Learn from solar, work together to reduce EV infrastructure costs

April 1, 2020

Folks involved in building the electric vehicle infrastructure can take advantage of lessons learned in the solar industry. Though, the soft costs of the charging infrastructure are not fully understood and can be hard to quantify.

Michael Roeth

Folks involved in building the electric vehicle infrastructure can take advantage of lessons learned in the solar industry. According to a new report, Reducing Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Costs, from our partner Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), streamlining the process and reducing bottlenecks is a good way to keep costs down.

The report says that hardware costs are already coming down, but “soft costs” still need to be understood, addressed and reduced. For more information on electric truck charging, see NACFE’s guidance published last year – Amping Up: Charging Infrastructure for Electric Trucks.

The report classifies infrastructure costs into three main areas:

Procurement — This includes charger hardware, managed charging capability, contracts, software, grid hosting capacity, and make-ready infrastructure.
Requirements — This includes payment system, measurement standards compliance, ADA compliance and parking requirements, dual plug types for DCFC and cost standards.
Soft costs — This includes communication between utilities and providers, future proofing, easement process and complex codes and permitting processes.

The soft costs of the charging infrastructure are not fully understood and can be hard to quantify. The solar industry found that when a variety of groups — Department of Energy, U.S. national laboratories and non-government organizations — worked together they were able to identify problem areas. Once the problems were identified, these groups and others worked together cooperatively to solve them.

It was estimated that soft costs represented 65% of the total cost of solar infrastructure. While RMI says there is not enough data to determine what percentage soft costs are of EV infrastructure costs, the organization would not be surprised if the percentage was similar to that of solar.

In the report, RMI identified some obvious areas for soft cost reduction:

Procure in larger volumes
Coordinate and consolidate charging sites
Choose sites carefully and consider conduit run
Plan for the future
Unbundle procurement
Install charging infrastructure during construction
Procure shorter data plans
Use standard RFPs
Offer focused utility support
Expedite permitting
Consider wired communication
Communicate and standardize ADA compliance requirements
Promote managed charging

You can see from this list that there are areas of improvement that touch everyone involved in making the charging infrastructure for electric vehicles a reality.

From its inception, NACFE has been a proponent of working together with all stakeholders to solve problems and improve freight efficiency. That same cooperative model needs to be applied to reducing the soft costs associated with EV infrastructure development. Let’s all work together to help make EV charging cost effective sooner rather than later.

I encourage you to read the report for more details on what RMI thinks is needed to bring these costs down.

About the Author

Michael Roeth | Executive Director

Michael Roeth is the executive director of the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. He serves on the second National Academy of Sciences Committee on Technologies and Approaches for Reducing the Fuel Consumption of Medium and Heavy-Duty Vehicles and has held various positions with Navistar and Behr/Cummins.