Electrical

Adding EV Charging to a Commercial Site

Guide · Commercial solar & battery · ~5 min read

Adding EV charging to a commercial site is more than bolting a charger to a wall. It's an electrical and energy decision that touches your switchboard, your tariff and often your solar and battery setup.

Start With the Load, Not the Charger

The first question isn't which charger to buy, it's whether your site can supply it. EV chargers can draw significant, sustained current, and adding several to an existing switchboard can push you past what your supply and main switch were designed for.

A proper assessment looks at your available capacity, your existing loads and how the chargers will actually be used across the day. That tells you whether you can add chargers as-is, need load management, or need to talk to your network about a supply upgrade.

• Your incoming supply and main switchboard capacity
• Existing loads that run at the same time as charging
• How many vehicles, how often, and how quickly they need charging
• Whether fleet, staff or customer charging patterns overlap

Demand Charges Are the Hidden Cost

For many commercial sites, the sting isn't the energy the chargers use, it's the demand charge, the cost tied to your peak draw. A bank of chargers all pulling at once can lift your peak and lift that charge, even if total energy use is modest.

This is where the numbers depend entirely on your tariff and network. A site review is the only reliable way to see how charging would land on your bill, but the good news is peaks can usually be managed rather than paid for.

Smart Load Management

Load management lets a site run more chargers than a naive design would allow, by sharing available capacity across them and throttling back when other loads spike. Instead of every charger drawing full power, the system balances what's available.

This often means you can start smaller and scale up, and it can keep you inside your supply limits without an expensive upgrade. It also plays nicely with charging schedules, so vehicles top up overnight or during cheaper periods where your tariff allows.

• Dynamic load balancing across multiple chargers
• Scheduling charging to off-peak or solar-rich periods
• Prioritising fleet vehicles that need to be ready first
• Headroom to add chargers later without re-doing the switchboard

Pairing EV Charging With Solar and Battery

EV charging is a strong reason to look at solar and battery together. Daytime charging can run off your rooftop generation rather than the grid, and a battery lets you store cheap or self-generated power and release it when charging demand hits.

This is where our AI-driven energy arbitrage comes in: the battery charges when power is cheap and discharges or exports when it's dear, so your EV load leans on the lowest-cost energy available. How much you gain depends on your tariff, your generation and your charging pattern, all of which we'd confirm on site.

We scale installs from 6.6kW right up to MW, so the solar and storage side can be matched to whatever charging load you're planning, from a handful of bays to a full fleet depot.

Installation and Compliance

Commercial EV charging has to be installed to standard, with the right cabling, protection and metering. Because we run an in-house team with no subcontractors and hold CEC and SAA accreditation, the switchboard work, the solar, the battery and the chargers are handled by one crew that answers to one another.

That matters when charging ties into your energy system, everything needs to talk together and be signed off correctly the first time. It also makes future expansion cleaner, because whoever installed it understands the whole site.

Getting the Design Right for Your Site

There's no one-size answer for commercial EV charging. The right number of chargers, the right speed and the right way to power them all come down to your loads, your tariff and how your vehicles are used.

If you're weighing up EV charging, the sensible next step is a site review. We'll look at your switchboard, your usage and your solar and battery options, then map out a setup that keeps running costs sensible and leaves room to grow. Get in touch when you're ready to take a look.

More: browse all guides · see our projects