What Is the FCI Program? A Plain-English Guide for Charging Site Owners

FCI — Fast Charging Infrastructure — is the part of California's Low Carbon Fuel Standard that pays the owner of a DC fast charger based on the rated capacity of the equipment, not just the energy it dispenses. It exists because California decided that the bottleneck on EV adoption was capacity in the ground, and the LCFS market is the cleanest way to pay private capital to fix it.

Capacity-based crediting, in plain terms

Traditional LCFS dispensing credits scale with throughput. If your station has a slow first year, you get paid less. FCI inverts that: an eligible charger generates a credit allotment based on its rated kilowatts, paid quarterly, for as long as the equipment remains eligible. That makes the cash flow look less like a fuel-station P&L and more like a long-dated infrastructure asset.

Who is eligible

• Public DC fast chargers (typically ≥ 50 kW) located in California.
• Non-residential sites with public or fleet access.
• Properly permitted, networked, and able to report uptime data.
• Owned by an entity that can hold and trade LCFS credits (we handle this).

If you own the equipment — even if a third party operates it — you are usually the credit-eligible party. Long-term host agreements, including the typical Supercharger host arrangement, can also put the credits in the property owner's hands. The fact pattern matters, and we review it as part of a free estimate.

The CARB application

FCI participation requires a Fuel Pathway Application submitted to the California Air Resources Board, plus a metering plan and an Implementation Agreement covering each site. This is the step where most owners stall out. The forms are long, the rules update on a multi-month cadence, and a misfiled application can delay revenue by a full quarter.

Working with an aggregator collapses this into a single signature flow. We prepare the application, submit it under our Implementation Agreement, and onboard the site for quarterly reporting.

How payment works

Credits are generated quarterly, pooled across our managed portfolio, and sold into the LCFS OTC market. Proceeds are remitted to the site owner net of our success fee. There is no upfront cost. Our incentive is to maximize your credit price and minimize unbilled capacity, because that's how we get paid.

"FCI rewards owners for the capacity they put in the ground. The hardest part is the paperwork — which is exactly the part we handle."

What's changed lately

Application windows and verification requirements have tightened over the last two cycles. Beginning with the 2026 compliance year, electricity reporting requires directly metered data and third-party verification — a meaningful step up in operational discipline. Sites with clean metering already in place sail through. Sites without it can still qualify, but the meter plan needs to be designed correctly from day one.

Get a site assessment

Send us the addresses, charger counts, and rated power for your sites. We will tell you whether FCI is worth pursuing, what the ten-year credit stack looks like, and what the application path looks like for your specific equipment.

Credit prices fluctuate; actual revenue varies by site, utilization, and market conditions. Figures are illustrative.