Webinar: State of the Practice in EV Charging Station Site Design (Text Version)

This is a text version of Webinar: State of the Practice in EV Charging Station Site Design, presented on April 4, 2023.

Stephen Lommele, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Welcome to today's webinar. We're going to get started in just a second. Give you all a second to come on in. And welcome, everyone. For those of you who are joining, we're just waiting for a few more folks to trickle in, and we'll go ahead and get started.

All right. Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's Joint Office webinar focused on the state of practice in EV charging station site design. I'm Steve Lommele, and I'm the communications and education lead for the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation. Before we get started, just wanted to offer up a few housekeeping tips.

We are going to be taking questions today. We're going to have a facilitated question with the panelists, and controls are located at the bottom of your screen. So if they aren't appearing you can move your cursor to the bottom edge and you'll be able to submit questions using the Q&A window, and then we'll pose those to the panelists.

If you don't get a question answered today, I've got a slide here in introduction, but we ask that you submit those questions to us via driveelectric.gov. We have a contact form. We can take those questions in and send them to our technical response service and get an answer for you. Also, we are going to be recording the webinar. So if you do speak today, you consent to being recorded and use of your voice or image.

So I want to start out with a quick introduction to the Joint Office. We've got our Executive Director, Gabe Klein, with us. Gabe has been with the Joint Office since last September, and has been leading us through our important work with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program.

Hopefully you've all seen the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program is now open as well, we're working with communities around the country to make sure that folks are aware of that opportunity to deploy charging infrastructure along corridors and in communities, as well as other alternative fueling infrastructure. We're so excited to have Gabe with us today, and Gabe, just wanted to turn it over to you to offer up a welcome.

Gabriel Klein, Joint Office of Energy and Transportation: Great. Thank you, Steve. Thanks, everybody, for coming, National Renewable Energy Lab, New York City DoT, EVgo, for coming to share their experiences. I think station design and site design are absolutely crucial. We're learning. We've had webinars on working with your utilities which are obviously central to this as well.

But as we put out the CFI grants and we're moving more into the urban and metropolitan region implementation of electric charging, it's just a different ball of wax. It's a different context, different complexities at the curb or in parking garages or multimodal hubs, and we know that cities and urban areas want to ideally dig once. They want to look at how do we light up an entire area neighborhood, census tract, curb, parking area? And so I'm really excited to stay and listen to these folks that have been doing this work, and can provide some shared expertise and some benchmarks, whether it's a station-based charging, pole-based charging.

So thank you again for coming. Know that we are here to help all of you that have dialed in. We've got 350 heading towards 400 people that are here to watch this, and we're trying to be more proactive, to provide more information like this on a weekly basis. Thanks to our host and comms director Steve Lommele who's been hard at work with his team and folks at NREL to put this together.

And if you don't get all your questions answered, because I know people throw lots of questions in the Q&A, don't worry, we'll get to as many as we can, but we can always reach out afterwards and you can always reach out to us on our website at driveelectric.gov to get individual questions answered as well. Thank you so much, and back to you, Steve.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Thanks so much, Gabe. And again, welcome, all of you. Just a quick highlight here of the Joint Office. As many of you probably know, we bring together the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and our mission is really focused on developing an electrified transportation system that is affordable, convenient, equitable, reliable, and safe, and hopefully resulting in a future where everyone can ride and drive electric.

We talked a little bit about this in some of the intro. Gabe mentioned this as well. But the Joint Office supports four main program areas. We've got the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, which is $5 billion for states to build out a national electric vehicle charging network along highway corridors. The Year 1 and 2 plans for this program have been approved. So if you visit driveelectric.gov, you can see the individual state EV deployment plans there. Every single state put together a plan for how they plan to invest this money to build out charging infrastructure along designated corridors.

And then of course, the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, that is also now live, and the deadline to apply for that program is May 30th, and that's $2.5 billion in community and corridor grants for EV charging, as well as hydrogen natural gas, propane, and fueling infrastructure.

And then the Joint Office also supports the DOT's Low or No Emissions grants program for transit, and the EPA'S Clean School Bus Program. The Joint Office really is focused on providing technical assistance for these programs, making sure that you all have the resources you need to be successful, and deploying charging infrastructure.

As Gabe mentioned, thinking about digging once: How can you potentially leverage these programs along with other efforts that you have going on to ensure that we're creating various mobility options, sustainable mobility options for people. So we're providing specialized assistance to states and communities and tribal nations as well as transit agencies and school districts.

We've been doing one-on-one meetings with state departments of transportation, specifically focused on NEVI. We're also responding to questions that come in from communities, with respect to the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program. We do have a concierge service, so there is a team of technical assistance experts.

I think we've got nearly 50 folks behind the scenes from 10 different organizations who are available to answer your questions about the various programs that I mentioned, as well as the technologies associated with the programs. So we encourage you to visit driveelectric.gov/technical assistance to learn more about the specific programs, and the resources that are available.

