[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host, Amara Rosgas, and we're talking today to Brandon Reynolds and Eric Grattinger from Peter Basso Associates.
And today we're continuing the conversation about electric vehicle charging stations.
Specifically, we'll be discussing how to determine whether a charging station is correct in specific applications.
And last time we touched on this topic, PBA's Brandon Reynolds joined us. But this time we're also speaking to Eric Grettinger. Hello, gentlemen.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Good morning.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: Yes, great to be here.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Well, let me quickly introduce both of you. Brandon is an associate with PVA based out of Michigan. As electric vehicles begin to evolve and charging stations become necessary design components to projects, Brandon has led the research on how EV charging stations work, who manufactures them, and what types of connectors different vehicles use, and the requirements of the National Electrical Code.
Eric is a VP with PBA and has been with the firm for more than 25 years. He serves as the technical resource for PBA's electrical engineers and designers and for the community.
Eric has owned multiple electric vehicles since 2017, giving him some hands on knowledge when using charging infrastructure. So, Brandon and Eric, thank you so much for joining me and getting a little bit deeper into this topic.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: Thanks for the opportunity.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Excellent, excellent. So, Eric, when I spoke to Brandon last, he had mentioned that there's a lot to consider in selecting the right EV charging solution. Can you summarize a little bit here?
[00:01:44] Speaker C: Sure, be happy to.
Often people think this is a pretty simple issue, but there's a lot of questions we'll ask to try and get to the final solution.
We like to start by understanding the motivation of our clients. You know, why are they interested in EV charging for their facility? It could be an employee amenity, philosophical choice, a money saving opportunity, or some combination of those.
Once we get a feel for the reasons, we start digging in to the needs by asking more questions.
Things like, how long will the cars be there and be able to charge? What are the daily miles driven by those cars? How many cars need to charge daily? What are your plans for the future, future expansion? Then we'll start getting some of the technical issues with the charging. You know, is this provided free or do you need to be able to take payment? What kind of charging speeds do you need? We can usually help guide them on those selections and any options for the chargers, such as single or shared load chargers, wire management. Then we'll look at the local ordinances to see if there's any requirements there. Some municipalities we're seeing start to require charging or at least prep for charging in certain building types, like multifamily. If it's an existing building, we want to look at available power capacity in that building. Sometimes we'll do some electrical metering to determine their max demand.
But the end goal is really to take a complicated issue and narrow down options by understanding our clients needs. That's where we feel PBA brings value and experience to those clients that are new to dealing with this issue.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: Okay, okay, got it. So, Brandon, in addition to these suggestions, are there other codes or ordinances that require EV charging?
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Most of the regulation at this point occurs on the local ordinance level.
Certain codes are starting to get on board with what EV charging is and what best to regulate. This has been changing with every code cycle. There's always something new about EV charging in terms of actually requiring chargers at a location.
It's mostly up to local cities to determine what they require.
For the most part, these ordinances, if they do apply, require a certain percentage of parking spots to have EV chargers installed, others to have conduit and wire on the ground, or others just to be ready for them. So just, just conduit going to those parking spots.
One example is Ann Arbor, Michigan. They're, they're one of the kind of, the biggest, the biggest proponents in our local area.
For example, they require higher education facilities to have 10% of their parking spots with EV chargers installed and then another 40% of parking spots to have conduit going to them for future EV chargers. So that's a pretty significant addition and can definitely drive up the cost of a new building or a new parking lot.
Now at this point, it's hard to say if this will become commonplace or if this is just a response to what trends appear to be going towards.
We have seen some of these regulations ease up a bit as the public has had some response to them.
So they might, we might settle out to something less than, less than 50% or it might go higher, it's hard to say. But regardless, it's just, it's important to check your local codes and authorities, no matter what your intents are for EV charging, because they can greatly, greatly impact what your project will end up costing.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Okay, so we know a little bit about planning for these EV charging stations. What's it like to own and maintain these charging stations? Brandon, I think you're probably the best one to ask there.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I wish I could say that EV chargers are flawless and all you have to do is install them and forget them, but unfortunately that's not the case.
