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Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About EVSE Installation and Were Afraid to Ask

Currently, the best estimates suggest that upwards of 80% of electric vehicle charging happens at home. Which means we’re basically treating our electric cars like any other gadget; we plug them in at night and however long their batteries last the next day, well, that’s how long they last. If we want to see wider adoption of EVs, however, one thing is obvious: We need to make it possible for drivers to charge in places other than their garage. It’s a more complex problem than it might seem, but a series of reports by the New York-based architecture and design studio WXY will at least give urban planners and prospective charging station entrepreneurs a place to start. [Download study].

The studies, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, address a major obstacle standing in the way of more ubiquitous charging--namely, that no one knows exactly what ubiquitous charging looks like. And in fairness, that’s because it doesn’t look like any one thing. Whereas gas stations, generally speaking, all follow one template, EV charging can and will take a number of forms in the years to come. Supermarkets will offer charging stations in their lots; offices might let you plug in on parking decks. You could even conceivably juice up while parallel parked on a city street.

There are a number of companies that are eager to piece together this network, but the sheer number of new variables involved makes it a complicated endeavor. "Nobody’s really figured out how to profit off of installing charging stations," says Adam Lubinksy, a managing principal at WXY. But the studio’s work to isolate and identify those variables won’t just be handy for those hopeful companies in the here and now--it will be hugely beneficial to drivers down the line. Without a common design language, it’s easy to imagine how things could get messy quickly. Think about how inconvenient it would be if gas stations weren’t so uniform--if the pumps at Sunoco stations, say, worked differently than the ones at Shell.

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