I’m an entrepreneur based in LA and recently moved from a house with a Tesla charger to an apartment in WeHo without a charging station.
I’ve realized there’s a large gap for fast charging in the West LA area. There’s only one Supercharger in WeHo (plans to build a second but unclear on timeline).
I’m curious what the viability is to set up a new fast charging station. I’m still in the research phase (talking EV Box to get a better understanding of startup costs etc) but curious if anyone here has first hand experience.
This area is very underserved - many apartments tons of Tesla & EVs.
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I’m curious what the viability is to set up a new fast charging station.
The one thing I know from a friend who did some research was that selecting the “box” was by far the easiest and cheapest part.
Getting near-Gigawatt electrical service was NOT easy and heavily restricted the location that it could cost-effectively be installed.
Also, getting permits from the city may be the reason Tesla doesn’t have it yet as they city may be stingy in this particular densely populated area.
Also challenging is leasing the parking spots, as this kind of use reduces the number of zoned parking spots available for buildings and most in very urban areas are built right at zoning minimums, so they don’t actually have parking spots that they can legally give up. (which is why you see a bunch in parking ramps in urban areas).
I’d expect half a million $$ in investment or so. Payoff is like 20 years.
My friend bailed after getting a bunch of quotes for service. It wasn’t even close to profitable unless you HAPPEN to have a free parking location with high-voltage power already adjacent (which is decidedly rare in major cities) and major government subsidies.
Been researching some of the same for Texas. I’ll follow this thread.
Don’t forget to take demand charges from your utility into account. They can be very substantial.
I’m an EV charging consultant and I have helped several clients through this and many through installation. It’s not easy, takes a couple years, and is fairly expensive, however, like others are saying it takes two things to be profitable: 1) incentives to shoulder the brunt of the installation costs and 2) a secondary stream of income (e.g. convenient store, quick serve restaurant, coffee shop, etc.). DM if you want to chat more.
Get in touch with the guy from Roulez Électrique.
Dude bought an old used car dealership with an apartment in it.
He started a electric supoly store selling evses and has now like 6 DCFC chargers, a pizza robot and washing fluid dispenser.
He was in it so much that they renamed his street electric street.
Haha yes the Pizza Machine! It’s featured in my video
https://youtu.be/QL9mIEeURrc?si=xH5bou8JBo_-0vPJ
But the economics of starting such a business in QC are vastly different from those in CA
If you ever get started and would be interested in a technology partner please let me know. I’m in Orange County so not too far and have many ideas for integrations that alleviate people’s concerns with apps and provide a better solution for waiting / queueing / load management (assholes charging to 100% at 3 kWh while there are 5 cars waiting). I just don’t have the business side that can handle funding / locations / hardware etc. would love to chat.
what kind of neighborhood - houses or apartments (residential)
I’ve realized there’s a large gap for fast charging in the West LA area.
where do people shop?
if there’s a lot of EVs with street parking,… they need to go to the store.
how big of an area are you talking about - ~100 square blocks?
is that an area where people are going to run out of charge in the first place?
it’s in the middle of a metro area, not the Mojave.
what chargers are GOING to be installed?
what business are in the area. what businesses could benefit from additional foot traffic that’s “forced” to hang out for 30 minutes?
are all the other chargers in the area continually in use… hard to charge?
Volta Charging Collaborates with Southern California Edison and Albertsons Companies to Raise EV Awareness
https://voltacharging.com/press/volta-sce-albertsons
Target’s Charging Up Its Electric Vehicle Program to Reach More Than 20 Stateshttps://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2018/04/electric-vehicles
California Taco Bell Receives First EV Charging Stations
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/11/01/california-taco-bell-receives-first-ev-charging-stations/
Just heard this today on KCRW; might be of interest:
“Over the course of 48 hours, The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern visited dozens of non-Tesla EV charging stations around LA County. A significant portion of them didn’t work.”
How is this relevant?
Frankly, Vandalism is a cause for a good fraction of the outages in urban areas.
And putting a charger in Hollywood of all places (which isn’t the “safest” neighborhood by modern American suburb standards) is… challenging.
Imagine spending $400k on a fancy new 5-station charging setup only to have the cables cut for $23 worth of copper the next evening.
I said it might be of interest, because the interview is about charging stations in the same area mentioned by OP, and how many of them were not working, because of compatibility challenges, etc. Thought that could be useful information to someone wanting to establish new chargers.
Give ChargePoint a call. That’s their whole business, helping private businesses/individuals become hosts for charging stations, and then handling the software/billing/services aspect of it for you after the install. Financially there’s no ROI, no fast charging network is profitable. The upfront costs are too great and paid utilization too low.
They charge handsomely for their cloud services accounts though.
I can imagine. The local McDonalds franchise group here has solar awnings over their parking lots, and ChargePoint L2 stations at each restaurant. But the ChargePoint stations can’t actually be used because they stopped paying for the subscription. It says as much on their screen (something like “service inactive, 0 courtesy charges remaining”, I don’t remember exactly). It must be expensive for the owner to have decided at some point to cancel after investing so much in the fancy solar-powered shaded stations.
From a ROI point having multiple slower chargers is probably better. Within a city people hardly fast charge normally (or do they in the states? European here. Within cities it’s mostly L2 at 2x11kw , but many such Stations) Maybe 50-75kw ones at supermarkets but the proper DC chargers are mostly along highways. In your map there is a highway , but I guess it would only be interesting those passing there. Mostly people will rely on slow chargers and as others stated intial costs are very high compared to L2 while you cannot charge that much more compared to L2
I fully agree with you, but reality seems to prove us both wrong.
Last year, Tesla started putting 250 kW chargers at city malls in Denmark, often quite far from the motorway. They have been a huge success, and some of them have already been expanded to double size because they were congested so often.
The question is if this is just a temporary symptom, caused by too few AC charging options, or if it is the actual endgame we are seeing.
In Austria it doesn’t work that well (mainly due to pricing probably) . Superchargers mainly hogged by old model S (which probably free charging ?)
Depends on location probably. Know of some here in Austria that are hardly visited despite open. But some others have customers. Location nevertheless is very important. My main point was - for the price of a 350kw charger you can probably build 50 L2 chargers spread across the town/city. So risky to build only very few chargers within a town. The highway there might help
I’m tempted to buy an old self car wash and install chargers where the vacuums are. Feel free to take my idea. Also a way to pay cash to charge would be cool. Or maybe a full service place called “Charge and Wash”.
It’s a good idea, but you need to be sure that the grid will be there…
One of the largest limiting factors is getting a transformer. What would probably happen is you would finally navigate the permitting, siting, design, delivery of the equipment and finally service hookup… only to find that Tesla already has a supercharger operating for 6 months.
Tesla runs the supercharger network because they have to in order to make their cars viable. Nobody is making money off charging stations. And if there isn’t a charger somewhere yet from Tesla there is probably a reason.
The actual gap is residential charging infrastructure, not fast charging. If you can get easy access to people charging overnight near their home within the city centers that would cover an actual need.
OutOfSpec did a video on how hard it is to charge an EV in New York.
It’s uneconomic
Unless you go for Nevi or VW funding / grants, you’ll never make it viable in your life time, you need to look at what is available to you and apply for it.
VW funding
As in “Commit a crime, but instead of paying a penalty, agree to spend the money on charging stations”?