On driveelectric.gov, you can again submit questions, you can find out about upcoming webinars and important announcements from the Joint Office. We've got access to data and tools that can support infrastructure planning and implementation, and so again lots of resources on driveelectric.gov, and we encourage you to visit us there to learn more.

And then also wanted to really encourage you to subscribe to our email news alerts. So after today's webinar, we will be posting a recording on driveelectric.gov, but we're also going to send out an email to all subscribers on our email newsletter list, when that recording is available.

And then as I mentioned, we are going to be taking questions on today's webinar, and if you don't get your question answered today, I would really like you to submit that question to the Contact U.S. form. We'll have our concierge service take care of that, and we'll get back to you within a couple of days. So we really want to make sure, again, that we're getting you the resources you need to be successful.

With that, before we introduce our panelists, I want to ask a couple of questions just to get a sense for who we have on the call today. Justin, if you wouldn't mind pulling up the first poll question, please.

We're interested in understanding what sector you're from, and I'll give all of you a minute to go ahead and respond here, and then Justin, when we've got a critical mass, you could go ahead and show us the results once those responses are in, please.

Oh, wonderful. We've got a great mix here. Looks like we've got local, state, federal government folks, tribal governments, some folks from the nonprofit sector, as well as EV charging station operators, utilities, folks from universities, so great to see that.

And then Justin, I know we've got another poll question here if you wouldn't mind bringing that up for us, please. We're interested in understanding what region of the country you're from. Typically on these webinars, we've had pretty good representation from across the United States, hopefully the same today, so Justin, when we've got a critical mass here, if you wouldn't mind showing that as well too, please.

Great. Pretty evenly distributed here, so great to see that we've got representation, as well as a few folks internationally too, so welcome. Wonderful. With that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce you all to today's panelists.

So first off, we've got Cabell Hodge from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. And Cabell leads NREL's support for federal fleet electrification, in addition to other national and international efforts.

So he conducts [INAUDIBLE] which develops analysis and has authored several applications on topics including fleet electrification, electric vehicle supply, equipment installation, charging management, vehicle grid integration, battery electric buses, cybersecurity, all that stuff. And before joining NREL, Cabell was a policy advisor to the Colorado Energy Office, where he developed programs and policies to deploy alternative fuel vehicles and infrastructure.

And then we have Mark Simon from the New York City Department of Transportation. He's the director of EV policy there, and he's been working on EV initiatives for the past 25 years. Mark has a master's in science and public administration environment policy from NYU.

And then Marcy Bauer from EVgo. So Marcy is a senior vice president of program deployment at EVgo, which is the largest public fast charging network in the United States, and Marcy has been working in the clean transportation space for over 12 years, and her experience spans the entire sector, OEM engagement, consumer and fleet education, charging station, site development, and host engagement, as well as public policy utility engagement and industry analysis.

So we're really lucky today to have representation from a national lab, from a city department of transportation, as well as a large charging network. We're thrilled to have you all with us today and we really appreciate you joining us.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Cabell, who's got a few slides to present, and we'll move through brief introductory remarks and presentations from each of the panelists, and then we'll have some facilitated conversation. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, Cabell.

Cabell Hodge: All right. Thanks, Steve. Let me pull up these slides here. All right. How's that look?

Stephen Lommele: Looks good. Thank you.

Cabell Hodge: Great. So Steve already provided the introduction. I'm Cabell Hodge, also wanted to call out my colleague who's supported on a lot of this work that I'm going to talk about today, Ranjit Desai. I'm going to talk about EVSE site design support.

NREL has done a lot of EVSE planning dating back to at least 2017. We've supported federal fleet electrification planning, starting with the process of identifying fleet EV opportunities, to the part that you guys are probably more interested in, which is designing charging infrastructure.

We've designed EVSE plans for between 40 and 50 federal sites. We've also installed 127 EVSE ports on campus, including Level 2 chargers, DC fast chargers, bi-directional chargers, wireless chargers. Reviewed invoices from over 1,000 EVSE installations, including a whole bunch in the state of New York, and we manage a high powered charging lab that includes a couple of 350 kilowatt chargers, a 150 and a 50 kw.

DOE and DOD have jointly funded an NREL tool that we're hoping to get out there, and that's what I'm going to focus on as part of this talk to design EVSE installations and estimate their cost.

So this is the tool. It's getting close to rolling out. It's actually functional in a testing environment, but we're not planning on releasing it until June. It's called EVI-Locate, and it is a site design tool and cost estimation tool that is supposed to make the whole process of the early stages of EVSE design a whole lot easier.

You can really run the gamut with this. There are a lot of assumptions built into the tool, and so you can just drop some EVSE icons onto a map, and this will give you a basic design and a basic estimate, or you can provide a whole bunch of information on your transformers, the load service panels, meters, other equipment.

It will actually draw a line for you sort of around the parking lot. The lowest cost line for the EVSE installation, the tool is capable of identifying even between things like this green grass and this, which you probably can't tell, but is gray asphalt. It's capable of identifying what is what, and so figuring out where you need to trench, actually using infrared imagery in addition to the visual imagery.

