.
Shell is 114% more expensive per unit than PIT Ultra. That gap cannot be closed, and it should not be attempted — the other side is not trying to make money on the electron. But note the qualification: Sinopec runs 50 petrol stations in Hong Kong to Shell's 43. They are an oil major with a forecourt estate too, not only a charging operator. The advantage to defend is what is ON the forecourt, and how quickly it is put to work.
A price floor above most competitors' ceiling only works if something else is being sold.
If price were rationing demand the premium bays would be the busiest. They are the freest.
All 18 districts are labelled. All five fuel networks sit within ±1.5% of the Hong Kong average — that is noise, not a pattern. Do not use it to argue siting.
A 13-page deck, EV Charging Analysis of Hong Kong, was prepared for this market on roughly 16 days of February 2025 session data. Read closely, three of its conclusions do not survive its own charts:
This is the argument for the team, made better than any slide could make it. Different data cuts may explain it. Either way I treat those conclusions as unverified and do not rely on them here.
Raised as a question, never as an accusation — the deck may have been drafted against a different cut of the data.
Act 3
Stop discounting. Start paying selectively, for behaviour worth more than it costs.
Speedy Base gives 15% back on top-up. CrazyCharge gives 30%. On our estimates Shell breaks even at about 7%. Matching either is arithmetic Shell loses.
| Same generosity, as the customer feels it | Cost / yr | Net / yr |
|---|---|---|
| Cash bonus, 15% (matching Speedy Base) | HK$6.51M | −HK$4.84M |
| Partner services, same 15% felt | HK$2.01M | −HK$0.01M |
A dollar of perceived reward costs Shell about 31 cents when it is redeemed against a partner service, and 100 cents when it is cash.
| Reward | Feels like | Costs Shell | Returns data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car wash — 16 Shell sites | HK$120 | ~HK$36 | — |
| Vehicle health check (途虎養車) | HK$400 | ~HK$125* | ✓ |
| 四輪定位 wheel alignment | HK$600 | ~HK$225* | ✓ |
| NTI insurance excess waiver | HK$1,000 | ~HK$145 | ✓ |
| Charging credit | HK$100 | HK$100 | — |
Note the last row. Straight charging credit costs full face value and teaches Shell nothing. It should be the least attractive item in the catalogue, not the default.
Speedy Base and CrazyCharge have no forecourts, no service bays and no car washes. Their only instrument is a deeper discount, which costs full face value and tells them nothing about the vehicle. Shell has 43 forecourts with 28 shops, 16 car washes and 13 service bays — a redemption catalogue that already exists.
One honest qualification. Sinopec operates 50 petrol stations in Hong Kong to Shell's 43 (Consumer Council registry). What retail sits on them is not published, so this cannot be presented as an advantage no oil major has — only as one the charging startups do not have. Shell will know the answer on Sinopec better than any outside analysis can.
This is the difference between a promotion and a mechanism. A price cut is paid to everybody for behaviour they were going to exhibit anyway. A points scheme lets Shell pay selectively, for the specific behaviour that makes the bay more valuable.
The whole scheme in one line
Earn 1 point per HK$1 charged. A point is worth about 10 cents to the customer and costs Shell about 3.1 cents — because it is redeemed against a service, not paid as cash.
That 3.2× gap between felt value and delivered cost is the entire economic engine. Everything below is built on it.
The base rate is uninteresting. The multipliers are the product: they buy the two behaviours that are worth more to Shell than the points cost.
Standard session
The baseline. Costs nothing extra and buys nothing.
Ends at or below 80% charge
Buys the bay back. The last 20% of a battery takes longer than the first 70%.
Starts between 00:00 and 07:00
Buys a session in a bay that was empty, at no extra fixed cost.
The overnight multiplier costs 6.2 cents in the dollar. An overnight session that would not otherwise have happened contributes its full margin, because the demand charge and the site licence are already paid whatever the bay does.
