The Top 3 Challenges Facing EV Charging Station Development
No major construction-business sector is growing faster than electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure. Call them EV charging stations, call them charge points, call them EVSE (electrical vehicle supply equipment) — they’re expected to proliferate globally at a 25% to 35% annual clip over the next decade.
The U.S. alone must build roughly 28 million charging ports to accommodate an estimated 33 million electric vehicles expected by 2030. Most U.S. EV chargers will be in private homes, but a million fast chargers will be at workplaces and multifamily properties and about 182,000 more along highway corridors and in local communities, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates. For comparison, the total U.S. fast-charger count stood at about 28,000 as of the end of 2022.
Such extraordinary growth is a blessing for the construction industry, but meeting such demand comes with many challenges as companies push to deploy with speed and at scale while maintaining profit margins. Many of those challenges fall into three broad categories.
Where to put all these EV charging stations and how to power them up.
Managing the deployment of hundreds or thousands of them at the same time.
Managing their operations and maintenance (O&M) into the future.
The good news is, there are software solutions that can help the construction business meet the EV charging challenges ahead.
Challenge 1: Where to put EV charging stations and how to power them up
There’s a land grab afoot, and it’s about securing more than just real estate. EV charging stations – especially those with fast chargers – need a lot of power. Local utilities inevitably influence site selection and design, and they can cause long delays as interconnection agreements are negotiated and feeds themselves get built.
The key tools in addressing the siting-and-powering challenge come in software evolved from traffic-modeling solutions long used by transportation planners. These systems enable the forecasting of EV traffic and charging needs based on a host of inputs. They optimize the siting of EV chargers based on factors such as accessibility, demographics, government EV purchasing incentives, proximity to commercial districts and tourist attractions, land-use constraints, and also customizable factors.
These systems also can help utilities determine where they’ll need to boost distribution capacity. They then use geospatial mapping to develop customized installation plans. In short, they help determine where to put what type of charger and how many you’ll need at a given location while taking future growth and usage patterns into account. Then it’s a matter of building them all.
Challenge 2: Managing mass EV charging station deployment
EV charging station development at scale presents a litany of management challenges. You have dozens or hundreds of projects that have both repeatable and site-specific elements. Repeatable elements beg for standardized processes as well as feedback loops to refine those processes over time. That refinement should propagate quickly through the organization, including to subcontractors, who are often heavily involved.
Finding and retaining skilled labor is hard, so you want to maximize the productivity of the people you have, get new team members up to speed quickly, and keep close tabs on who does what and how well they do it. You want everyone, from top management to project managers to field techs, working from the same up-to-date information.
An emerging class of software called deployment operations management systems is fast becoming an EV charging industry mainstay. These cloud-based systems combine project planning, project management, and work management capabilities across hundreds or thousands of EV charging station builds. They standardize highly repeatable elements while enabling site-by-site variation based on equipment, accessibility, priority, staffing, material availability, and other factors. They apply machine learning to help managers refine forecasts and schedule more strategically. They harness mobile apps to bring subcontractors into the fold.
The benefits are real. Deployment operations management systems help customers complete projects roughly 30% faster. Harnessing that capacity lets them take on substantially more work and while boosting employee experience – no small benefit in a tight labor market. These systems also make a difference with the last big challenge of EV charging station development.
Challenge 3: Managing O&M
EV charging stations are complex systems. They’re out in the elements. They’re used by novices and those who don’t necessarily baby them. You can’t just install them, connect them to the grid, and bid them adieu. Mass numbers of EV charging stations translate into massive needs for both preventative and corrective maintenance.
Deployment operations management systems are proving valuable long after deployment wraps up. A centralized, continually refreshed database ensures a reliable view into inventory and scheduling status of individual projects and O&M efforts in aggregate. Project templates standardize O&M work, speeding job completion and boosting quality.
Mobile apps for field techs enable real-time connections with teams in the field, reducing cycle times and improving reaction times when issues arise. Reports and dashboards help O&M leaders quickly share insights with stakeholders while staying on top of team performance and charger uptime. On the maintenance front, deployment operations management systems can determine the equipment and field workers best suited to do a particular job based on sweeping visibility in real-time.
Immense demand for EV charging stations is the new normal. Meeting that demand represents a generational challenge for the construction business. There are incredible opportunities for those who can deliver efficiently and profitably, and proven solutions can help exploit them.
About the Author: Emily Obenauer is senior product marketing manager for energy at Sitetracker.