So it's a really cool tool. The cost estimate part of it is really interesting because it provides a great amount of specificity. So it's based partly on data from RS Means, it's currently designed for the federal government, and so it uses EVSE that's [INAUDIBLE].

Stephen Lommele: Cabell, looks like we got some video freezing. We're going to stop your video here. If we're unable to get Cabell back right here in a second, we can move on to Mark and then come back to Cabell. That sounds great. Let's see. Can we pull up Mark's slides, and we'll come back to Cabell in a minute? Mark, sorry to put you on the spot right now. You ready to jump in?

Mark Simon: Yeah, I guess so.

Stephen Lommele: Thanks so much. We'll turn it over to you. Again, Mark Simon with the New York City Department of Transportation.

Mark Simon: Yeah, good afternoon, everyone. I just have a few slides and some show and tell. I mostly want to say I am addressing this like I imagine many of you. I'm a policy guy, and I was thrust into capital construction, and experiencing this in real time for the first time as I built the first few sites. So next slide, please.

So we'll start. I'll skip the arduous process of site identification and everything, but we basically came up with about 40 sites that are primarily city-owned parking lots and fields, and we did site investigations of them to find the most cost effective and—our goals were to make sure we had a distribution across the city. And next slide.

So we ranked things and we looked at a variety of issues in terms of how likely were we to succeed with this, how accessible it was. Was it visible ownership? And we ultimately selected developing sites on our own parking lots and fields as a first step. Next slide.

So step one, as everyone has said, is start working with your utility, and so we submitted load letters for 16 sites with the hopes of getting the first seven of them up and started, so that's where we were, and that was our short list on the right of sites. So we prioritized sites that were easily developed, the power was nearby and sufficient, and we could do it within our budget. Next slide.

Now I had seen some interest before in specific design. Now the first two sites we've done, the chargers are pull-in on the edges of two parking garages. Now in this site that's under construction right now, it's actually a parking field, and we felt that it was so tight that to have them as pull-in it did not—just created more trouble than it was worth for fast chargers. So we are doing a drive-through model, and if you look in the center where the arrows are going around, that's where the drive-through charging will be, and on the left hand side is the extra space for ADA compatibility.

And in the bottom right is where the electrical equipment would be, so and then up on top is we're going to have a few Level 2s in association. But we'll have four drive-through chargers there, and there'll be—well, three of them are going to be 75 kw, and one is going to be 150 kw. Next slide.

Now here are just some examples of things we did and problems we encountered. So if you start on the upper right, this was very fortunate because we were able to run the conduit along the side of the building, which saved a huge trenching project.

So the power came in way down at the far end there, and we could do that because we had this historic wall that kept this from being viewed as an exterior wall. And an exterior wall, this should be encased in concrete if it's on the—before you get to the meter. But because of that, we were able to do that and run it on the outside, and then right where it comes in is where we put the electrical room.

And then down below, you see where it's coming out, and where ultimately the chargers would be. Now right where the arrow is there, you're going to see a mistake that we made. When we originally designed it, we wanted to use these spaces closest to the entrance to the garage.

However, once we actually did the final layout and the design and with the actual equipment in place, and by the time you put the cement pads on the bollards, it was going to cause vehicles to extend into the access to the garage. So that was—we felt was unsafe, and we ultimately switched to these first two spaces and made them Level Twos where it was just a wall mounted charger and put the fast chargers further away.

So just be careful, when you're designing for that the extra space, that the cement pad and the bollards would take. We had thought about doing the chargers on the side, not in front, but that also did not—works with the space we had.

And then up on the top left, this is—maybe it's not for all of you, but if you're in a dense urban environment with a lot of old stuff, as they were trenching they found a pipe, and who knows—does anyone know what this pipe does and what its services? Can we cut this pipe?

And bottom line, no one did know, and we basically went underneath the pipe. So you're going to get delays. You're going to get snags. This has happened—this happened on my first site, so expect the unexpected. Next slide.

Then as we go, so we start in the upper left there. That's the layout prior to installing the concrete pads and leveling everything out, but we had the chargers in place and where you see the bollards there on the far left, you know that we remove those bollards to create the space for the ADA spot, because right next to those was just a space that wasn't suitable for parking, but it was suitable for pedestrian use.

Jumping to the—actually I'll start at the bottom. The bottom right here, when you're thinking of an electrical room, we're building in garages or parking fields where there is no significant power coming in. So it's all new. If you're fortunate enough to be working with a building where there's a 16480 power and you can tap that, you have a much simpler problem, but we have to do everything.

We have to transform, we were bumping the power up, we have switch gear. This is the amount of equipment we needed to operate the four chargers and the space it took.

So as you're planning your parking facility, assume you may need this much space, and there may be corners that you're not using for parking, so you don't lose as many spots to that. But you can end up with a lot of equipment. And then above that, that's getting just the inspection, the utility has to inspect multiple times.

