As electric vehicles continue to follow Americans home, America’s charging infrastructure will have to be up to the task of keeping everyone juiced up. Sure, most EV owners charge at home, but EVs are supposed to replace everything, from your local commuter to the road-tripper and even the semi-truck. Pilot Flying J, best known for its large highway travel center fuel stations, has teamed up with General Motors and EVgo to provide gas station-style charging solutions, and it’s a genius idea.
If this seems familiar to you, it’s because I wrote about a similar idea last month. Thor Industries, one of the largest camper conglomerates in America, wants to install rest areas with pull-through chargers for electric RVs. As of right now, Thor’s plan is still in the concept stage and requires government action for implementation.
General Motors, EVgo, and Pilot Flying J just installed their first 22 of 500 charging stations, showing that a future of pull-through charging can be done. Let’s take a look.
Charging In Public Has Caveats
EV charging has an annoying limitation right now. The vast majority of chargers are found in parking stalls. You pull or reverse your EV into a parking space and then plug it in. This style of charging has largely worked since the rebirth of electric vehicles. There isn’t much difficulty pulling your Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model X, or any electric motorcycle into a space like this to get your charge on.
However, EVs are now expanding beyond motorcycles and passenger vehicles. Various companies are developing or producing electric trucks, travel trailers, and motorhomes. Not all of these vehicles will be expected to return home every night. Instead, some will be charging in public. That’s the only way you’ll be able to take anything resembling an actual vacation in an electric motorhome.
This presents a problem. An electric motorhome can’t fit into a parking stall. It’s even worse if you’re towing an electric travel trailer with an electric vehicle. Now, it may sound silly to tow a travel trailer with an EV. Range testing, such as a test from Car and Driver, has shown that EVs like the Ford F-150 Lightning and the Rivian R1T may see their ranges drop to just 100 miles when towing a camper. However, companies including Airstream, Pebble, and Lightship all have campers in the works that have their own EV drivetrains. These campers will help their tow vehicles retain range by helping to pull themselves along. The campers aren’t out on the market yet, but they’re in active development.
When these trailers do hit the road, their owners will have to figure out how to charge both their tow vehicle and their trailer. The current EV charging stalls just aren’t going to work for that. They also won’t work for people towing regular unpowered trailers with their EVs.
Ok, so that’s just one problem. There’s another problem and it’s where you’ll find charging stations. A lot of charging stations are placed nowhere interesting. You’ll often find them at hotels and other odd spots. My city has a few charging stations. Almost all of them are in entirely boring places. What are you going to do as your car charges up next to city hall? Juicing up at an auto repair shop nowhere near any other store is hardly a fun activity.
General Motors, EVgo, and Pilot Flying J realized one solution was simple: Just give EV owners the same infrastructure as ICE owners. Why charge at a hotel when you can fuel up at a place with a restaurant, restrooms, showers, and shopping just like ICE owners can?
The Gas Station Solution
Back in July 2022, Pilot Flying J, the purveyor of those Pilot Travel Centers and Flying J truck stops that you see on the side of highways, announced a grand plan with General Motors and EVgo, a provider of EV charging stations. The three companies planned on joining forces not just to add chargers to America’s charging network, but to enhance the charging experience.
The brilliance, I think, comes from the Pilot Flying J-side of the equation. Chances are, you’ve stopped at a Flying J or Pilot Travel Center before for fuel, a restroom visit, or food. They are convenient places to stretch your legs, take the dog for a walk, and maybe scarf down some pizza before you hop back on the road again. People use EVs for road trips, too, so there’s no reason why EV owners can’t have the same experience. Why should they have to stare at a Holiday Inn for 30 minutes at a time?
Now, EV owners will be able to do the same as ICE owners can. But the good ideas don’t stop there. The stations being constructed by this trio of companies resemble a typical gas station. Instead, you get EV chargers instead of fuel pumps. At first glance, it seems like a waste of space. You could charge far more vehicles in parking spaces. These charging canopies will be great for people with larger EVs such as trucks, camper vans, travel trailers, and motorhomes. There would be no need to unhitch your trailer. Just drive up and hook up, not much different than you would with an ICE vehicle.
Pilot Flying J explains what each company is doing in this partnership. For General Motors, these charging stations are a part of its $750 million investment in EV infrastructure. GM wants to install up to 40,000 chargers in dealership communities and collaborate with EVgo to provide another 3,250 charging stalls in large cities by 2025. EVgo is providing the technology. Each of these new gas station-style charging stalls will be branded as “Pilot Flying J” and “Ultium Charge 360.” Underneath the branding sits EVgo eXtend 350 kW chargers and all EVs will be welcome.
