Reducing Soft Costs in Conductive Charging Infrastructure

“Soft costs” such as permitting costs, siting costs, utility interconnection application costs, opportunity costs, the cost of delays, and so on create significant overhead for EV charging station network operators. Those costs are ultimately passed on to EV drivers, making it more difficult for EVs to reach cost parity with ICE equivalents. But the soft costs of deploying charging infrastructure are poorly understood, unpredictable, very hard to quantify, and almost entirely undocumented in the literature. Our original research, based on 24 interviews with a variety of stakeholders as well as existing literature and publicly available information on utility procurements, identifies some major categories of soft costs that need to be investigated further. This research should inform future legislation and harmonization of regulations and processes in order to reduce the total system cost of charging infrastructure.