When you install an EV charger that becomes part of your regular maintenance for, for the rest of that equipment's life.
Most of the times we see EV chargers have issues during startup. That's when a lot of the growing pains happen because I mean, it's a new piece of equipment in a new area. And so trying to get that to, to mesh well with where it's installed and how it's being utilized in that area, it takes some time to figure out.
And in addition, these issues will pop up here and there as they're owned.
These issues can range from not being able to communicate with the cloud, which might prevent people from charging.
There might be broken cords as people don't, don't put the cords back where they're supposed to go.
You might even have vandalism, not as common in our area, but we've heard reports of it.
Or they might just stop working without any reasonable explanation.
Sometimes it's as easy as just turning it off and turning it on again, the tried and true method. But other times you might need to get an electrician or even the manufacturer involved.
Now that could be kind of a pain to handle and kind of frustrating at times. But one thing to consider is that some manufacturers or third party companies have maintenance programs.
They will ensure that chargers remain operational for as long as possible and take care of some of these issues for you.
They can be costly, but they can also help ease some of the headaches of maintaining chargers.
Speaking of costs, if you want to have customers pay to charge, manufacturers will charge a license and processing fee, and that can be costly as well, depending on which manufacturer you go. With certain EV chargers, you can actually, if you don't like the cost program of one manufacturer, you can actually have a different software manufacturer work with the charger that you have on site. Not every manufacturer is compatible with this, but there are some options available and their payment methods might work better for your type of application.
All things to look into as you're. As you're looking to purchase an EV charger.
All that being said, unless you have high utilization of your charger, such as a parking lot in a downtown area or a fast charger along a major highway, you may not end up making much money, if at all. That's not to say you can't leverage charging to bring people to your business, it's just something to consider.
Now maybe, maybe you're not looking to make money off of this. Maybe you're using it for fleet vehicles. Maybe you're using it because you feel like it's the best thing to do for your clientele or for your employees. That's great. These are all just things to keep in mind.
Now, another thing to keep in mind as well is that when you're purchasing chargers, you might have some companies come up and they have the best charger at the lowest price available.
Unfortunately, they just, they might just be selling a service and they might just be purchasing a charger from somebody else giving it to you. That's totally okay. But again, it's just, just something, something to keep in mind because that charger may not be of the highest quality and that business may not have been in business for a long time and may not be in business for much longer. And then that leaves you with a charger that you're not able to maintain. So there's a lot to consider when it comes to maintaining these. It's definitely not simple, definitely not something that won't take up your time. But if you're aware of these issues going into it, they might help ease some of those concerns. And being prepared for that tension really goes a long way in dealing with these issues as they occur.
Right.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: It's definitely not a straightforward decision.
So, Eric, do you have any advice for people who aren't already adopting EV charging stations soon, but you know, want to keep their options open?
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:10:12] Speaker C: We still like to ask a lot of the questions I mentioned earlier and, and still get a feel for their future needs, even when they are just prepping for sometime in the future, possibly needing it. I tell clients that it's a. It's good to at least start thinking about prepping, particularly when you see a need in the future. It may not make sense for all facilities, but if there's a need, there's usually a great time to at least add conduits from the electrical room to the site for future use. If you're dealing with new construction or if they're just doing a parking lot repaving project or reconstruction of that parking lot, that that's a cheap time to put conduits in that that will save them a lot of money in the future for new facilities as well. Building in capacity into the electrical systems may be a good idea too, but a lot of times you'll inherently have some capacity built into a new facility as well. It really just depends on how they look into the future and how they see their needs identified.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: One of the benefits of some of these manufacturers, even if you don't project the way that you originally thought that you would use them, say if you Say oh well, we, we only anticipate needing 5% of parking spots. But then when you go to proceed with the project, your city's telling you you need 10% or maybe you see a need to go to 15% and your, your building just doesn't have the capacity and you don't have the money to afford an upgrade.
Some charger manufacturers, actually a lot of them have what's called an automatic load management system. And what you're able to do is that say you just need a lot of physical plugs, but you don't necessarily have the electrical capacity to back it up.