Part of the plan behind partnering with Pilot Flying J is to provide charging along highways in and near rural and urban communities. That way, more people could take EVs on road trips and more people in rural areas could feel more confident in buying an EV. Here was Pilot Flying J’s expectation in 2022:
By the end of 2023, it is expected that at least 25 Pilot and Flying J travel centers will feature EV fast charging, with approximately 200 locations targeted by the end of 2024. In total, the network will include up to 2,000 high-power fast-charging stalls at up to 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers across the U.S., connecting urban and rural communities. Expansion sites for this network have been strategically selected for continued electrification of highly traveled corridors in every corner of the nation.
The new stations first started coming online in September. Click here to see one in action by mikethecargeek on Threads. As of Pilot Flying J’s most recent update, there are currently 17 Pilot Flying J locations across 13 states with online Ultium Charge 360 stations. The trio of companies expect to hit their goal of 25 locations by the end of this year. Pilot Flying J’s website currently shows 22 stations up and running.
By the end of next year, they expect to have 200 stations. When the network is complete, Pilot Flying J, EVgo, and GM expect to place a total of 2,000 fast-charging stalls at 500 Pilot and Flying J travel centers dotting America. Of course, 2,000 chargers isn’t a lot, but they will help make towing with an EV make more sense.
If you’re interested in charging at one of these stations, they will show up on major charging apps including GM’s apps, the Pilot myRewards Plus app, EVgo, and PlugShare. Next spring, GM EV owners will be able to reserve a charging stall and may see a discount as well. For me, I love that double shot of pull-through chargers and an accessible location. You can make 30 minutes pass by quickly when you have a bathroom, a restaurant, and free Wi-Fi. It’ll also be nice to have ample lighting at night and not be all alone in the corner of a parking lot.
The biggest advantage may be the cognitive shift. A charger at a parking spot is really a parking spot that happens to charge. So people just park there and there isn’t much urgency to free up the space.
In this model, it’s pretty ingrained into people that you pull up, fill up, and gtfo. Of course some people stay longer than they need to, but I’ve never seen a pump blocked by some jabroni just leaving their car at the pump to go shopping.
And if monsieur Jacques Broni feels like he’s too good to care about moving his car as soon as it’s done charging, you can make it a requirement to return to your car within x minutes or the attendant can have your car towed or something.
Regardless of the model, isn’t there a way to charge people by the minute for hogging the the spot after the charge is complete, so they have an incentive to move?
Our offices feature a public-access charging station for electric vehicles.
Free to utilize but there is a surcharge that is applied for every 15 minutes your vehicle remains parked after completing charging.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe Tesla’s chargers will charge you $1 per minute if your car is fully charged and you let it sit there.
Correct! I think it may only happen in busy areas, and not say if 6/8 chargers are available.
Buc-ee’s style centers or a similar concept with a Starbucks/CosMc’s/Dutch Brothers attachment. Easy way to burn half an hour, generate extra revenue.
Is the next logical step to partner with Sonic?
which will happen first, you finish charging or your food shows up?
Or In-N-Out, Whataburger, 5 Guys…
Honestly this is kind of what we already do when doing cross-state trips. We grab food at a drive-thru and then sit at the charger and eat it while the car charges. Would be so much more convenient if we could do both at the same time, plus have access to bathrooms.
This is exactly what charging on trips should look like, and it has so many obvious upsides for the major travel stop chains. The only thing surprising is how long it took one of them to start doing it. The only way this looks ‘brilliant’ is in comparison to the idiotic parking space charging in random places that somehow became the initial standard. It’s just common sense.
I completely agree. I think it’s the high development costs vs low expected revenue on just the chargers. There really isn’t a ton of data on how much an EV roadtripper will spend when they stop to charge for 30 mins. It didn’t hurt that there was this pretty big cultural divide between your average truck stop operator or executive and the average EV enthusiast prior to 2018.
I’m hopeful that they will get some really positive results.
Yeah, for years now I’ve been wondering why we’re spending so much $ and effort putting chargers in random spots instead of, you know, EXISTING FUELING STATIONS. I know gas station operators have limited space and low margins on gas, so they can’t usually afford a pump location that’s basically idle most of the time due to lower demand for electricity, but that’s where the subsidies could go.
