EV CHARGING STATION DESIGN.
ONE ENGINEER OF RECORD.

Site design and permitting

A charging site is an electrical project first. SLC produces the full design package: load calculations, service and panel design, conduit and feeder routing, charger layout and circuiting, metering, and the stamped construction documents the AHJ needs to issue a permit. Because one engineer owns the whole package, the drawings the contractor builds from match the drawings the utility and the AHJ approved.

SLC prepares the permit submittal and works the AHJ review directly, answering plan-check comments as the engineer of record rather than routing them through a third party. That keeps a correction cycle from turning into a month of lost time.

NEVI and grant-funded project support

Publicly funded charging carries requirements a standard commercial site does not: NEVI program standards, uptime and power requirements, accessibility, and documentation that has to hold up to a funding review. Engineering that anticipates those requirements from the first drawing keeps a funded project on schedule and on budget, instead of discovering a compliance gap at plan check or at closeout.

SLC builds those requirements into the design and the submittal package, so the proof a funded program asks for is already in hand.

Fleet charging and commercial fleet electrification

Commercial fleet electrification is the shift of a company's vehicles from gas or diesel to electric, together with the charging infrastructure sized to run them. It is a duty-cycle problem before it is an equipment problem. The charging has to match how the fleet actually runs: how many vehicles, how far, how fast they have to turn around, and what the depot's electrical service can support at peak. SLC sizes charging to the real daily demand, designs the service for it, and stages installation so the depot keeps operating while the work goes in.

SLC has engineered fleet charging from a handful of depot chargers to large-load sites, including work for WattEV and Watson Land Company.

Commercial fleet electrification in California also runs on a deadline. The state's Advanced Clean Fleets rule pushes fleets toward zero-emission vehicles on a set schedule, which makes early charging design and utility planning the difference between meeting a compliance date and missing it.

Utility coordination for charging sites

The utility is usually the longest pole in a charging project. A new or upgraded service, and any distribution study a high-power site triggers, moves on the utility's timeline, not the owner's. SLC opens that coordination at the start of a project and runs it in parallel with design, with direct experience across PG&E, SCE, SDG&E, and SMUD.

Knowing how each utility runs its service and study process, and what each one needs to see in a submittal, is what keeps a project from sitting in a queue waiting on a question that could have been answered up front.

Capacity and load planning

Every charging project lives or dies on capacity. SLC starts with the load: what the site needs at peak, what the existing service can carry, and where the gap is. That early answer drives every downstream decision, whether the site needs a service upgrade, whether storage can shave the peak and avoid one, and how the design should phase to leave room to grow.

Getting the capacity question right at the start is the difference between a site that scales and a site that has to be re-engineered the first time it adds chargers.

What an EV charging project costs

Commercial EV charging cost varies widely, and it is driven less by the chargers than by the site: the electrical service, how much utility upgrade the load requires, trenching and civil work, and the charger power level. A site with spare capacity costs far less than one that needs a new service.

The engineering job is to find the lowest-cost path that still meets the load, which is why an early capacity study, before equipment is bought, is the cheapest decision on the project. SLC scopes the cost drivers up front so the budget reflects the real site, not a generic per-port estimate.

Proven across the West

SLC has engineered 30+ EV charging sites and 1,300+ ports across the Western United States, part of 80+ projects supporting more than $350M in total site construction value. The work spans fleet depots, commercial and dealership sites, and public charging, all under one licensed Electrical Engineer of Record.