Commercial EV charging stations for New York garages, lots and fleets

The charger is the easy part. The hard part is feeding a dozen of them from a service that was sized for lights and a ventilation fan. Most commercial projects succeed or fail on the load calculation and the load-management plan.

We start with the building's existing service and utility bills, lay out the parking, and show you how many chargers the current service can carry with managed charging versus how many need new capacity.

Residential garages and commercial lots usually start with Level 2 chargers on dedicated circuits, grouped on a new panel near the parking. We plan conduit runs along the ceiling or in trenches, protect equipment from vehicle impact with bollards or wheel stops, and leave spare conduit for the next phase so the second round doesn't mean new trenching. In occupied garages we phase the work by level and coordinate closures with the operator so spaces stay available while the banks go in.

Delivery vans, service trucks and car-share fleets charge on a schedule, which is an advantage. Knowing when vehicles return and when they leave lets us stagger charging overnight and size the equipment far more tightly than a public station. We look at duty cycles, battery sizes and dwell times, then design a mix of Level 2 and DC fast charging with software that finishes every vehicle by morning without setting a new peak demand on the building's service each night. Spare capacity is left for fleet growth.

Networked chargers connect to a cloud platform that handles access control, pricing, payment and usage reports. Garages use them to bill drivers by the hour or the kilowatt-hour, and condo boards use them to charge each owner for their own energy. We install the hardware, confirm cellular or network connectivity in the garage, and set up the site in the operator's portal so the stations are live and billing on the day they're energized, not weeks later. Staff get a short walkthrough of the portal and the reports.

Load management lets several chargers share one circuit or one panel by throttling each car as the total rises. It's often the difference between installing chargers now and waiting months for a service upgrade and a Con Edison cutover. When the plan does need more capacity, we prepare the load letter, file the service upgrade and coordinate the utility work, phasing chargers so the first bank can open on the existing service while the upgrade proceeds. You see both paths priced side by side before choosing.

A first bank of Level 2 chargers on an existing service is often installed within a couple of weeks of permit approval. Projects that add service capacity take longer, because the Con Edison side sets the date. We sequence it so the chargers that fit today go in first and the rest follow the upgrade, rather than holding the whole project for the slowest piece.