Hell, isn’t there a way to add a charging cable and power line to an existing gas pump housing, and make each pump dual use? Is that a safety issue? Gasoline and potential sparks kind of thing?
I don’t think we’re ready for co-location yet because of the disparity in charging vs fueling times, and yeah buddy there are definitely some fun safety issues with that, but I think both those issues can be overcome. This could make sense in the not too distant future and I hope that is the way it goes. While we’re at it, lets add CNG and Hydrogen to our combined fueling pump… don’t want to leave anyone out and don’t want our safety engineers to get bored 😉
I’m on board with CNG, not so much with hydrogen.
“Yeah, for years now I’ve been wondering why we’re spending so much $ and effort putting chargers in random spots instead of, you know, EXISTING FUELING STATIONS”
Well for one there’s a big difference between a 5 minute fill up and a 30 minute fillup. That’s going to make for a long line. There’s also the issue of safety, you’re not even supposed to use your cellphone near a gas pump so a xxxkW charger shouldn’t be anywhere near a gas pump.
I think though the biggest setback is power. xxxkW is a LOT of draw. Put in 6-8 of those all pulling at the same time and you’ve got to run a lot more power from the substation out to the filling station. Or put in a diesel generator which kinda defeats the purpose.
On the plus side those power lines only need to be run once vs a tanker truck that needs to come out every few days and underground tanks that need to be replaced periodically. Power lines also don’t contaminate ground water so there’s that too.
Electric Power limitations at some specific charging locations IS a real concern. Current practice used at Tesla superchargers and others is to have battery banks that help to make up the difference / act as a buffer, so the grid charges up the battery banks at a slower steady rate and then the chargers (at a high rate of dlelectric demand), are pulling their electricity from the battery banks to meet the quick level 3 charging requirements.
Some combo of ev on board chargers now capable of between 4-6 C and level 3 chargers means that charging from 10% – 80% full can happen in between 10-15 min.
Mostly, 1) People actually use the ones in the suburban parking lots and don’t use the ones on the Interstate; they just *want them to be there* which is true but doesn’t pay the monthly electric bill. There’s starting to be enough EVs and other funding that this is just now tipping over. But 10% of the 99% of travel that’s within 10 miles of someone’s apartment is much larger than 80% of the 1% of long distance travel. 2) Non-interstate / suburban fueling stations are very small pieces of land most of which is hard to build on or around due to the big construction / contamination hazard of the underground fuel tank 3) The dispenser here (or at a Supercharger station) is the consumer-friendly “half” of a much larger, like, largest kind of commercial freezer size, thing, with its own utility transformer, that is tastefully landscaped on this site somewhere out of frame.
It’s not just about what to do while you charge, it’s also about what to do while waiting in line for the people ahead of you to charge, especially if they’re taking up two chargers — one for the tow vehicle and one for the trailer.
This is America–just eat junk roadside food!
Saddened by the I90-shaped hole in their map, but since I doubt I’ll be moving to an EV tow vehicle anytime soon there will be time to fill it.
The map shows one in Ellensburg. That’s on I-90. What more do you want?
Looking again, I think I may have been wrong about which road was 90 and they actually do have decent coverage for it. The lack of state lines is messing with my (already not too good) sense of geography. 🙂
Seems E-burg is up and running. Guess I’ll check it out next time I make a trip to Kennewick…
For vehicles whose owners leave them in the spot and the vehicle is charged.
Require you put in percentage goal(ie 85%) and your cell number. The station texts you when complete and allows a grace period. After which you are charged per so much time, as in per 10 minute block or something.
This would get people to watch their vehicles and not leave them in a spot forever, helping turnover rates.
With some caveats, yes, they do this.
I don’t have a better idea but that is a huge chunk of prime real estate to tie up for 20 minutes at a time.
20 minutes is generous considering the type of vehicle using a pull through charger is likely to have the largest batteries.
People will spend on your higher margin items like drinks and food instead. Somebody will make the numbers work.
Yup. And I see plenty of gassers leaving the pump blocked and going inside to order food, rest room, lotto and whatnot. At least with charging you can spend the entire time you are stopped as a customer/user of the entire site, it just gas and go.
This. This all day. The margins on retail fuel sales are super thin, in the low single digits. The money is in selling food and other amenities – https://pilotflyingj.com/amenities. Also there’s a direct correlation between a customer’s dwell time on the property and how much they buy. Pull into the pull through with a 400kWh medium haul truck? Yes please! Grab yourself some food, wash your clothes, wash yourself, all for only a few dollars more.