What it will do is that it will monitor the output of all of your chargers and then once you get close to that limit, the limit of your building's capacity, it will start to manage it. It will either ramp down the speed of charge for all chargers or it will tell other charge to stop vehicles, to stop charging and to allow capacity for other vehicles which need it more to charge.
These are all different ways to make it work. And that's the nice thing about having this kind of variability. But regardless, like Eric mentioned, if you're thinking about maybe doing it in the future, if you're working on any major project, keep it in mind, it's easier and cheaper to work on it now as you're already spending the money for these upgrades. But you know, regardless if you need help, there's always, there's always resources available between electricians, engineers, construction managers, who are all be willing and able to help you in solving the problem that you have. Right.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: And that real world hands on knowledge is extraordinarily helpful.
Eric, you actually have an electric vehicle, right?
[00:13:18] Speaker C: I do, I have a plug in hybrid is what we have, but definitely utilized a lot of level 2 charging infrastructure over the years.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Okay, so what kind of design issues have you seen with these EV charging stations that you would fix or avoid in your design?
[00:13:36] Speaker C: I mean there's a typical maintenance issues that, that we all know of that Brandon mentioned, you know, broken screens or just no power to the units or no communication.
Some of the more interesting ones I've, I've seen that have impacted some of the designs that we've done, you know, or just cable management often runs up. You know, if you don't have retractable cable management, a lot of times cords and plugs can end up subject to physical damage. I had one case where, you know, I wanted to charge up a car at charger and the adjacent car had, was parked on top of the cable.
So it was Preventing you from being able to reach the charge point so just not usable in that condition. Another was an interesting maintenance problem on an older style station.
A manufacturer very early on had a level 2 combination station with a receptacle in it so that if the Level 2 was in use, you could plug in your Level 1 charger into it. And it had a locking door mechanism to keep your charger, you know, which can be, you know, four, four to $500 to replace that comes with your car, keep it from walking off while you were plugged in, which is a nice feature. But in this case when I went to leave, wouldn't release the door so that I could get my charger out. So I had to find facilities managers and in that building and then eventually found another EV charger user who was able to try and start a session on that charger because mine was not letting me release it. And when he started a session, I was able to then scan my phone and it finally released my, you know, charging unit from the station. So it was about an hour of time spent trying to just leave. So really wasn't worth my 10 miles of range that I picked up while I was there for free. But you know, so interesting things happen when you get into that failure scenario, sometimes in the chargers. But it's all kind of a lessons learned that it's really good to have a maintenance plan in place when you have these at your facility so that the users don't have a frustrating experience using them.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Well, it sounds like you could start your own podcast about adventures and EV charging.
[00:16:10] Speaker C: Yeah, the goal is not to have adventures for at least for our clients, but they do happen.
[00:16:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, speaking of adventures, Brandon, you don't know me that well, but anyone who does know me knows that I love to travel. And I hear you're leaving on vacation soon.
[00:16:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I, I love to travel too. I mean, had I have I enough money and enough time, you probably wouldn't see me on this podcast. But that being said, I still love to, to talk with people. I still love to work, but every once in a while you just gotta, gotta get out, you gotta enjoy life. So I am, I'm taking my, my, my daughter, my wife and my son to Disney World. We're going to enjoy it with my daughter for the first time, my son for the second time. So it's going to be, going to be a fun time. We're really looking forward to it.
The nice thing is that, you know, we talk about driving less gas vehicles and driving more electric vehicles. Well at Disney I don't even need to drive so that it's the best of all.
[00:17:17] Speaker A: Agreed? Agreed. That sounds absolutely fantastic.
All right, well, that was Brandon Reynolds and Eric Grettinger from Peter Basso Associates talking about EV charging stations.
For more information on electrical engineering topics related to EV charging stations, visit consulting specifying
[email protected].
this was the second of a series of conversations about EV charging stations, so please check back for the next episode that will explore this topic in even more depth.
Thanks for listening and catch you next time.
