Your Comprehensive Guide to Commercial EV Charging: Boost Revenue and Attract Tenants & Customers

As more drivers make the switch to electric cars, they’re looking for convenient places to charge up while they’re out and about. This presents a great opportunity for small businesses and commercial property owners. By providing convenient charging options at your property, you can better attract and retain customers, tenants, and even employees—and likely enjoy a nice boost to revenue.

Curious about how commercial EV charging can boost your business and how to make the most of the benefits it offers? Read on for everything you need to know to get started.

Why you should add EV charging to your business or commercial property

The rewards stemming from installing EV charging can be substantial, and can provide everything from a boost to customer and employee satisfaction to indirect sales lift to the tune of thousands of dollars per year. But there’s also an element of time to consider: The quicker you act, the more benefits there are to realize.

Let’s dig into the benefits, plus why sooner is better than later when it comes to installing commercial EV charging stations at your property.

Charging stations can help attract and retain customers and tenants

Though there are more charging stations popping up all the time, competing with an entire town or city for public charging can make for an unpredictable experience—drivers never know when their preferred public charging station is going to be available.

By offering charging stations at your commercial building, though, you immediately drive up the appeal of your property.

For customers, the presence of charging can make your location worth going out of their way to plug in.

For tenants or prospective tenants, the presence of charging stations could be a nice differentiator that puts a commercial property over the top when getting evaluated against another location. More and more companies are being asked by their employees about EV charging amenities at the workplace.

And, with typical charging sessions lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours, folks who elect to plug in at your property are likely to spend a significant amount of time in the area. This can be a boon to all kinds of businesses, but especially on commercial properties where one or more retailers have set up shop. Research from MIT showed that the presence of an EV charging station boosts revenue for each retailer in the area to the tune of thousands of dollars per year.

You can demonstrate an increased commitment to sustainability

There’s an immediate association made between EV charging stations and sustainability. With so many properties now looking to highlight their investments towards going green, having charging stations on the premises offers a highly visible, much-appreciated example of this commitment.

Together with other initiatives related to things like energy efficiency, reduction of the use of single-use plastics, and updated heating and cooling, EV charging can do a lot to showcase your commercial property’s or business’ intention to become a sustainability leader.

EV charging stations can pay for themselves (if you want them to)

Though there is an upfront cost to installing commercial EV charging stations, they also come with the fairly unique benefit of being able to pay for themselves over time.

The typical arrangement for charging stations in public or semi-public settings is to have drivers pay for the cost of the electricity they consume + a modest fee on top, usually per kW of energy delivered to their vehicles. This fee most often goes toward maintenance, operating costs, and to pay back the initial costs related to the hardware, installation, and any electrical work required to prepare a property for the charging stations to be installed. By charging slightly more, you can even begin to generate a profit, typically after a couple of years of operation.

Note that some properties and businesses elect not to charge for charging sessions, choosing instead to treat EV charging as a tool to boost customer or employee satisfaction. It’s also possible grant free access to certain users (ex: employees of your company) while requiring payment by others who may look to use the charging stations.

The precise manner in which you charge or don’t charge drivers to plug in is up to you, and whatever choice you make, there are benefits to be had. But it is still worth noting that commercial EV charging stations can, if you want, be either cost-neutral or even provide a profit over time.

Why right now is the best time to get EV charging installed at your commercial property

One of the reasons many property owners are electing not to install EV charging stations at their locations is that they don’t believe there’s adequate demand. The aforementioned benefits—attracting and retaining customers and tenants, highlighting sustainability, and having chargers pay for themselves—won’t change that much in a few years. Why invest now?

There are two main reasons. By acting today, you have a head start in building preference for your business. You’ll also have the best shot at securing funding from various government and utility programs to make what can be an expensive project into something far easier to include in your budget.

Build brand preference with EV charging by being an early installer

While it’s true that many of the benefits of installing commercial EV charging at your property will exist even if you only install in the future, there’s a major perk to getting there earlier.

Today, EV charging at commercial and business properties is not necessarily expected. It’s highly welcome, though, and might be a clinching factor for tenants looking for office space to lease or customers considering different options for where to shop or otherwise spend their money. Installing charging today means granting your business a good differentiating advantage over the competition. It could well win you business you would not otherwise have, and it’s easier to keep business you already have than it is to win new business later.

Down the line, it’s going to be an expectation that just about every business or commercial property has EV charging stations on premises. At that point, installing chargers means playing catch-up, or meeting the bare minimum of expectations. You’ll have lost your chance to have a few years to build brand preference with folks who are delighted that you have EV charging stations available for their use.

There will never be more funding available than there is today

There’s a common story around the world right now when it comes to EV and EV charging subsidies: as more property owners take advantage of programs and the number of public and public-facing charging stations go up, governments and utilities are beginning to plan for phasing out existing incentive programs.

Today, depending on where you are, you can receive tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal, state, provincial, or even municipal or utility funding to get commercial EV charging stations installed on your property. In some cases, the amount of funding that is available may nearly or completely pay for the entire cost of the charging stations and their installation.

Unlike EVs, which are expected to decrease in cost each year, the cost of installing EV charging stations will almost certainly not decrease over the coming years. This is because most of the cost is generally tied to the electrical work and the installation required to get chargers onto the property, and not the hardware or software of the charging stations themselves.