PFJ’s are huge and it ain’t exactly downtown Hong Kong where they are…
There is plenty of quality content addressing charging like this on TeslaBjorn’s youtube channel. It’s specifically in Norway, but man he has a lot of videos on charging infrastructure. Contrary to his handle name, Bjorn is not just a Tesla stan. I believe Circle K and Shell in Norway are adding gas-station style charging stalls to their stations there. The canopy is the game-changer for sure.
There is a great supercharger off I-26 in orangeburg SC. The chargers are parking spots, but with a (solar!) canopy, squeegees, and trash cans. It’s at a Parker’s kitchen (gas station like Sheetz).
I like the idea of using a design that has evolved over the years and has improved because of real use. Pull through under a canopy and both sides accessible. Great! just keep it away from gas pumps. The first map made me smile in that nothing is planned between Fargo, then Medora? and then Washington state. Some big gaps across the empty north.
Could lead to a Stuckey’s renaissance. And I’m all for that.
Mmmmm
Peanut Brittle and Bumper Stickers
I-95 in Santee SC. Supercharger at a Stuckey’s! They have a dog park, but the DQ inside seems to always be broken.
I see this as a challenge. Plus if you plan to have meal the time to charge is not a problem.
I find it hilarious that one of the biggest arguments for the parking spot bollard design is that it’s space efficient, considering how inefficient all the vehicle infrastructure surrounding that charging station is. Honestly having a dual wide charging setup where people can park two cars width-wide in the space between the roof supports, and then making it so that you can fit two cars length-wise under the roof so you can fit up to sixteen cars would be best, like some of the larger gas stations.
Colour code them as well by painting the supports with stripes, so people don’t get confused. Yellow for electricity, black for gas, green for diesel. Yes, yes, I know, green for electricity because “eco” makes more sense, but diesel already claimed the green pump handle.
Blue for Electricity.
Or pictures of “Reddy Kilowatt”
Blue is most fitting if that electricity is sourced from nuclear:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
Isn’t yellow commonly used for E85? Blue is probably the right choice for electrons.
Ah, yeah. I forgot about that. The green or brown handle with the yellow guard. Blue would probably be better, then, yeah.
In all of our charging stops, we’ve encountered one Supercharger that had been configured for pull-through charging. Presumably expecting someone with a Model Y to possibly have a trailer. I’m guessing because the hitch is an option and I’ve actually seen a couple towing. The rest have all been back-in style spots.
We also, recently, encountered one with a canopy that had solar cells on it which was different, but I guess that’s commonplace out west. That was handy from a weather perspective.
In all honesty, our charging is on long-distance trips and it’s become so seamless now that I don’t even think twice about it. You don’t “pay” for it physically, it’s all through your account, you just back in, plug in, and either sit and watch TV or go walk around. Many of our chargers in the Midwest are in a Meijer so we just go in, walk around, and look for Hot Wheels and whatnot. It’s a great break to walk around and our trips feel less rushed and hectic compared to how I used to load everyone in the car and blast for hours on end until we ran low on gas. The family is much happier.
Aren’t there Tesla semi trucks? Could that be a use case for the supercharger setup you encountered?
I don’t think you could negotiate the turns with a semi to get into this one. It’s behind the McD’s off the highway in London, KY.
Technically true there are Tesla semis though I think so far they have sold them on a very limited more beta testing basis I think so far only sold in the US to Pepsi / frito-lays to get real world feedback.
I think Teslas intent is to have tesla semi specific super charger stations that yes would be pull through that have higher capacity
This is a great idea. There are a few Pilot or Flying J stations along routes I’d reasonably go on. Getting out to take care of nature while the car guzzles electrons is worthwhile.
Also, I know of one Dunkin Donuts that relocated next to a rural Supercharger site. There are always a few Teslas charging there when I’ve gone by, so it makes sense.
I never knew Pilot and Flying J were the same company. Back where I used to live, there were both about 10 miles apart. Pilot used to be about 5c cheaper per gal than Flying J. Pilot also had a pretty good restaurant next to them too
They used to be separate, then the Cleveland browns happened.
Granted you’d need to probably increase the count by 1.5 to 2x, but why not just have a charger + pump combo? Everybody pulls into the same spot, uses the same card reader, takes the same crap while trying not to touch the toilet, only difference is the EV sits there for 30 minutes instead of 5.