Another issue on the bottom left, where the power comes to your site, the point of entry. You have to put in a property line box, and we had challenges. We had construction folks who felt that the property line box was sufficient as it was, until we went to actually do the work in which case it wasn't sufficient. So we had to then pull the property box, put it in a bigger property line box. These are all issues that will come up as you're doing this. So next slide.

But ultimately, it does get done, and you can have a nice press opening, and I thank you.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Thanks so much, Mark, and exciting to see the final product there too. It looks like we have Cabell back on, so I'm going to go ahead and share his slides for him and he'll finish up. Apparently, his utility decided to replace his meter in the middle of the Zoom, so sorry about that. I've got your slides up, Cabell, if you're able to talk.

Cabell Hodge: Yeah, I am. Can you hear me all right?

Stephen Lommele: Yes.

Cabell Hodge: Yeah, I'm back on my phone. So just cover this really quickly and sorry about that, guys. I just wanted to say that the EVI-Locate tool has a whole lot of detail in terms of the cost estimate. There are going to be some higher-level graphs, but I just want to show you guys what information we have here, and what we're able to provide.

And as part of this, we've been using invoices in order to validate the information that we're getting. And so if you guys have invoices on your EVSE installation, we would love to see them. The next couple of slides are really just informational for you guys for sort of more resources, so EV-AMP stands for EVs As Mobile Power.

We're looking at bidirectional charging specifically for whether it can provide backup power for Army, National Guard readiness centers, but the idea is that we're looking into bidirectional charging. We see a lot of potential in it in terms of the vehicle-to-building, maybe even more so than a vehicle-to-grid.

And then the last slide that I have here is just a series of brief videos. So if you guys are wondering what we're talking about or are looking for some sort of basic information in a quick-hit sort of format or you want to share this with somebody else, I highly recommend you guys checking out that link right there. energy.gov/ere/carelectri vehicle training. And that's it for me.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Thanks so much Cabell, and sorry you got disconnected earlier. We are going to now turn to Marcy Bauer from EVgo to tell us a little bit about her experience, and then we'll go ahead and get into some questions, which I'm excited about. So Marcy, over to you.

Marcy Bauer: Great. You can just click it right through to the next one. Thank you so much. So EVgo is one of the largest public DC fast charger networks in the U.S., even bigger when you count all of those little dots on the map that are roaming partner chargers in the mix.

Our network has been 100% renewable energy powered since 2019. That's through a mix of what's naturally in the grid, plus some renewable energy credit purchases. And on this slide that you're seeing, really just a fraction of our site host partners. These are host partners that host our chargers, but really since our founding in 2010, we've cultivated strong partnerships across the entire charging ecosystem, and I'll get into the ecosystem in a moment. So just building partnerships left and right, whether it's hosting chargers or utilities that hopefully don't come and turn your meter off in the middle of a—in the middle of a panel session.

So we are primarily focused on deployment of fast charging in public spaces where people really need that quick and convenient charge session, as well as on supporting fleets with the variety of services and the various core competencies that we've built up over the past so many years.

Serving the fleet partners is either directly through behind-the-fence charging, or with mixed use hubs that will serve both public and fleet needs. So think, for that second one, think Uber and Lyft where you've got sort of a pseudo fleet operating out amongst the public as well, and you need larger sites to be able to serve both of those needs. You can go to the next slide.

So I mentioned the charging ecosystem and this is kind of what I'm talking about here. A couple of years ago, we were finding that our construction timelines—actually in construction, doing the bulk of the construction work—really just takes six to nine weeks total, which isn't a lot, it's a pretty straightforward installation project, but the rest of the time, all the other pieces of coordination that needed to happen to get a charger from, hey, that's a great site for a charger, all the way to the end stage of having someone be able to plug-in and get their charging session completed, that was stretching out to be on the order of eight or more months, which is insane.

What should really be six weeks in construction, maybe six months total for the whole cycle, was stretching out to 12 and 18, or even more months than that. So we pulled together a couple of years ago, all of the stakeholders in the charging ecosystem, which you can see represented here, and under the—not included here actually which for us.

I guess contractors see better design and build contractors kind of lumped in under one there. But we pulled them all together and really started to identify and attack the friction points, where the grip was kind of finding its way into our flywheel. And come up with solutions together—best practices, process tweaks, you name it. And then roll those out together.

So that's what we've—in tandem with actually deploying chargers left and right. We've been working with stakeholders across the ecosystem to improve things, and make it easier to get these fast chargers out there faster.

So I just wanted to give a little plug to that is on efforts are ongoing. And this year, earlier this year, we recognized our first cycle of what we call EV Charging heroes. And these are organizations representing different elements of the flywheel here of the ecosystem. And they're already putting in place some of those best practices and realizing the benefits of them. So it's utilities that are applying dedicated resources to EV Charging projects that permitting authorities—that are having streamlined processes at site hosts that are setting targets and meeting them for numbers of their properties or percents of their properties that have EV charging hosted there. Whether it's EVgo or not, we don't—I mean, we kind of care.