Shell is buying a marginal contribution for six cents. That is the trade a flat discount cannot express, because a flat discount pays the peak customer the same as the 3am customer.
| Reward | Points | Feels like | Costs Shell | Spend to reach it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Car wash — 16 Shell sites | 1,200 | HK$120 | ~HK$36 | HK$1,200 |
| Vehicle health check (途虎養車) | 4,000 | HK$400 | ~HK$125* | HK$4,000 |
| 四輪定位 wheel alignment | 6,000 | HK$600 | ~HK$225* | HK$6,000 |
| NTI insurance excess waiver | 10,000 | HK$1,000 | ~HK$145 | HK$10,000 |
| Charging credit | 1,000 | HK$100 | HK$100 | HK$1,000 |
Charging credit is deliberately the worst item on the list. It costs full face value and
returns nothing. It exists so nobody can say the scheme has no cash-equivalent exit
— not because Shell wants it chosen.
* Not quoted prices. No approach has been made to 途虎養車 or
NTI. See the reward tab for the full qualification.
Breakage
3.5%
Points issued and never redeemed, taken to income. Deliberately conservative — published airline and retail schemes run far higher. Over-claiming breakage is the classic way a loyalty P&L flatters itself.
Expiry
24 months
Long enough to reach the health-check threshold on ordinary usage, short enough to bound the liability. Every unexpired point is a balance-sheet obligation.
Liability
3.1c
Carried per unredeemed point — the delivered cost, not the HK$0.10 the customer perceives. Booking the perceived value would overstate the provision threefold.
Sinopec sells at HK$1.68 when electricity alone costs HK$1.50. Shell cannot follow that price and should not try. But a points scheme moves the fight to a field where the cheapest electron does not win: the reward is worth HK$0.10 to the driver and costs Shell HK$0.031, and it is redeemable only against services a pure charging operator does not have.
Matching Sinopec on price costs a dollar to give a dollar. This gives away ten cents of felt value for three.
Act 4
The physics of a charge curve, and the one thing a charger can never tell you.
Above roughly 80% the battery management system holds voltage and cuts current to avoid lithium plating on the anode. Power falls with current. The charger cannot override it — it is the car's decision.
| Hyundai Kona 64 kWh on a 120 kW bay | kWh | Minutes | Bay-min per kWh |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 → 80% | 44.8 | 42.0 | 0.94 |
| 80 → 90% | 6.4 | 15.1 | 2.36 |
| 90 → 100% | 6.4 | 33.2 | 5.19 |
The last 20% of the battery takes 48 minutes — longer than the first 70% takes. Charging every kWh at one price means the driver who stops at 80% subsidises the driver who fills to 100%.
| Vehicle | Usable | 80–90% | at 22 kW | at 120 kW | at 350 kW | tail cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hyundai Kona EV | 64.0 | 6.4 kWh | 17.5m | 15.1m | 15.1m | 5.5× |
| Tesla Model 3 LR | 75.0 | 7.5 kWh | 20.5m | 5.5m | 5.5m | 3.2× |
| Hyundai Ioniq 5 | 77.4 | 7.7 kWh | 21.1m | 6.0m | 6.0m | 3.4× |
| BYD Seal | 82.5 | 8.2 kWh | 22.5m | 10.0m | 10.0m | 4.9× |
| BYD Atto 3 | 60.0 | 6.0 kWh | 16.4m | 12.4m | 12.4m | 5.5× |
| MG ZS EV | 49.0 | 4.9 kWh | 13.4m | 9.7m | 9.7m | 5.5× |
| Nissan Leaf 40 | 39.0 | 3.9 kWh | 15.4m | 15.4m | 15.4m | 5.5× |
Look at the 120 kW and 350 kW columns: identical for every vehicle. Above about 30 kW the car limits the rate, not the charger. The 80–90% band is 6–8 kWh whatever the car, and it takes 5–22 minutes. Paying for 350 kW hardware to serve that band buys nothing.
The new app bills by actual kWh — but the same price for every kWh, regardless of how much bay-time it consumes. Pricing by state of charge is still open.