Because most people getting gas just pull in, fill up, and leave without going inside, no point in blocking a gas pump for 30 minutes when it could make 6 or 7 sales in that time-frame
I agree with both of your points, however if charging is billed per minute and not per kilowatt then people have an incentive to get out of the stall as soon as possible. The prices I’ve seen charged some places are next to ludicrous so if someone is parked for 30 minutes at $2/minute they likely have a higher profit margin per minute compared to having 6 cars cycle through there taking maybe 10c per gallon.
You’re never going to get billing by the minute, either.
If you’re only getting 4kw of current (220v / 20 amps, say), you’re adding about 8-10 miles of range per hour at the pump. Somebody at the next station over might be pulling 20kw (440/50), and thus adding about 50 miles/hour of range.
Not to mention, no state’s weights-and-measures group is going to allow bill-by-the-minute for charging given the vagaries of charging current. There’s probably a model out there somewhere that’ll support a connection fee / minimum purchase (a cover charge, if you will), or an excessive idle time penalty (IE, “Ensure you have moved your vehicle within 15 minutes of charge completing”), but you’re never going to be able to commingle the charges for occupancy of the space with the cost of the electricity.
No there were/are a number of states that legally require(d) billing by the minute as under their laws only utilities could charge for electricity by the kwh. In those cases there were often tiers based on the starting charge rate, so the person charging at 150kw payed more than a person charging at 50kwh. This caused some disgruntled H/K owners as those vehicles would only charge at the higher tier for the first min or so after being plugged in. Thankfully many areas have changed those laws so that the companies can (over)charge based on actual use. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/electrify-america-switches-to-per-kwh-billing-in-23-states/
Idle fees do exist. Tesla has them world wide, though they only apply when the station is exceeding 50% of capacity and get even worse when all chargers are being utilized. https://www.tesla.com/support/charging/supercharger/fees
Start charging for occupancy after the charge is completed. The charger knows when it’s done. Notify the driver they have a 5-minute grace period to collect their car, then start charging by the minute.
That seems like a very solvable issue.
The best way to solve it – IMHO – is to have #working chargers > #cars needing to charge. As long as there’s at least one available charging slot it really doesn’t matter how long the others are tied up.
Billing by the minute is very common in practice and has been for a decade or more in hundreds of locations….beginning only now to be phased out as utility franchise laws are.modernized and metering is improved. Adding idle fees to those similarly uncommon and legal (sometimes even legally required) practice. Few states still holding out though. Also typical charging at these facilities is approx 40x faster than your examples (though they conceptually still sort of hold up)
(e.g. the ones above are 1000V / 350 amps though I don’t think any current cars can take more than 800V)
No can do. Gas stations measure pump turnover, which (among the corporate entities) also includes idle time (measured as availability) and unavailable-but-occupied (people who, in violation of all etiquette and mores, go inside the station for their snacks after they’re done pumping and don’t move the car from the pump).
Having a combo EV/gas pump would mean the gas pump – which is subject to every state’s weights-and-measures group, environmental agency, and others – is sitting idle a considerable amount of time. That’s a fairly high capital cost and fixed operational cost that requires a certain amount of turnover that’d be defeated by having it shared with an EV unit.
It’s better to keep the infrastructure separate. EV’s posit another problem – their turnover is lower due to slower charge times vs. pumping, of course, but the idle-but-unavailable times are also longer. Like, it’d be the height of offensive for somebody to leave their car at the pump while they wander into the gas station’s attached Subway and spend half an hour eating (thus making the pump unavailable for anyone else to use), but with EV’s, the car’s going to take 30-60 minutes to charge, which means the owner is likely going to wander further off. This is fairly common (how many people have pulled up to an occupied EV charging station and seen that the charge was completed a while back?) and, given the vagaries of charging current, is likely going to continue to be common.
IOW, a single pump can likely turn over 4-6x as many cars per hour as an EV charging station, which means that doing converged infrastructure is going to mean turning away gas pump customers during peak usage times (gas stations typically don’t model the number of pumps available for the average use case – they’re trying to solve for the peak-time use case, so while there’s definitely some times the converged model wouldn’t pose an issue, at peak times it would definitely mean turning people away).
All that said, putting a few charging stations under a separate canopy (like many truck stops do for RV’s/commercial vehicles/vehicles with trailers that’s separate from the passenger car island) shouldn’t pose an issue, and all the better if people can get a text alert or something akin to it letting them know their car is at 95% charge so they should probably go move it.
