industry streamline installation to reduce barriers to mass adoption. Photo by Werner Slocum, NREL
Private and public electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE)—the charging infrastructure
necessary to support the rapid rise in electric vehicles (EVs)—are essential to the
transformation of the transportation sector, yet associated expenses outside of the
actual hardware, software, and construction called “soft costs” are not well understood.
A new multilaboratory initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National
Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) fills this gap.
Building on the novel NREL-led soft cost analysis project that began in 2010 and helped
achieve cost reductions for solar technologies over the past decade, the laboratory
is leveraging its learnings from the solar soft cost project’s success with Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory in an effort to achieve
similar soft cost reductions for EVSE installations. Funded by the Joint Office of
Energy and Transportation (Joint Office), the new project aims to find pathways to
reduce soft costs for EVSE installation by identifying, benchmarking, and tracking
relevant soft costs that will facilitate deployment of a nationwide network of chargers.
The three national laboratories have been engaging different stakeholders, such as
electrical utility organizations, federal agencies, and EVSE installation businesses,
to understand their perspectives and collect data on various EVSEs, expenditures,
and timelines for buildouts.
“Today’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure costs vary significantly—dependent
on various factors such as the type of chargers and location—which can make current
projects quite cumbersome to track and compare,” said NREL’s Ranjit Desai, the EVSE soft cost project principal investigator. “That’s why we’re taking a multipronged
approach to solving this issue by obtaining invoices from state agencies, conducting
stakeholder engagement to acquire critical data, and leveraging NREL’s extensive set
of EV infrastructure tools that estimate the cost of charging station installation.”
about the variance in total costs of EV charging infrastructure, which will accelerate
the deployment of a nationwide network of chargers. Photo by Joe Del Nero, NREL
Desai added that in the early stages of this effort, the project team has been focused
on identifying the types of data needed to perform EVSE soft cost analyses, collecting
the identified data and inputs from industry stakeholders, and tracking specific metrics
and soft costs over time.
“One soft cost associated with EVSE charging installation is time. The longer the
process takes, the more labor hours build within the soft costs of the project,” said
NREL’s Erin Andrews-Sharer, a research project manager. “This project dives into the
time associated with the permitting process for EV charging, which—according to many
stakeholders and relevant literature—can be a variable and lengthy process but one
that could be reduced with strategic efforts to streamline it.”
Reducing the Cost of EV Charging Infrastructure
The EV charging industry, much like the solar industry a decade ago, has reached a
point where it must streamline installation to reduce barriers to mass adoption. The
direct costs of EVSE systems—software, hardware, physical enclosures, and plug connectors—have
been widely studied. But much like solar soft costs, EVSE soft costs such as the capital associated with permitting, inspections, administration,
customer acquisitions, and utility interconnections sometimes account for a larger
portion of total installed system prices than direct costs in the United States.
To address this industry knowledge gap, the EVSE soft costs project team seeks to
understand, document, and quantify the soft costs of EV charging infrastructure and
identify specific mitigation strategies. The team’s technical achievements to date
include conducting extensive literature reviews and both qualitative and quantitative
analyses of permitting processes and analyzing more than 4,000 station buildout invoices
across different states. EV service providers, state agencies, contractors, site hosts,
and installers were among the primary stakeholders interviewed.
“We’re finding that land use and development codes, including zoning and permits,
have the most variety across the nation,” Desai explained. “EV charging is not always
explicitly outlined in codes, and even if they are, the lack of clarity within them
and variance across the authorities that manage these processes leads to stakeholder
uncertainty.”
Part of the research team’s quantitative analysis work involved NREL’s Electric Vehicle
Infrastructure Locally Optimized Charging Assessment Tool and Estimator (EVI-LOCATE)—one of the newest additions to the laboratory’s flagship EVI-X Modeling Suite of Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Analysis Tools—which is a site assessment tool that generates user-specific, site-specific, and
location-specific EVSE site designs and cost estimates. Additionally, the research
team developed a method to estimate the total costs for the station buildout invoices
as well as compare the estimates with the invoices. The invoices that the research
team obtained are from a large variety of station buildout projects, with detailed
cost estimates for locations that have a single port to locations with more than 18
ports.
Partnership Opportunities for Data Collection
As the project moves forward, the research team continues to develop a visualization
for an initial cost model that can incorporate various uncertainties of key inputs
from stakeholder interviews. As more feedback is received, the model will continue
to evolve and become even more refined, identifying opportunities and potential avenues
to reduce EVSE soft costs. Additionally, the research team is developing a series
of infographics based on the data collected for public use. The infographics will
provide insight into variations and dependencies in project cost categories for use
in benchmarking and identifying EVSE soft costs baselines.
“All cost data collected is anonymized and standardized to ensure organizational privacy,”
Desai said. “We’re adhering to the engagement strategy that we’ve developed and continuously
identifying new stakeholders to engage.”
A website to share engagement opportunities for identifying, tracking, and addressing
soft costs is on track to be published later in 2024. The project’s findings will
also be made publicly available later in the calendar year.
“With soft costs sometimes comprising more than half of the total cost of EVSE projects,
it’s especially important to gain a sense of contributing factors and to have them
well documented to help stakeholders mitigate soft costs, optimize, and increase the
cost-effectiveness of their buildouts,” Desai emphasized. “Industry data will be essential
to helping us build that knowledge base.”
Learn more about NREL’s transportation and mobility research, including the laboratory’s modeling suite of electric vehicle charging infrastructure analysis tools. And sign up for NREL’s quarterly transportation and mobility research newsletter,
Sustainable Mobility Matters, to stay current on the latest news.