EV Charging Rollout Across a Commercial Retail Complex
AC and DC charging for a mixed retail and office development, sized for growth
The challenge
The operator of a mixed retail and office development wanted EV charging in its parking structure. The commercial driver was tenant demand and Vision 2030 alignment; the constraint was the existing electrical infrastructure.
The initial request was for a large number of fast chargers. An early load assessment showed the incoming supply could not support that without a substation upgrade that would have dominated the budget.
What we did
We started with an electrical capacity assessment rather than a charger quotation, because the answer to "how many chargers" is determined by the supply, not by the parking count.
The deployment we recommended mixed a small number of DC fast chargers near the retail entrance, where dwell time is short and speed matters, with a larger number of AC Level 2 units in the office parking area, where vehicles sit for hours and slower charging is sufficient. This served more vehicles per riyal of electrical capacity than an all-DC design.
All units were specified as OCPP-compliant so the operator is not locked to a single vendor’s management platform, and integrated with a payment system so charging could be billed rather than absorbed as a service cost.
Containment and distribution were sized for a second phase, so adding units later means pulling cable, not revisiting the switchgear.
Outcome
The complex went live with a working mix of AC and DC charging within the existing electrical supply, avoiding the substation upgrade the original brief would have required.
Because the distribution was sized ahead of demand, the operator can expand as EV uptake grows without repeating the civil works.
Services involved
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Talk to our teamClient name and identifying project details are withheld under confidentiality. This is a representative account of work we carry out; scope descriptions are accurate, and we have deliberately not published performance figures we cannot evidence publicly.