The evolving etiquette of EV charging should give a Sociology grad prime material for a thesis
Not also the EV charging station build cost is much more dependent on where on the parcel it lands relative to the distribution line than the gas folks are…
Honestly, one of the best things about EV charging is space efficiency, so I don’t see this being all that much of a game changer. I understand that eventually more people will be driving larger EVs or towing with them, but it sure seems like we’re pretty far from that being practical.
The roof is what matters. Having to get out to hook up a charger in the pouring rain or snow sucks. Give me a canopy and a decent place to hang out, and I’m good.
It’s a long way off but I eventually they are going to start replacing gas pumps with charging stations.
Another idea is to put a dozen or more charging locations every five miles or so along the side of the highway, parallel to the road. Anyone who needs to top off can stop for 10 or 15 minutes, juice up and keep going. The power line goes along the highway anyway, so no need to do anything but hook up to the electricity right by the main line. This will keep the fillin’ stations from getting backed up from people hogging the charger for a half an hour each.
I actually like this.
At a minimum, it reduces range anxiety if you know that you’re never say, more than 10 miles from a charger. No more “whoops I missed the exit with available chargers and I’m on the NY Thruway/PA Turnpike/MA Turnpike and the next exit is 30 miles away (looking at you, Lee, MA)”.
Take it one step further and add in a third rail or overhead power to charge on the fly.
but but but…disruption! Please tell me the machines take credit cards and doesn’t require an app.
I’ll take a prepay inside with cash.
Coins in a slot
Almost uniquely among US charging stations, the PFJ ones do take in store cash IIRC
While not at space-efficient, you are correct that this is a better design.
Locally to me, the charging stations are pretty meager, but there are a handful of them that are placed on the edges of parking lots that are still associated with parking spots except you park pallel to the curb rather than perpendicular. The spots are also extra long, allowing for longer vehicles and allowing room to pull out of the spot regardless of which side of the car is facing the charger. These spots don’t have covers over them, but they are at least associated with shopping centers that offer something to do while you wait.
Locally Sheetz is upping it’s charging game. Most newer and larger stores also have a small indoor seating area to suit the made to order menu selections.
Two have been remodeled in my area, and it wasn’t for the better IMHO. The took out merchandise space and replaced it with seating areas. So now they have less stuff to buy, and more people sitting around.
Flying J is hardly the first to do this. Lots of charging sites are organized this way.
I think the roof idea may be the best part. It seems like all of the outdoor public charging locations are out in the open, possibly for the sake of easy construction, but it would be pretty miserable to need to connect and pay for the charger in a downpour.
I said this needed to be a thing in a comment on here within two-three months or so of you guys starting the site up. I need my royalties.
That being said. Gonna need to have more than just what’s at a regular Flying J. There’s not enough to look at and shop at for the half hour it takes for a car to charge, and there damned sure won’t be enough for however long it takes an RV to charge.
Return of the roadside restaurant? With people distrusting chain fast food more and more it seems like a prime opportunity for station franchisees to pair up with local restauranteurs. “Come on down and eat some of Granny Jane’s delicious donuts while you wait! Free Wi-Fi!”
I hear the restrooms are pretty clean.
At a Flying J? They’re no Buc-Ee’s, but they are usually pretty good.
I certainly hope the forces behind this move made the choice to incorporate solar panels atop those massive canopies.
I would also recommend big letters on those canopies and the lead-in signs saying “EV CHARGERS” so that the naysayers who don’t use navigation or Google can see that there actually are EV chargers in this world.
Also so that people needing gasoline/diesel don’t pull in and get annoyed.
Heaven forbid that people using old tech get their little feelings hurt.
Nah, I don’t care about that. I just don’t want them taking up valuable charging space while they wander around looking for the gas pump and/or damage the charger in a rage.
They did not. That’d be a ~50 kW solar canopy total on a site that can consume 150 kW of.power per parking space, and it’s far and away the most expensive way to build solar (as compared to often big other dead areas ont he site.) the big signs are there though.
If 50KW can be from the canopy and another 100KW from the roof of the restaurant/cafe/restroom building – That’s one less high speed charger load from Big Power Company, Inc.
Energy independence starts at home.
Or in this case – The local Flying J
Eyeball this site and tell me you think that canopy is the most economic and rational place for dem panels. I’d vote “jacked up unfarmable land immediately south, for 1/3 the installed price” but that’s probably just the decades’ experience in the industry talkin’. https://www.google.com/maps/search/pilot+flying+j+454/@39.9587112,-83.3709725,419m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu
“Southeast”. Damnit.