Start early! This will be the biggest source of delays in your project.
Chargers, what you want:
You need to be installing at least 22kw chargers - and so need access to 3 phase energy. Anything less and the “shadow” cast by a booking will have to be much longer as you wait for the car to charge. Roughly: divide the capacity of the charger by the capacity of your battery to find out how long it will take to power the battery back to 100%. On the 22kw charger our newer Zoe takes about 2 hours to go from empty to full, on a 7kw charger, that becomes 7 hours. This formula is not perfect and faster chargers will not necessarily charge all cars faster if the car cannot accept the higher wattage. Most cars will also charge to 80% faster and then slow down for the final 20%.
The charger that we installed is modular. As well as the actual interface where the car’s charging cable goes in, it has a “hub” to run the software, which can process up to 20 further chargers in that location. You may not be thinking of expanding but having the possibility to develop the EV infrastructure might be an advantage later on.
You need to have 22kWh charging facility at least – although it is worth noting that your vehicles will also act as a limit on the charging capacity. The faster the car can recharge the faster it can be hired out again!
Chargers, how to pay:
We have 2 chargers. The village car park charger was installed and is managed by Charge My Streets. We pay a monthly subscription that has an allowance of kWhs. They paid for the installation, which includes a charger for the car club, and a charger for the general public. Both are type 2 22kWh. When the charger needs a check-up or to be turned off and on (power cycling), one of our volunteer team are able to do that directly, potentially saving Charge My Streets a callout fee from a maintenance firm.
We manage the charger at the community center ourselves. It is the same hardware as the Charge My Streets charger – the EO Genius with a hub. It is a type 2 22kWh charger which is connected to a hub inside the community center. The set up could be expanded if we needed to add more chargers for more cars, or if the council wanted to. We pay the council for the electricity at our meter (not the electricity that the software tells us has been used to charge cars, because there is additional electricity consumed by the setup for the Wi-Fi, the lights on the charger, the hub.
There is no getting around the fact that chargers are a hefty capital cost. The bulk of this cost is not associated with the technology, but the install itself and is hard to predict exactly how much it can be. This will depend on things like how far the charge point is from the 3-phase supply - which will inevitably involve digging a trench. Expect it to be at least £8,000. Each car needs its own charger, though if they’re on the same location that doesn’t mean twice the install costs as they can share the digging and infrastructure work.
The other approach is to partner with installers or charging networks. In our case, we partnered with Charge My Street https://chargemystreet.co.uk/ they installed a double charger. One was for the general public and the other is reserved for the Tisbury Electric Car Club. This significantly reduced our outlay, while it meant that they had a guaranteed user for their charger. We do pay a monthly membership fee, but in our case, it has been completely worth it.
Many councils are also looking around for places to install new elements of the EV charging network and getting involved with their decision-making process would be very worthwhile as they also want to see adoption and having a guaranteed user could help them make the case.
Chargers: process
Whether you go it alone or facilitate for a partner provider, it is useful to know the steps you will have to follow.