Install Process
You’ve convinced a property owner to sign a contract allowing you to install a charger on their site. Excellent! Now it’s time to buy stuff and get the tradies involved.
I would love to give detailed pricing for each item here, but that’s an incredible amount of work. The prices keep changing and it’s so specific to your site’s needs. I’ve tried to give rough pricing so you have a general idea.
Charger Unit Cost
It’s tough to get pricing for 50kw+ DC chargers, but they start at around $25,000 for a Chinese-made 50-60kW unit. The prices just go up the more power you want. Those fancy 350kw Tritium units are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars price range. If I was in the market for a 50kw+ DC charger, I would talk to ABB and Sinexcel. Both these suppliers were the nicest to deal with and responded quickly and honestly to a pissweak little startup like Park N Plug. Some of the other brands simply ignored us or wouldn’t give us pricing.
AC chargers can just be ordered via the usual range of electrical wholesalers like Middy’s, Rexel and Blackwoods that any electrician will have access to. There’s a few brands to choose from these days. Schneider, ABB, Delta/NHP, Evbox/Wallbox, Fimer and ZJ Beny just to name a few. To give you a rough idea on price, here’s three 22kW AC units with OCPP and 4G support that Blackwood sell:
Additional equipment
You also need the following additional bits and pieces:
Cabling, conduit, trays - the type of cabling can be determined via jCalc’s handy AS/NZS 3008 calculator. Double check it with a real electrician of course. Cable can be anywhere from $5/m to $100/m depending on the length and load it needs to handle. You also need to chuck that cable in conduit or on a cable tray depending on where it is. That costs money too.
Type C MCB & Type B RCD - so the cables don’t melt and so nobody gets electrocuted (some chargers have an RCD built-in). Also double check with electrician, the latest Australian Standards (which are a pain in the arse to get unfortunately) and the installation guide of the charger.
Pedestal/concrete pad - if you’re not going to mount the charger to the wall or the floor you need something to mount it to! Most wall mounted commercial grade chargers have a pedestal option that fits nicely. Concrete pads are needed for bigger DC chargers.
4G SIM card - need a way for the charger to talk back to your CSMS if you’re billing customers for use. Tip: visit the site with a smartphone and see which telco has the best signal in that area. Optus, Vodafone or Telstra.
Site Work
This is all the stuff around the charger to make the area look nice and friendly for drivers.
Signage - parking signs to dissuade ICE cars parking there, or even EV drivers from parking there but charging.
Charger wraps - turns a boring beige box into something a bit more exciting, builds your brand, has a QR code on it, whatever you like.
Ground/wall markings - make it nice and obvious that this is an EV charging spot.
Bollards/wheelstops - to protect the charger (if it’s floor mounted) from numpties who can’t park.
Lighting - bright lights make people feel safe when they’re charging at night, consider adding extra lights as part of this project if the area is a bit dim.
Fimer sell this nice stand for their chargers with built in LEDs.
Shelter - it’s safe to plug in an EV while it’s raining, but it still sucks getting wet while doing it. Solar canopies are cool if you have the budget!
Security cameras - you might cameras installed depending on the location so if your precious chargers do get vandalised you can tell the police. More appropriate for expensive DC charging sites than a single AC charger.
Civil Works
Where you might want to install a charger is far from the switchboard, or there isn’t enough power on site for the chargers to operate. This is when your project goes from simple to complicated.
Trenching - Ever walked down a footpath or road and seen the poorly patched up bits with asphalt? That’s likely the results of trenching.
An electrician gets on the excavator and cuts out a slice of the dirt/concrete/tiles/asphalt/whatever, puts down a plastic pipe in it (aka conduit), then covers it back up. The cable can then be run through the conduit to the other side.
When there’s stuff on top of the dirt like concrete or asphalt, it can take time, it’s expensive, there can be stuff in the way you didn’t know about (dial before you dig!), it looks bad after and local councils hate it, but often there’s no other way to get the job done when retrofitting a new electrical appliance. Look at this beast in action tearing up the road:
It’s common and not really a problem for any tradies, but I really like chargers that can go on a wall as it’s faster, easier and cheaper. Unfortunately it isn’t possible for DC fast charging units above 25kw, which is one reason why the costs of simply installing the charger can cost more than the charger itself.
