The Electric Vehicle (EV) market has an amazing outlook for the next decade, with over 145 million units expected by 2030. With such a tremendous market expansion, the need for a large deployment of EV charging stations is becoming imminent across the US. One of the most important sectors that will need to adapt to these trends is definitely the public and private parking facilities.
In fact, under some jurisdictions, new and existing parking facilities are now required to assign a percentage of the available parking spaces to EV charging stations. This means that parking lot owners will need to target including EV charging infrastructure in the short to medium term. However, considering a large deployment of EV charging stations can become challenging and even problematic. Why? Let’s find out!
Major Issues on Electrical Installations of EV Charging Stations for Parking Structures
Dedicated Circuits
The traditional approach to installing an EV charging station is to have a dedicated circuit branch for each EV charger. This is generally not a problem in most residential applications where only one or two EV charging stations are installed.
However, when speaking of multiple EV chargers, there is a high probability that the existing main panel board does not have enough spare circuits available to accommodate the number of EV charging stations. Therefore, this eventually means adding a new sub-panel that can accommodate each 40A branch circuit separately.
Figure 1. Traditional EV Charging Wiring Configuration
Additional Installation and Trenching
Besides, you must not only consider the extra labor and costs associated with installing a separate sub-panel, but you must also add up the extra labor and costs of installing all the extra wiring and conduits for each dedicated circuit from the sub-panel up to the EV charging station location. In addition, the distances in parking lots are also quite large and the electrician will be charging per linear foot of wiring and conduit installation. In other words, more wiring, more conduits, and longer distance mean higher project costs.
Besides, if the parking facility is located outdoors, it may involve a huge renovation of the parking facility involving trenching. As you can imagine, it will be difficult to core through an existing concrete structure to run conduit through it.
Main Panel Upgrade and Transformer Rating Capacity
An important issue occurs if the existing main panel is not capable of handling the extra load of the EV charging stations.
Considering that EV chargers are a high load application that can demand 40A or even more, it is probable that the panel that powers the parking facility (which is only intended to power some lighting and maybe some outlets) will not have the capacity to accommodate the extra load requirement. Then, this will involve doing a main panel upgrade to increase the maximum rating and be able to provide power for all the EV charging stations safely.
Moreover, a major issue occurs if the feeder of the electrical installation (or even worse, the power transformer) is not capable of providing the entire load for the EV charging stations. This will require involving the power utility to request an upgrade of the feeder or power transformer that can supply all the load. When this happens, project delays are expected and capital costs increase substantially, becoming in some cases prohibitive for the project.
The Ultimate Solution – The Electric Vehicle Master Controller (EVMC)
As you can see, the electrical installation of multiple EV charging stations in parking structures can find major obstacles. One of the best ways to address these issues (especially in existing parking facilities) is by installing an Electric Vehicle Management System (EVMS) like the Cyber Switching Electric Vehicle Master Controller (EVMC) that provides a unique solution to all these issues. Let’s find out how!
Single Electrical Line
By installing an EVMC, you will be able to use a single branch circuit to power up to 4 EV charging stations. This is possible thanks to its single-line approach in which each 40A dedicated circuit from your main electrical panel can be used to power multiple EV charging stations. This potentially avoids the need for installing a separate sub-panel, which means substantial labor and material cost reductions.
Figure 2. EVMC Electric Vehicle Charging Wiring Configuration.
Less Wiring and Less Conduit
As we know, the traditional approach leads to multiple branch circuits, which also means more wiring, more conduit, and more costs. The EVMC also addresses this issue by using a single branch circuit to power the EVMC (located close to the EV charging stations) which output will be directly used to power the EV charging stations.
This minimizes the amount of conduit and wiring that needs to be run across a long section of the path between the electrical panel and the EV charging stations. Therefore, this approach can minimize the materials requirement by nearly 4 times. All of this translates into lower project costs, especially if trenching is involved.
Power Management
Finally, what makes EVMC the ultimate solution is that this controller is designed under the “round-robin” configuration, which uses the power from a single 40A branch circuit to feed multiple charging stations under a shared rotational distribution of the load that is programmable over a time frame. This dynamic load management system also allows to prioritize a specific charger to be the first one to finish charging.
This solution adapts to the existing main electrical panel configuration allowing to efficiently make use of the available electrical infrastructure of the parking facility. This avoids unnecessary and costly feeder or power transformer upgrades (or even main panel upgrades) while at the same time optimizing energy consumption to avoid peak rate charge rates from the utility.