Two mid-century books, neither about electricity, explain more about EV charging economics than most contemporary energy strategy. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful (1973) argued that technology should be scaled to people and place rather than centralized for its own sake. Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale’s Topsoil and Civilization (1955) traced how societies collapse when they draw down a slow-regenerating resource faster than it replenishes, all while mistaking the drawdown for prosperity. Read together, they describe a discipline that EV infrastructure advocates have mostly ignored. So far.
Start with the gigantism problem. The prevailing charging narrative fixates on the highway-adjacent DC fast-charging hub: high power, high visibility, high capital intensity. It is the electric analogue of the petrol station, and it inherits the petrol station’s assumption that fuelling is an event you drive to. Schumacher would have recognized the reflex immediately. Bigger, faster, more centralized reads as progress, but it concentrates capital, concentrates risk, and serves the network’s convenience rather than the driver’s actual pattern of life.
Most charging does not need to be an event. The majority of kilometres are added while a vehicle sits idle anyway, at work, at home, at the places people already spend hours. Level 2 charging, modest in unit power and unglamorous in spec, matches that reality. This is Schumacher’s “technology with a human face”: small units, embedded where people are, resilient through distribution rather than concentration. A network of a thousand slow chargers fails gracefully. A handful of megawatt hubs fails hard.
The distributed model also solves an adoption problem that scale worsens. When the charger costs the host nothing to install and the driver nothing to use, the barrier to seeding infrastructure into a workplace car park or a multi-unit residential building nearly disappears. “Free” here is not a subsidy dressed up as generosity. It is honest pricing that reflects where the value actually originates, which brings us to the second book.
Topsoil and Civilization is a catalogue of invisible depletion. Carter and Dale’s central and uncomfortable observation is that erosion was usually invisible to the societies living through it. The loss was gradual, deferred, and unpriced, so it never appeared in any ledger a farmer or a treasury consulted. Fields yielded crops, cities grew, and all the while the resource base thinned underneath, until it entirely failed. The failure was not appetite. It was accounting. The cost was real but was simply never made legible in time to change behaviour.
Fuel carbon intensity is the same category of cost. The climate impact of a litre of conventional fuel is real, deferred, and, absent policy, unpriced. It sits outside the ledger exactly the way eroding topsoil did. This is precisely the correction that Canada’s Clean Fuel Regulations and British Columbia’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard are built to make. They assign a price to carbon intensity and generate compliance credits when a lower-intensity alternative displaces a higher-intensity one. Delivering electricity to an EV instead of petrol to a combustion engine produces those credits. The mechanism turns a slow, deferred cost into a present-day number.
That reframing matters for how the economics are read. A charger monetized through compliance credits is not a revenue-extraction device bolted onto a host’s property. It is an instrument that makes previously invisible depletion legible, and pays for the infrastructure out of the value that legibility unlocks. The host is not a customer to be billed. The driver is not a wallet. Both are participants in a system whose economics run on displaced carbon intensity, not on transaction fees skimmed at the plug. On a deployed-asset basis, those credits carry the contribution margin. The centralized, event-based model has no equivalent mechanism and must recover its capital the old-fashioned way, from the driver, at the point of use.
There is a caution embedded in both books worth keeping close as any of this scales. Schumacher was wary of intermediate institutions growing until they lose the human face that justified them. Carter and Dale were wary of prosperity that obscures the resource it is quietly spending. For distributed charging, the two warnings converge on one point. The financial engineering that makes this model investable, the securitization structures and credit-forward instruments, is legitimate and necessary, but it is scaffolding around a physical fact: real energy delivered to real vehicles, displacing real carbon intensity. When the scaffolding starts to feel like the building, both authors would tell you to walk the fields and check the soil.
The infrastructure worth building is the kind that is scaled to how people actually live and honest about what it actually costs the planet. Two authors working decades before the first mass-market EV understood this principle. The question is whether the industry deploying the chargers does.