0 – 80% charge
HK$2.90
Below the market median of HK$3.20
80 – 90%
HK$4.20
2.4× the bay-time per kWh
90 – 100%
HK$6.00
5.5× the bay-time per kWh
A driver charging 10→80% pays an effective HK$2.90/kWh — less than today. The considerate driver is rewarded; the bay-blocker pays for the bay. Apply it only at congested sites: at a quiet mall the tail costs nothing.
Moving the 6.4 kWh in the 80–90% band takes 17.5 minutes at 22 kW and 15.1 minutes at 120 kW. Only 2.4 minutes apart, because above about 30 kW the car is the constraint, not the charger. Buying 350 kW hardware to serve tapering cars buys almost nothing.
Physics, not policy. The bay is occupied longest exactly when it is earning least.
A pricing ladder is a throughput scheme. Judged per bay-hour, the cheap floor gives away more than it fills.
Whatever single rate is chosen, it is losing one of them.
Every CCS2 session exchanges data that identifies the vehicle and describes its behaviour. Three levels of confidence, which should never be presented as one.
Direct
Derived
Inferred
One technical caution. The “time remaining” field is time to the vehicle's own full-charge target, which is optional and not always 100%. A car may report a target of 90%. Treating it as time-to-100% produces wrong estimates for some vehicles.
CCS2 never reports the exact model or the true battery capacity. A 3-minute OBD read on a phone does. The trick is not to ask for it.
The reward the customer wants — a free vehicle health check — is the data collection.
Driver redeems points for a free health check
↓
3-minute OBD scan at a Shell forecourt or partner
↓
Customer receives battery health, fault codes, service due
Shell receives exact model, true battery capacity, odometer
On our estimates roughly 55% of redemptions return a read — around 8,900 vehicles a year identified. Each one improves the pricing and siting decisions for every session after it.
Act 5
The largest lever is not the loyalty scheme. It is which electricity tariff a site sits on.
The Island is served by HK Electric, the rest of Hong Kong by CLP. Their EV tariffs are not the same. Both are published.
| Per kWh | CLP · Kowloon & NT | HK Electric · Island |
|---|---|---|
| EV tariff energy charge | 110.6c | 142.4c |
| Fuel adjustment | 39.4c | 57.3c |
| All-in cost | HK$1.500 | HK$1.997 |
On these published rates Island electricity costs up to 33% more, while Shell's Island price premium appears to be around 12%. If that holds, the Island price sits roughly 16% below the premium needed to preserve the same markup, across 15 Island sites.
Caveat, stated up front. The 33% uses HK Electric's top consumption block against CLP's flat EV rate. Blended across blocks the real gap may be nearer 18%. And Shell's 12% premium comes from the tariff published before the December change. Both need checking against actual site bills — which is exactly the kind of thing that is invisible from outside.
HK Electric's published fuel clause charge, most recent months, in cents per unit:
35.4 → 35.4 → 34.0 → 30.4 → 26.0 → 31.3 → 41.9 → 57.3
26%
of the CLP EV tariff is the fuel adjustment — revised monthly, not fixed.
HK$2.8M
a year of contribution lost if that swing repeats on CLP — more than any improvement discussed here.
2026
CrazyCharge has guaranteed its prices for the whole year while its fuel cost floats. That is risk they are carrying, not strength.
479 points sit at 7 kW. At Shell's own price that bay tops out at HK$23 an hour, fully occupied.
The car limits what it can absorb, while CLP’s Bulk demand charge is billed on recorded maximum kVA — so higher-rated equipment raises exposure only insofar as it raises measured peak load.
Act 6
One question, and it costs you nothing to answer
Pull the bills for ten sites.
Your own people, a few hours.
Tariff code, twelve months of charges, interval utilisation. Whoever already owns that data in EV Operations or Finance can answer it faster than I ever could from outside — and they should, because it is their data and their call.
10
sites is enough
to know
1
question:
which tariff, and why
0
budget, and no
commitment to me
And then the honest trade
If it turns out there is something here, I would like to be the one who works on it.
