DC fast charging bypasses the vehicle’s onboard charger and delivers direct current at high power. For the right site it is transformative. For the wrong one it is an expensive way to achieve what a bank of Level 2 units would have done.
The first question is dwell time
Before anything electrical, this: how long do vehicles actually stay?
Where the stop is short — a travel corridor, a convenience retail site, a fleet with tight turnaround — fast charging earns its cost, because the whole value is putting range in quickly.
Where the stop is long — workplace parking, a hotel, a residential building, most retail — drivers are there for hours and Level 2 fills the vehicle comfortably within that window. Installing DC there buys speed nobody uses, at many times the capital cost and with an ongoing demand charge attached.
We would rather tell a site it does not need this than sell it.
This is a service project
A single DC unit can demand more power than an entire small commercial building. That takes the project out of branch-circuit design and into the territory of service capacity, transformers and switchgear.
So it begins with a capacity study run with the serving utility: what can be delivered to this site today, what would be required to deliver more, and what that costs. Everything else — equipment selection, layout, phasing, financial modelling — depends on that answer, and specifying hardware before you have it is how these projects stall.
Which utility that is matters here as much as anywhere. Six providers serve this area, with different capacity study processes and different distribution standards. We establish the serving utility from the site’s supply before starting.
Schedule is set by things that are not installation
The physical work of setting equipment and pulling cable is not what makes these projects long. The schedule is dominated by the capacity study, by lead times on distribution equipment, and by delivery of the charging hardware itself.
Planning against that reality from day one produces a far better project than treating it as an installation that turns out to have delays attached.
Phasing, and trenching once
Ground work and conduit for the full eventual layout should go in during the first phase, for the same reason as any car park installation — reopening a site costs almost what opening it did.
Dispensers can then be added as utilisation justifies them. Power sharing across dispensers allows a site to run more units than its service would otherwise support, which lets early phases operate within existing capacity while demand is proven.
Layout
Circulation, cable reach and pull-through access govern the arrangement, and they are harder constraints than on a Level 2 site because the vehicles are transient rather than parked. Bollards and impact protection around equipment that sits in a live traffic area. Space allowed for the cabinets, which are substantially larger than the dispensers people picture.
Accessibility requirements for parking and routes are designed in rather than retrofitted.
Funding
Programmes covering this class of equipment exist at various levels and their terms change. Because they are typically funded annually and can close when an allocation is exhausted, we confirm the current position rather than quoting a figure from a previous cycle. Where a programme materially changes the economics, that is worth establishing before the design is fixed rather than after.