Charger for my Worksite

[Pwrgnr22]

I work at a power plant and would like to get a charger installed onsite. It wouldn't be open to the public but I do have a wide range of voltages available that most people don't have at their homes or businesses. What are my options?

 

[Earl]

The cheapest and easiest option is to install NEMA 14-50 or NEMA 6-20 outlets and let them bring their own connector. Otherwise, there are plenty of good J-1772 EVSEs available (Clipper Creek and Webasto are my favorites) or, of course, a Tesla Wall Connector. I would lean toward a J-1772 since all Teslas can use J-1772 because Tesla includes an adapter but others would have to buy a non-UL approved adapter for a Tesla Wall Connector. My company installed a bunch of the dumb Chargepoint-at-home J-1772 EVSEs. Their reliability isn't as good as my above mentioned but they work too.
If you need to charge drivers for the electrons, Flo, Chargepoint, EVConnect, and others offer networked charging stations that can handle billing but, unfortunately, the electricity cost about triples because of the administrative costs for the network connection and billing.
Good luck.

 

[mociaf9]

I work at a power plant and would like to get a charger installed onsite. It wouldn't be open to the public but I do have a wide range of voltages available that most people don't have at their homes or businesses. What are my options?

It's hard to give any advice without knowing why you want one there, i.e. what is the imagined/expected use case for the charger and who is going to be using it? What types of EVs might be expected to charge? How frequently?

 

[Rocky_H]

but I do have a wide range of voltages available that most people don't have at their homes or businesses. What are my options?

Other people covered things about formats for outlets and equipment, but no one really talked about this voltage part of the question. All types of electric cars and charging equipment will gladly accept the pretty standard 208V from three phase systems or the 240V from split phase. 277V is hit or miss. Some cars and some equipment is made to handle it, but some not, so I probably wouldn't go for that if you want to make sure it has a good chance of working.

 

[Sophias_dad]

Regardless of what the manual says now, a HPWC Gen2 charger will happily take 277 volts line-to-ground. Hello 13kw charging!

But then you are restricting it to only Tesla vehicles, and people won't like that.

 

[Rocky_H]

Daaayum! Reading is FUNdamental. Every comment but mine talks about the public using it. *sigh*

It wouldn't be open to the public

 

[sdoorex]

Depending on how many you want to install, perhaps the Lite version of the Grizzl-e commercial solution would work the best. It supports RFID and PIN authentication and does not have network fees like ChargePoint or Enel-X's offerings. Business products – GRIZZL-E

 

[Sophias_dad]

Grizzl-E's offerings look great functionally. Not a super big fan of their actual look for the master unit, but when you want bulletproof you usually end up with something looking like a safe. I wonder if that is why they chose to use cat6 instead of wifi for their networking. I can't imagine its easy to make a vandalproof wifi antenna, but maybe they'll run cat6 through the power conduit if that's even allowed.

 

[Rocky_H]

but maybe they'll run cat6 through the power conduit if that's even allowed.

It is, with conditions. Of course NEC has something to say about this. People asked about it with connecting the Tesla Gen2 wall connectors with their twisted pair signaling wire for circuit sharing. The specification the NEC says about signal wire sharing conduit with power wire is that it is allowed if the signaling wire has the same voltage rating of its insulation as the power wires that share the conduit. So you can't just use any old regular tiny signal wires, because they usually don't have an insulation rating as high as stuff like the 8 gauge or 6 gauge copper that the power wires would have, which is usually 600V. But if you search around some, you can find thin signal wires with thicker insulation that do have that 600V rating.