Either as a paid engagement to scope it properly, or in the role that would own it. Everything on this site was built on my own time, from public data, before anyone asked me for it. That is the part I was willing to do for free.
What the answer is worth
HK$235,000
a year on one six-bay site, if it sits on the dearer side of the line. Payable whether the site sells anything or not.
What checking costs
A few hours
of someone’s time, on data Shell already holds. No capital, no new system, no consultant.
What “tariff” means here
CLP does not sell electricity at one price. It publishes several different pricing plans, and a site is signed onto one of them. The plans charge in completely different ways.
So the cheaper plan depends entirely on how busy the site is. Busy sites want Bulk. Quiet sites are better off on the EV plan, even though the unit rate looks worse. Roughly 29% utilisation is where they cross over.
I am not assuming Shell has made a mistake. A tariff that looks dear today can have been the right call when it was contracted, and utilisation forecasts move. From outside I can’t see the bills, the meters or the contracts — which is exactly why I am asking the question rather than answering it.
This question deserves a straight answer, because the obvious one is that you don’t need me.
I am the customer
Daily EV driver since 2023. I run out to the SENT landfill regularly and drive across Hong Kong for meetings, so I charge on the public network in the same conditions your customers do. Every assumption on this site is one I have tested with my own money at a real bay.
I have built the other side
Eight solar-powered sensor poles across the haul roads of the SENT landfill for Veolia — off-grid batteries sized for seven days, a UPS on the compliance-critical circuit, IP65 enclosures, delivered to the operator’s access and PPE rules alongside live waste operations. I also built g63m, my own Hong Kong vehicle-data system. A charging site is the same class of problem: power, enclosures, connectivity, uptime, on somebody else’s operating site.
And shipped it fast
Purchase order came in late November. Everything was specified and ordered inside a month. The client’s own programme then slipped into February, so we went on site mid-February and had all eight poles installed and handed over before the end of March 2025.
About six weeks on a live site, and roughly four months from order to handover including a client-side delay. It is still under paid annual maintenance.
And it changed something
The client reported an 11.6% fall in speeding violations after deployment. Instrument a site, change a behaviour, prove it with a number. That is the same shape as what I am proposing here, on a different asset.
Before that, four years as an HKT field engineer on live sites — the airport, the Exchange, the Police Force. A PolyU data science degree, an HKU MBA finishing now, and in 2025 I built the Hong Kong charging-pattern analysis for EV-BOY, who run the territory’s real-time charging map. So I have seen roughly what this data looks like at scale, from the outside.
| An IT analyst | Can query anything you ask for. The gap here isn’t querying — it’s knowing that a charge curve flattening at 80% is a commercial fact, and that a demand charge is fixed. That comes from standing on sites and driving the cars. |
| Someone from CLP | Would know the tariff far better than I ever will. But CLP sells the electricity, and this finding is about buying less of it more carefully. That is structurally the other side of the table. |
| A charging operator | Knows charging, and has no forecourt, no shop, no wash and no service bay — so the only instrument they have is price. The whole argument on this site is about the things a pure charging business doesn’t own. |
| A consultant | Delivers a snapshot that is true the day it lands and stale a quarter later. This data drifts every month. |
A small standing team — one lead, three part-time analysts, tooling. HK$966,000 a year, no capital. But the tariff question alone doesn’t justify four people, and I wouldn’t pretend otherwise. What it tests is whether there is a continuing pipeline of decisions worth measuring: utilisation, pricing, retail attachment, site selection.
It would need a Shell owner carrying the number, not a team sitting beside the business. If nobody inside wants to own it, that is a good reason not to do it.
And a stated failure condition: if a redemption pulls less than about HK$220 of extra forecourt spend, the reward scheme doesn’t pay, and I’d say so in writing.
All public sources: Shell’s own station locator and Recharge pages; EPD register of public chargers; CLP 2026 tariff tables and HK Electric published tariffs; Cornerstone Technologies (SEHK GEM:8391) audited accounts; LegCo Environmental Affairs Panel, Sept 2025. Nothing from inside Shell.