But we want to recognize those efforts as they come to fruition. So that's sort of our pride and joy program, which pulls everything together to try and streamline and make things easier. And it represents all of those years of building core competencies and learning through some of the mistakes that were mentioned earlier as well. We've made plenty. And just trying to perfect this plane that we're building while we fly it.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Marcy. Mark and Cabell, if you're able to come back on, we've got some questions. Go ahead and turn your videos on. And we'll start working on some of these questions—a lot of questions regarding accessibility of stations, particularly with respect to the Americans with Disabilities Act. How have you approached that?

I know that the Access Board has been working on resources. We've got some guidelines on driveelectric.gov. And I think there's going to continue to be more resources around this in the future. But what has been your experience with the stations that you've deployed with respect to ADA?

Marcy Bauer: This is me?

Stephen Lommele: Go for it.

Marcy Bauer: I guess. OK.

Mark Simon: You put more in.

Marcy Bauer: So it's been varied. We've been deploying all over the U.S. And of course, California came out with fairly strict rules way ahead of the rest of the U.S. And they're rolling their way eastward from there.

But it is tricky when we look at the prospect of installing, especially DC fast chargers. Everyone sees a great, big lot. Especially in slightly less dense areas, it's a great, big lot. You think you can install anywhere. Why would you pick there? So we'll get nudged around the lot by the site hosts themselves—underground services to avoid overhead services to avoid, and of course, ADA considerations, which is what the question is about.

We do have to consider past path of travel. And some jurisdictions consider the destination to be the charging. Others consider the storefront, the retail centers to be the destination. And we have to create a path of travel to one or the other. They're at the charger. They're at the charger. But if the jurisdiction is interpreting it the other way, then we've got to create that path to the storefront.

And so there's a lot of different considerations that are baked into that. But we need to make sure our units are all designed to be ADA-compliant for reach and things like that. But yeah, it's increasingly—it's always been important. But it's important to spreading and definitely amplifying as we work to deploy chargers nationwide.

Stephen Lommele: Mark, anything to add there based on your experience?

Mark Simon: Well, just some of the things to look out for, like in a garage, we were building their ramps. A lot of the charging—the vehicle parking is on ramps. And the ramp, the angle was insufficient to meet ADA guidelines. So we had to deal with that and adjust the design for that.

And otherwise, yeah, the reach works. But it's not crystal clear because you have the equipment. Then you have how you install that equipment and making sure that the bollards don't interfere with accessing. It could use some more clarity, let's put it that way.

Stephen Lommele: And I know one of the participants asked about specific station design guidelines. And the Access Board does have some specific guidelines. And those are on driveelectric.gov. So for those questions related to the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, we'll put a link in the chat to that page on driveelectric.gov.

But I don't know. You have all started to touch on just the nature of different use cases for charging, right, Mark? You're installing charging infrastructure in municipal garages right now. I knew you've been thinking about curbside. Marcy at EVgo has installed a variety of charging infrastructure along highway corridors, on curb sides, community charging. Cabell, I know you've got varied experience here, too.

Mark Simon: I was just going to add that we actually have curbside installed. We have 100, 120 charge spots or 116 charge spots in operation in the city as part of a demonstration program with ConEd.

Stephen Lommele: And how is that going?

Mark Simon: It's going really well. We hope to have an evaluation out covering the first year of operation. Utilization's exceeding expectations. The vandalism has not been the issue. Still, there's some challenges with icing or illegal parking in the spots. But then maintenance is—O&M has been good on those.

Stephen Lommele: And Mark, we had a follow-up question related to car sharing. And I suppose this could also cross over to ride hailing, too. But with the curbside spots, are you thinking about car sharing and having some dedicated curbside spots to support our car share vehicles?

Mark Simon: That is currently an active, active discussion here about how to work with the car sharing and would the responsibility be on us to develop that charging, or the car share operator. But I would expect to see some plans around that fairly shortly.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Well, Cabell, you presented us with a variety of tools when you're walking through. And we had a question here. I know you talked about being able to identify costs associated. Do you have anything that can help calculate the profitability or feasibility of independently-owned DC fast charging stations?

Cabell Hodge: You know, it's interesting. That has not been the factor. That has not been exactly what we've looked at. The one thing that we do have built into there is, as part of the installation, the project costs and the project overhead. And those are basically—you can manipulate those and set them in terms of how much money you could make installing the EVSE. But it's not like how much money you would make over time. So I guess the short answer is no.

Stephen Lommele: But Marcy, I imagine that's something that you think about pretty closely when you're installing charging infrastructure, working with site hosts, and all that to think about what the utilization of that station looks like over time.

Marcy Bauer: Oh, definitely, yeah. It's foundational to our network plan. So before we even get started talking with a host, we'll look at where we think utilization—where utilization is. Where do we need a little bit of a relief valve because chargers are actually heading toward being overutilized. You don't want queueing. And that will create some friction for the driver, right?

