Commercial charging is an infrastructure project with a charger at the end of it. The equipment is rarely what decides the schedule or the budget.
The service capacity study comes first
The question every property owner opens with is how many ports they can have. It cannot be answered from the parking count.
A service capacity study establishes what the building’s existing service actually supports once current loads are accounted for. From there the port count is a design decision rather than a guess — and the difference between the two is the most common reason a commercial charging project gets repriced halfway through.
Sites in Stafford, along the Beltway 8 corridor through Humble, and around the Clear Lake employment centres in Webster tend to be the ones where this matters most, because the buildings are older than their current tenants’ electrical demands.
Load management changes the arithmetic
Ports do not all draw at once, and designing as though they do wastes capacity.
Load management coordinates the group against an overall ceiling. Ten ports sharing a managed budget serve a workplace parking lot perfectly well, because cars sit there for eight hours and none of them needs full rate for all of it. The same site sized at full rate per port would need a service upgrade it does not actually require.
This also addresses demand charges, which are frequently the dominant operating cost. Commercial tariffs bill partly on peak draw, so flattening the peak is worth more than reducing total consumption.
Size the conduit for the build-out
The single most valuable decision on a commercial charging project is made in the trench.
Conduit and feeder capacity should be sized for the build-out you want in five years, not for phase one. Adding ports later into conduit that was sized for them is a modest job. Adding ports later by re-trenching a parking lot, replacing feeders, and closing spaces for a week is a different order of cost and disruption.
The extra conduit costs a fraction of what re-trenching does. We have never seen an owner regret oversizing it.
Multifamily
Multifamily is its own problem because the electricity has to be billed to someone.
Assigned spaces make submetering straightforward. Unassigned parking generally points toward a networked platform that identifies and bills the driver. Either way the choice shapes the electrical design — where meters go, how circuits are grouped, whether a house-meter feed or individual unit feeds make sense — so it belongs in the first conversation.
Texas has no right-to-charge statute compelling a property to provide charging, which means multifamily charging here is a business decision rather than a compliance one. Properties in Sugar Land, The Woodlands and Pearland are increasingly making it as an amenity and retention decision.
Site work
Bollard protection where vehicles approach the equipment. Cable management so cords are not lying across a drive aisle. Accessible spaces and routes meeting the applicable requirements. Lighting adequate for people using the equipment after dark.
These are the items that get value-engineered out of a quote and then added back after the first incident.
Incentives
For properties served by Entergy Texas — The Woodlands, Conroe, Magnolia — the eTech program pays $250 per port for ENERGY STAR certified Level 2 equipment, and considerably more for DC fast charging. Applications go in online.
Most of the metro is CenterPoint Energy territory, where we are not aware of an equivalent current program. We would rather tell you that than build a proposal around an incentive that does not exist. Program funding is first-come and annually capped, so confirm availability before it becomes a line in your budget.
What we install
- Service capacity study before any port count is committed
- Load management design sized against demand charges, not just capacity
- Commercial-listed networked charging equipment
- Conduit and feeders sized for the planned build-out
- Bollards, cable management, and accessible space layout
- Network and payment platform coordination
- Submetering and cost-recovery structures for multifamily
- Permit, inspection, and utility coordination
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Start with the study
Tell us the site and the port count you have in mind. The study will tell you whether that number is conservative or optimistic, and it is worth knowing before you publish it to tenants.
Call (346) 406-1223.