In other words, by acting today, you will almost certainly spend much less money to install EV charging than you will if you act even just a year or two from now. And when the cost of installation becomes far higher down the line, locations that already have charging stations installed will likely enjoy a nice boost to their property value as well.

What to look for in a commercial EV charging solution

Not all EV charging solutions are equally suitable for a commercial setting. The best choices will help you make smarter usage of your electricity, will make it easy to manage access and usage remotely, will provide you with the functionality and stability you need to grow, and will ensure your chargers remain operational and easily used by drivers at your property.

Smart energy management features

It’s not enough to simply plug an EV charger into your electrical system and call it a day. There is a finite amount of energy available at a property, and for a location to install a sizeable number of EV chargers without smart energy management features would require an enormous amount of available electrical capacity—far more than most locations have to spare, or would be willing to pay to have installed.

To ensure your EV charging solution sets you up for success, make sure you select a provider that offers load management functionality. This can help ensure your EV chargers never draw more energy than your property can spare in a given moment, and allow you to install more EV chargers along a single circuit than would otherwise be possible.

Read more about load management here

Ability to remotely manage access and analyze charger usage

There’s little question that it’s important for commercial EV charging stations to have an always-on connection to the internet. This is what can allow you to monitor live usage, to react instantly in the case of disturbances to normal charger functioning, and to acquire a wealth of data with which to make future decisions about your charging stations and a possible expansion.

You’ll also, of course, need to secure an EV charging management system like SWTCH OS to be able to take advantage of the connectivity to perform these functions.

OCPP compliance for functionality and choice

The Open Charge Point Protocol, or OCPP, is the global standard for EV charging, and promotes consistent charging, payment, and other experiences tied to charging up a vehicle.

A solution being certified by the Open Charge Alliance means that it adheres to the requirements of the standard, and it also means that that solution can interconnect with other, complementary solutions that are also certified. For example, an OCPP-certified software solution should be able to run on an OCPP-certified EV charging station without any issues.

In choosing an OCPP-certified solution, you effectively guarantee your chargers will offer a great user experience. You also guarantee yourself choice. If ever you decide to swap software providers, it’s as easy as finding a different solution that is also OCPP-certified. If ever you want to add hardware, you can choose the best value on the market when you’re looking without having to worry about what you purchased before.

This might sound like a small benefit, but with EV charging a relatively young space, it’s important not to get locked in. If you choose a closed system provider that you wind up disliking—or which goes out of business in a few years—you might run into difficulties with your EV chargers.

Read about the OCPP and its benefits here

Reliability for your customers and tenants (and for your team, too)

Unfortunately, EV charging stations have a reputation in some corners for not being reliable. While the state of reliability in the space is improving all the time, there are still big-name providers with chargers that seem to be down more often than is ideal.

You should ensure that, whatever solution you adopt, it offers uptime of at least 98%. It may sound high, but it’s the standard we hold our own charging stations to, and we don’t think anyone should settle for less. Charging should be available whenever drivers need it. It’s as simple as that.

Best practices for successful installation and operation of commercial charging stations

In addition to picking out the right solutions, it’s important to have the right plan and processes in place to maximize the odds of a successful rollout of your charging stations.

Here are the key elements to get right.

1: Partner with experienced EV charging installers

Plenty of installers and contractors will claim to be able to install EV charging stations in a commercial setting, but you’re going to get the best results with teams with longstanding, demonstrated ability to do so well.

Find reputable teams in your area who can share a number of installation success stories, or ask for a recommendation from your chosen EV charging solutions provider. The right solutions partner should be able to connect you with an excellent team to get the installation, and any necessary electrical upgrades, done.

2: Promote your chargers both internally and externally

New charging stations are sure to lead to questions—from your team, from your tenants, from customers, and from folks who might want to become tenants or customers in the future. Taking a bit of time to educate your team and any tenants or customers you might have is the best start. These are the people who are likeliest to make use of the chargers soonest, or to be asked questions about them in the unlikely event that something goes wrong.

Here again, your chosen solutions provider will likely be able to assist you with thinking through an internal education campaign, with suggestions for what to say and how to explain access, usage policies, pricing, and more.

But don’t forget to also find ways to promote the existence of your charging stations externally. That could mean advertising, including it in listings for open units at your property, making mention of the chargers on your website, or even putting together a press release if your property is sufficiently high-profile in your community.

The more excitement you can drum up for your charging stations, the more value they can offer you. Leave no stone unturned!

3: Plan and install with an eye on the future

Odds are, your EV charging needs will be different in a few years than they are today, so while you might not want to purchase a large number of charging stations that will largely go unused, it will likely be worth your while to plan out a future expansion and lay the groundwork.

This can mean things like installing more additional electrical capacity than is immediately needed, so that you can simply add EV charging stations for your business as soon as you decide you need them. It could also mean things like planning out the layout of where future charging stations will go, and running the necessary conduit to those locations. And it will likely also mean selecting a management system that can easily allow you to add more charging stations whenever you want them.

Electric vehicles are an inevitability. They are here today, they are becoming more and more common and popular, and we’re not that far off from them being pretty much the only kind of vehicle that drivers will be able to buy.

By installing charging stations today, and taking care to select solutions that are well-suited to the needs of commercial properties, you’ll be able to put your business in a leadership position and thereby reap the substantial benefits of early adoption.

Want to learn more about adding commercial EV charging to your property? Reach out to us today! We’ll be happy to walk you through it.