But certainly, when we're going into new areas, that's the first and foremost consideration—where do we think the utilization demand is going to be? That's the big bubble. And then we'll narrow it down from there within that geography, where is there a site that fits the bill on making it.

Charging needs to be fast. It needs to be abundant. It needs to be reliable, conveniently placed, and pleasant to use—and so what site fits the bill for all of that?

Stephen Lommele: Mark, you mentioned, in municipal garages, you've got pull-through spots right now. Is the expectation for those that drivers would pull up, wait with their car at those or not go far, and then move along pretty quickly for the DC fast charging?

Mark Simon: Yeah, exactly. In terms of power on the highway, when we talk about the 150 kW spec, yeah, certainly on a highway where you're moving quickly. That's pretty important.

I think in New York City sometimes, people want to run a quick errand. And maybe they need a few more minutes. So using a slightly lower power like 75 kW gives them a chance to run a local errand. Our garages are usually in areas with amenities or shopping nearby. So we expect them to either be in the car or back in 20 minutes kind of thing.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Let's see. One, you know—I imagine the municipal parking garage has some space limitations in general, just being able to get in there in terms of height and that kind of thing. But as you're thinking, all of you, about evolving needs of electric vehicles, we've seen a lot of pickup trucks starting to come in the market that could be towing trailers, campers, that kind of thing. How are you all thinking about building charging sites around accommodating larger personal vehicles that may be towing a trailer?

Marcy Bauer: I'll dive in for that one. I imagine New York City is tough for that. Probably also a little bit lower use case downtown. But it's a tough one. It takes up more space. Remember, I said, we start with a whole big parking lot. And then we get nudged around a lot and have to find the right spot to avoid all of the other things, take into consideration site host concerns.

Several of our partners—of course, General Motors is one of our flagship partners. And they're very interested in making sure that trucks can access the chargers conveniently. But it does take up more space to turn a traditional parking lot from something that's head in or angled or maybe it's pseudo-pull through because there's nothing blocking the two aisles. But it's not really designed for true pull through. And we're having to create that and hack our way at it a little bit as well as find natural fits.

Our partners in Pilot Flying J are also interested in that. And so we're able to find some sites where we can create or find a natural fit, where we're just making use of the layout that they already have. But it's tough. And it does impact site design.

And to make matters even more complicated, it's not just a matter of taking up the space, finding and taking up the space with the host, but also the charge port locations are different on every vehicle. So you're having to make sure that as you're designing that for pull through, you also still have that cable reach, look physically, not even—there's the ADA cable reach piece.

But there's also just the fact of, does the cable reach from the charger to the vehicle that has its port in a different location. And all of those factor in heavily to how we place our chargers within a site and, in fact, the sites that we look at from the start.

Stephen Lommele: Yeah, Cabell, I know that you've worked with a number of federal agencies to deploy charging infrastructure on federal campuses and at DOD facilities, that kind of thing. What kind of use cases are you all looking at? And how does that factor into the site design?

Cabell Hodge: Yeah, so we mostly are looking at applications for the fleet vehicles themselves. And a lot of those are light duty. Some of them do end up being some of the heavy-duty vehicles like buses and things. And in a lot of cases though, that's the same vehicles that are always coming back to the chargers. So it's a little bit easier to say, this is how we're going to design it.

So it's not like Marcy's case where you needed a charging station that could possibly work for any number of applications. But you kind of have a bit of an idea going into it. So that's been nice.

We've also been looking at a lot of the privately-owned vehicles and trying to support those—so basically, workplace charging. And that is a little bit more flexible. But again, that's manageable enough from a design perspective. That's actually where the ADA requirements tend to come in more heavily.

And actually, I want to jump back to one of your earlier questions about the earlier question about ADA and mention the Access Board document is terrific and explains a whole lot of things. One thing it really doesn't touch on is the number of charging stations required to be ADA-accessible.

And California has rules on those. They're also present in some of the other, more local building codes and even zoning. And so it's really important to check with whoever your authority is, having jurisdiction when looking at installing charging stations, to understand whether you fall under that purview and what exactly they're looking at there.

Stephen Lommele: Yeah, thanks, Cabell. Important note to always think about working with those authorities having jurisdiction. I don't know. So we talked a little bit about pull through stations, thinking about vehicles with trailers.

But that just brings to mind, like, a lot of the stations that we're seeing going in right now are meeting the needs of the vehicles that are on the road and what we're seeing growing interest in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles. How do you design a station so that it works now but could potentially be future-proofed to meet the needs of vehicles in the future?

Marcy Bauer: You're talking about specifically medium/heavy-duty or just free-for-all, any type of vehicle of the future?

Stephen Lommele: I think generally, like future-proofing, right? Maybe you build a four-port station now, but you know that utilization is going to increase, that you may have medium-duty, heavy-duty vehicles in the future. So what do you think about when you think about future-proofing?

