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Partner with Local Utilities to Build a Successful EV Charging Business

January 22, 2025

EV sales are rocketing skyward, breaking records in their wake. Even heavy-duty commercial fleets are turning to EVs for a cleaner, safer way to transport people and goods around town or across the country. So if you’re thinking about getting involved in the EV charging space, it pays to partner with local utilities to build a successful EV charging business.

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Here’s why. With that growth comes an increasing demand on the nation’s electrical grid. Certainly, technologies like vehicle-to-grid (V2G) charging, as well as renewable energy sources, can help meet that demand.

To ensure you have enough power — and the right kind of infrastructure — to take care of your customers’ charging needs, loop your utility company in at the earliest stages of your planning. Given its local connections and expertise, your utility can help you through the planning and permitting process for a smoother experience than if you were going it alone.

As a World Resources Institute (WRI) article points out, building a successful EV charging operation “can be expensive and require extensive coordination among government agencies and utilities.” Working with your utility company, you’ll have a partner who has worked with governmental bodies and knows how to provide you with a cost-effective solution.

What Challenges Can Utility Partners Mitigate for EV Charging Companies?

As the World Resources Institute article advises, EV charging companies face several challenges as they navigate the regulatory maze, siting issues, and energy utilization curves. Even what seems like a simple matter — choosing the site for a new EV charging station — can turn into a web of complexity. Those challenges can include:

  • Impact on the grid from the charging station
  • Usability of nearby renewable sources of energy
  • Traffic flow near the prospective site
  • Potential for customer parking and future expansion
  • Local regulations prohibiting specific types of projects

And many more, as the WRI piece states. That’s just choosing the site.

With your local utility company’s experience with a broad range of electrical projects, you can have confidence that their expertise will help you overcome any roadblocks.

For example, you might think — rightly so — that retrofitting utility poles and streetlights with EV charging stations would be a wise use of resources. You’d be right.

But if you had planned to build a curbside charging station in San Francisco until recently, you would have found that city regulations banned it. Your plans would have come to a grinding halt.

If, however, you had partnered with the local utility, you would have known about the curbside pilot program pegged to start in early 2025 and held off your plans until local authorities deemed the pilot program a success and approved curbside chargers citywide. Knowing about local statutes from local electricity providers — that’s golden.

Use your utility’s years of experience to help plan a project that will benefit not only your company but also the utility and the community it serves. It’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.

Utility Companies Can Help Enlarge Your Target Market

Let’s face it — if you want to build a successful EV charging company, you want a massive customer base to draw from. Utility companies are doing just that, as a QMerit post observes. From expanding the infrastructure that supports increased EV charging to providing incentives for new EV adopters, as well as both home and commercial EV charging stations, electric utilities are preparing for a more electric future for all their customers.

Utilities, too, have a vested interest in increasing the population of EV drivers nationwide. They have little profit to gain from new gas stations except from the paltry sum they receive from the station’s lighting, electronic cash registers, or maybe heating.

However, EV charging stations don’t just light or heat their buildings with electricity. They pump electricity out of their facilities with each car that pulls up to one of the station’s charge points. That makes you — the charging station owner — one of their top customers.

Working with your local utility, you can assure prospective EV buyers that the grid will be able to handle the extra load charging brings. That alone should give them the confidence to give EV adoption a try. However, there are even more benefits utilities can provide to increase your target market with more EV drivers.

Utility-Driven V2G Charging Programs Make EV Ownership Pay Off

Some utilities even have V2G programs that will allow their customers to feed energy back into the grid for extra cash in the bank or a discount on their utility bills. With such a program, EV owners can charge their cars when rates are low and then sell the excess to the utility provider when rates are higher. Gas stations don’t have any programs to compare with that kind of service.

Using Utilities’ Data Helps You Choose the Most Strategic Location

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Working with a utility, EV charging companies can take advantage of all the data the utility has collected over the years. Leveraging this data, charging businesses can find the most strategic locations for their charging stations — near workplaces, multi-family residential developments, major highways, and shopping centers, as the Qmerit article points out.

Even more importantly, using the electric company data can help EV charging businesses better manage their electricity supply, keeping an eye on the grid to ensure maximum charging efficiency. This leads to savings for both charging stations and their customers.

Partnering with Utilities Gives You a Louder Voice in Government

No matter how successful your EV charging business is, you’re only one voice. Utilities speak for all their customers, providing a large expanse of territory with electrical power.

When you join forces with your utility, you’ll have a more powerful advocate with lawmakers in the region to help streamline the regulatory and permitting processes, implement more EV-friendly policies, and provide incentives to EV buyers. In fact, many utilities will tack on their own financial incentives for EV or EV charging infrastructure buyers, growing the market for EV charging with every purchase.

Utilities Create an EV-Favorable Environment for Charging Companies

As EV adoption increases, utilities are investing in more efficient grid infrastructure to handle the increased load. Many of them are also incorporating renewable energy sources to supplement their normal operations, as well as battery electric storage systems (BESS) to store the energy they collect from renewables, V2G exchanges, and other resources.

Partnering with your local utility allows its personnel to gather and analyze your stations’ data, giving them valuable insights into how you can leverage those updates to benefit your operations. These data include your customers’ charging patterns and your stations’ energy usage. This allows the utility to “identify peak demand periods, anticipate load fluctuations, and implement demand response strategies” through smart grid technology, as the Qmerit post points out.

Successful Partnerships Prove Beneficial to Both Utilities and EV Charging Companies

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Even though EVs and the technology that powers them are relatively new, there are plenty of examples of successful partnerships between utilities and EV charging companies. Here are some ways charging businesses have joined forces with existing utility companies.

Eneco: It’s Complicated

Eneco, a European utility company, created a subsidiary corporation — Eneco eMobility — to get into the EV charging game. However, eMobility itself partnered with another EV charging company, GreenFlux, to manage its network of chargers to cut costs and increase efficiency via GreenFlex’s leading-edge technology.

Though complex, their relationship worked. Instead of seeing GreenFlux as a competitor, even though it also provides EV charging networks, Eneco realized that a partnership would benefit all parties.

What might have looked like a gamble on a partnership with a competitor paid off. With state-of-the-art technology and significant cost savings, Eneco could concentrate most of its energy on its primary business, providing energy for its customers while raking in extra revenue from its eMobility division. GreenFlux, too, benefits from the cash that rolls in from its management services.

American companies, too, have begun to offer similar solutions — utility-owned charging stations that could benefit everyone involved in such a partnership. Exploring this possibility could provide EV charging infrastructure companies with an innovative, profitable alternative.

Smart Columbus, American Electric Power (AEP), and Various EV Charging Providers

Although Smart Columbus itself is a not-for-profit organization, it partnered with Columbus, Ohio electric utility AEP, city leadership, and several automotive and other businesses around the city to provide city residents and visitors with more EV charging opportunities. For its part, AEP provided EV-owning area residents with financial incentives, including rebates, to help them install EV charging stations in various locations across town, which include residential developments.

Working with Greenspot and other EV charging infrastructure providers, Smart Columbus extended the city’s EV charging network to more public locations. These include a well-publicized installation at the Columbus College of Art & Design and another at Ricart Ford, a Columbus-area automotive dealership.

Find Partnership Opportunities for Your EV Charging Business at the Summit

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From exploring the possibility of partnership with utility providers to networking with some of the EV industry leaders who can make it happen, you’ll find a wealth of opportunities at an EV Charging Summit event. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to make connections that can drive growth for your EV charging companies. Register to attend today!

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