Charging for Business

If you're a business and you need to install car chargers (EVSEs), either because of government mandates, or to provide an amenity for your customers or employees, here are my recommendations.

First, realize that you can charge for charging. Figure out how much you pay for electricity in $/kWh and then you can set a rate relative to that to recoup electricity costs and any overhead. Alternatively, if this is an employee perk, you can give free charging, or set a subsidized rate (probably better, free is frequently abused).

Now that all North American EV manufacturers have settled on one charging standard, it makes the selection of chargers much easier. Make sure you buy ones with NACS handles. For older EVs that have the J1772 charge port, just tell people to buy their own NACS adapter.

The Tesla Wall Connector is the most reliable, feature rich and fairly priced EV charger that businesses can buy. Tesla operates a charging network that uses the Wall Connector that will charge user's credit cards and send you money every month for usage.

Site requirements are straightforward. You need to supply WiFi for your parking area, and run power to each charger. You can group every group of 6 chargers together into a power share pool to keep overall electrical loads manageable. While each Wall Connector can supply 11.5 kW of power, you could instead provision 3.3 kW per stall for a total of 6 x 3.3 = 19.8 kW of power shared across 6 chargers (3.3 kW is typical government mandated minimum power per stall). So if one car was charging, it would get a full 11.5 kW, but if more were charging, they each get an equal share of the 19.8 kW.

Tesla sells a both a short pedestal, or a tall one, or you can mount them against a wall, or use other options.