Marcy Bauer: Yeah, so first and foremost, we'll look for areas where just physical space exists to be able to expand. So we're trying to not start off with super small lots to begin with whenever we have the choice to make. Within that, we'll run extra oversized conduit. We'll stub up so that we basically can just come behind down the road and just plunk chargers down if we can.

And we're also already implementing various assortments of power sharing capability because to some extent, we're deploying 100- to 350-kilowatt chargers. And so that 350 kilowatt is already a measure of future-proofing because very few cars on the road can take that charge rate. And so we're doing that with elements of power sharing so that once there is sort of a critical mass of 350 kilowatt—of vehicles that can actually take that max charge rate, the chargers are already there. And we can dial back the sharing component and then upgrade from there on.

The medium/heavy-duty application, by and large, is going to wind up—it's rare. You see a food or bev, a large food or bev delivery vehicle pull up to your gas station. Most of that's going to be behind-the-fence or depot-type charging services. And we are working with a couple of food and bev delivery entities on that. Most of the fleets are dipping toes in on the more medium-duty, lighter delivery, more regional delivery. And so a lot of that is slower charging in depot overnight.

But certainly, as the vehicles come out—you know, Tesla's got theirs. There's a lot of excitement in the sector writ large. So once the vehicles come out in a way that can expand and would require us to expand beyond that slow, overnight, depot charging, then that's definitely on the radar.

Cabell Hodge: Yeah, right. Marcy made some great points there. I would add to that—the power capacity, especially if you're looking at a new service drop from the utility, just oversizing that.

And also on the medium- and heavy-duty side specifically, we're working on a new megawatt-plus charging standard. And so it's possible for some of those long-haul tractors where we really hope to go into, like the Tesla semi that she was alluding to, those ultimately might require a completely different charging type. And so there's no real way you can future-proof with the existing light-duty standard and make sure that that's going to address the needs of the Tesla semis. That just might be a different market altogether. I mean, you might be talking about new substations and things like that to support. And you're not going to spend that money for light-duty charging right now.

Marcy Bauer: Yeah, for sure. We may be talking about pentagram or snake-arm charger type deployment, all manner of things. Just real quick though on the utility oversizing piece, I just want to caution—I mean, that's a great idea. We definitely try to do that wherever we can. We certainly oversize our gear on our side of the meter. But it's not at all uncommon for us to run into utilities that can't or won't oversize the service. So that's just something to be aware of. It's a great idea.

But then on the flip side of that, we're actually seeing longer lead times for the larger transformers. So there's this push-pull experience that we're having right now where yes, certainly, where we can, we would want to oversize the service. But then that would add 18 months of lead time or 6 to 18 months of lead time on that particular transformer. So there's this pull of initially going smaller with the service, at least initially, just so we can have the site live and then expanding it, increasing it later.

So certainly, we have managed to sidestep a large part of the supply chain constraints that met lots of industries nationwide, globally last year. But the transformer lead times have crept out pretty substantially. So without any kind of strategic reserve in that area, we have a conflict there. We want to oversize where they'll let us, which is not everywhere. But we have an immediate need to get those chargers live. And sometimes that means asking for, actually, a smaller transformer.

Stephen Lommele: OK. And Mark, I know you were talking just about the infrastructure that you've installed. You have load letters that you have with the Con Edison, for example. And those are based on the loads that you expect for the infrastructure installing and not necessarily for future-proofed.

Mark Simon: We do future-proof as well. Once again, ConEd needs to discuss that. An example, we're building out the four fast chargers right now and a couple of Level 2's. But I know we have plans and a separate grant that's funding coming in for another 20 Level 2's going into that lot.

So I can tell them, I need the power for those 20 Level 2's. And I can tell you they're coming in in fiscal—second half of fiscal '24, in which case, they might give it to us. But in general, if they don't see the utilization in your plans, they're not going to give it to you so. So that's an issue.

And then briefly on the trucks and stuff, we have a whole separate program looking at what kind of charging and where will we locate some medium-, heavy-duty truck charging, publicly accessible truck charging. And there would be in different areas near industrial zones, things like that.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Marcy, I see behind you. You've got a picture of an overhead canopy. What are some considerations for protection from the weather? Is an overhead canopy necessary? Are you seeing a lot of those installed nationally?

Marcy Bauer: Overhead canopy is nice. Certainly, there's increasing demand for it. We are not seeing a ton of them deployed, and that's for a number of different reasons.

First and foremost, we are most often—and we're not alone in this. Other networks are in similar situation, if not identical situation, where we are a lessee or lessor in the parking space. It's owned by another entity. And we lease the parking spaces where we install. And they themselves then, in turn, have lease agreements with many other tenants, which may actually restrict things that block line of sight to their storefront. They've got aesthetics to worry about.

And that's just on the host side. On the permitting side, it could add six to 12 months of permitting time, an exorbitant amount of cost. And it itself doesn't actually add anything to the NPV profile of the site.