Horizontal Boring/Drilling - This is a great example of running a conduit for power cables under a road without having to dig up the road using a technique called horizontal boring.
They dig a small hole on one side, then run a long pipe under everything that pops out the other end. Usually a site survey is done using an x-ray or radar or something to detect any obstacles. I don’t know the costs - I’m sure it isn’t cheap - but if trenching isn’t possible for whatever reason, this could be an option.
Grid Upgrades
If there’s no spare capacity on the existing electricity supply at your chosen site, you’ll need to upgrade the supply feed. There are ways of augmenting the grid with batteries/solar and you can do dynamic load based charging (i.e: the charger output is limited by the consumption on site in real time), but I don’t have much experience with that.
Also once you go above a certain supply level (120A or 170A I think with Powercor - I’ll need to check), you change from normal sane tariffs to dreaded “demand charges” where your power bill isn’t based on just how much power you use, but also how much capacity in the grid the DNSP has to reserve for you should you decide to use all that power at once. It can be quite expensive.
The DNSP for the area (Distributed Network Service Provider, as we call them in Australia) will be more than happy to upgrade your supply this - but it’ll probably cost you an arm and a leg and take months to happen.
I’ll update this section with more details info on grid upgrades and power pricing later. In the meantime, I strongly suggest reading Evie’s Lessons Learnt Report from September 2020.
Lesson 5 in that document drops a little hint at what it costs to upgrade the power supply - “our benchmark average connection cost is ~AU$220 per kVA (albeit with a per-site variance of >100%!)” - which they say is expensive, but still cheaper than a battery solution.
Let’s say you wanted to install two 60kW DC fast chargers on a site with no spare capacity. That’s roughly 130kVA. If you asked the DNSP for an extra 150kVA, that’s $33,000 on average. Could be much higher depending on site and what the DNSP can provide or the minimum they’ll let you upgrade to.
Powercor has an estimator tool on their website you can mess around with to get a very rough price estimate. But it only works if the location hasn’t got underground power cables. Underground power can be upgraded but just not via this map.
Real Life Example
I was lucky enough to be on-site when the Chargefox station in Euroa off the Hume Highway as it was getting installed for a blog post. Evan Beaver is a top bloke who let me take photos on the day I was there and sent me some photos from the days I wasn’t there. Guided me through what was going on and I learned heaps from him way before I ever thought of doing a startup in the EV space.
You can read that blog post here, I think it’s great:
But if you just want to look at pretty pictures with some captions, keep scrolling.
The outside of the main switchboard for the building. This is where the electricity from the grid enters the property.
Inside the switchboard. If I recall correctly, this is the supply feed for the chargers, not the entire building.
This is the other side of the building the switchboard is on. The cables go through the roof of the building and outside, then down and into a hole in the ground.
The hole in the ground where the trench under the car park begins.
The carpark the cables go under
To this manhole.
The cables are run into the box with the closed door that contains more switchgear and isolators. The boxes with the open doors are the rectifiers for the chargers and they connect to the boxes on the left.
Here’s a close up of the isolators.
Here’s a close up of the rectifiers.
These head units are wired to the rectifiers via DC cabling.
Chunky DC cabling. A copper thief’s delight.
A closer look inside the charger head.
An even closer look!
The finished site before the wraps and branding were put on. That big box behind the chargers and to the left of the switchboard is a battery!
This was one portion of a $15m project to build 21 similar sites across the country. $6m from ARENA and the rest from Chargefox’s investors. This particular site in Euroa received $500,000 of funding from the state government too. I don’t know the exact cost for the Euroa site, but 21 sites divided by $15m is an average of $715,000 per site.
The Chargefox sites are what I’d call deluxe sites. The fastest chargers on the market, often backed by batteries or grid upgrades, with a decent amount of civil works. If all they were installing was one or two 50-60kw chargers, the price would be significantly less.
Chargefox has published multiple documents (a condition of their ARENA funding) on the project that are invaluable for anyone wanting to operate any type of EV charging network.
This is a video from UK (pretty similar to Australia in terms of power setup), but the playlist goes into great detail about installing a 22kw EV charger in a public car park and well worth a watch: