I’m an entrepreneur based in LA and recently moved from a house with a Tesla charger to an apartment in WeHo without a charging station.
I’ve realized there’s a large gap for fast charging in the West LA area. There’s only one Supercharger in WeHo (plans to build a second but unclear on timeline).
I’m curious what the viability is to set up a new fast charging station. I’m still in the research phase (talking EV Box to get a better understanding of startup costs etc) but curious if anyone here has first hand experience.
This area is very underserved - many apartments tons of Tesla & EVs.
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Just heard this today on KCRW; might be of interest:
“Over the course of 48 hours, The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern visited dozens of non-Tesla EV charging stations around LA County. A significant portion of them didn’t work.”
How is this relevant?
Frankly, Vandalism is a cause for a good fraction of the outages in urban areas.
And putting a charger in Hollywood of all places (which isn’t the “safest” neighborhood by modern American suburb standards) is… challenging.
Imagine spending $400k on a fancy new 5-station charging setup only to have the cables cut for $23 worth of copper the next evening.
I said it might be of interest, because the interview is about charging stations in the same area mentioned by OP, and how many of them were not working, because of compatibility challenges, etc. Thought that could be useful information to someone wanting to establish new chargers.
I’m curious what the viability is to set up a new fast charging station.
The one thing I know from a friend who did some research was that selecting the “box” was by far the easiest and cheapest part.
Getting near-Gigawatt electrical service was NOT easy and heavily restricted the location that it could cost-effectively be installed.
Also, getting permits from the city may be the reason Tesla doesn’t have it yet as they city may be stingy in this particular densely populated area.
Also challenging is leasing the parking spots, as this kind of use reduces the number of zoned parking spots available for buildings and most in very urban areas are built right at zoning minimums, so they don’t actually have parking spots that they can legally give up. (which is why you see a bunch in parking ramps in urban areas).
I’d expect half a million $$ in investment or so. Payoff is like 20 years.
My friend bailed after getting a bunch of quotes for service. It wasn’t even close to profitable unless you HAPPEN to have a free parking location with high-voltage power already adjacent (which is decidedly rare in major cities) and major government subsidies.
Give ChargePoint a call. That’s their whole business, helping private businesses/individuals become hosts for charging stations, and then handling the software/billing/services aspect of it for you after the install. Financially there’s no ROI, no fast charging network is profitable. The upfront costs are too great and paid utilization too low.
I’m an EV charging consultant and I have helped several clients through this and many through installation. It’s not easy, takes a couple years, and is fairly expensive, however, like others are saying it takes two things to be profitable: 1) incentives to shoulder the brunt of the installation costs and 2) a secondary stream of income (e.g. convenient store, quick serve restaurant, coffee shop, etc.). DM if you want to chat more.