So it's a tough—some tough math to do. But certainly, we know that customers like to be sheltered from the elements when they're plugging in. So we're trying to incorporate it or at least assess sites differently to be looking for more opportunities to do that.

And we know our partnership with Pilot Flying J, it's come up with them as well. They, of course—you pull up to a Pilot Flying J site. They've got canopies over all of their gas stations. So of course, our gas pumps, of course, they want it over the chargers as well.

And so we're navigating that space. But it is a complicated space. And even in areas where we would feel maybe very strongly that canopy should be provided, the host themselves might veto it for a variety of different reasons. So there's a lot to it, to be sure. [LAUGHS]

Stephen Lommele: Yeah, it sounds like a lot to it. And it can potentially—that can impact the timeliness. Marcy, I know you mentioned six to nine weeks for construction, but potentially 18 or more months total based on all of the other kind of things that you have to do—working with the utility, the authorities having jurisdiction, all of that. In general, for all of you, what has been your experience with timelines? And what should people expect, do you think? [LAUGHS]

Cabell Hodge: It's been all over the place in my experience. I mean, sometimes with the federal fleets, the longest thing is getting the money. And they're budgeting things two years out ahead of time. So it's like they budget. Then they do the design. Then they install the EVSE. And so they're talking about a few years, right?

For installing a Level 2 charger, which is a lot of what we deal with, it's really pretty quick. I mean, it's the installation is pretty quick, especially if you've got capacity in the panel. The longest thing is just waiting for the concrete to set on the pedestal. But that, that's like the best-case scenario.

And so I don't even know if I can give you an average number besides that. It really depends. But I don't know. Maybe Marcy can.

Marcy Bauer: There are truly so many factors. We've got permitting authorities that just churn and burn permit out so fast. And maybe we've worked with the utility before and managed to arrange a scenario where, through the design and through just document, through our contracting process, to avoid an easement. And anyone who's not familiar with an easement, that's a whole other ball of wax that can add weeks or many months onto a project timeline. So if we can avoid that completely, where the project is suddenly pretty golden—quick permit, no easement—that's going to be a pretty fast project.

But if you're going through rounds of negotiation between the host and the utility on easement language, if you've got a permitting authority that doesn't really feel a whole lot of motivation to incorporate any of those best practices, or maybe it's resource constrained—we've got some permitting authorities, for example, that they don't address EV charging in their language at all. It's just not covered. And their interpretation of that is to therefore disallow it completely. So we have to go through rounds of negotiations trying to get them to introduce and pass new language, initially starting with trying to convince them that that's not a necessary position to take to begin with, and then rounds and negotiation over, methodology to get it introduced. That's kind of more worst-case scenario.

But we've got plenty of unicorns that go real fast. And plenty of those—the other kind of unicorn, [LAUGHS] the not great time, that goes not so fast.

Stephen Lommele: Well, great. I'm going to show some slides here just as we're wrapping up. But as we close out—I think we just have one minute left. But can each of you just share one maybe best practice or principle in approaching site design that you think everyone on the call should walk away with? We'll just go ahead and start with you, Marcy.

Marcy Bauer: I'm just going to put in a plug for Connect the Watts because there's a whole bunch—I'm going to cheat. There's a whole bunch of best practices right in there. So look up EVgo Connect the Watts, and you'll find literally two-pagers and one-pagers pagers that describe, in a fair amount of detail, all the best practices in several of the charging ecosystem areas. So that's a really great place to start.

Stephen Lommele: Thanks, Marcy. How about you, Mark?

Mark Simon: One thing I was going to get to very quickly is, as a government, we have to bid. And getting bids that are stable enough with the current price fluctuations or price increases, we need 90 days. And work based on your purchasing abilities. Work to give yourself the time because prices are just all over the place right now.

Stephen Lommele: Good suggestion. Thank you, Mark. Cabell?

Cabell Hodge: Yeah, I would just say to pull your team together first thing. We have, similarly, a lot of resources. And one of them is 15 Steps to Electrification. But the very first step is, just pull your team together. And so I think that includes some of the external stakeholders, like if your subject's permanent, like most folks are outside the federal government, you want to make sure that you understand what the requirements are going in.

Stephen Lommele: Great. Well, thank you all so much. We really appreciate you being with us today. We are going to be doing more webinars. We do have some coming up, focused specifically on ADA accessibility as well in May and June. So we'll be sharing more information out about that.

But again, you can visit driveelectric.gov, sign up for those news alerts. If you had a question that wasn't answered, please submit that via the driveelectric.gov Contact Us form. And we will get back to you in a couple of days.

So with that, I really appreciate the panelists again. Marcy, Mark, Cabell, thank you for joining us. And to all of our participants, thank you as well. We appreciate you spending the time with us. So thanks so much.

Marcy Bauer: Thank you, Steve.

Mark Simon: Thanks.

Cabell Hodge: Thanks.

Stephen Lommele: Bye.

Cabell Hodge: Bye.