Service Planning & Design Helps Connect Indoor San Francisco EV Charging Station

By Jennifer Robison

Picture your typical electric-vehicle charging station. 

You probably imagine a parking lot with a few spaces set aside as charging points. You might see the back wall of a hotel or big-box store, and maybe a couple of Dumpsters nearby. Perhaps you see cars circling — including gasoline-powered cars that park in dedicated EV-charging spaces. 

Now picture this: An air-conditioned, indoor sanctuary with 20 hyper-fast chargers, lounges with food and beverage vending machines, complimentary high-speed WiFi, two restrooms with baby-changing stations and 24/7 monitoring and security. 

That’s the vision Electrify America brought to life earlier this year inside its flagship charging station at 928 Harrison St. near the heart of downtown San Francisco. 

“This is a unique charging station — the first and, so far, the only charging station in the nation that is all-indoors and offers customer lounges,” said Ben Moore, Electrify America’s senior manager of site development and construction. 

To make it happen, the Virginia-based company needed PG&E’s Service Planning & Design (SP&D) team to overhaul electric service to the site. 

The new-service connection to PG&E’s grid would be the largest interconnection in Electrify America’s 47-state network, using double the power of the 61-story, 1.4 million-square-foot Salesforce Tower to serve a single-story, 15,500 square-foot former warehouse shoehorned between two apartment buildings in San Francisco’s dense South of Market neighborhood. 

Working closely with Electrify America, the SP&D team, in a “One PG&E” partnership with the company’s Business Energy Solutions, Electric Operations and Clean Energy Transportation Strategy & Policy teams, helped develop creative solutions and focused on constant communication amid challenges that included an unusual service type, limited space for infrastructure and a supply-chain shortage. 

Their effort pared two to three months from the project’s schedule and gave Electrify America a head start building buzz — a critical factor in reducing range anxiety to encourage EV adoption. 

Here’s how the teams made it happen. 

A shortage of stations 

Much was at stake with Electrify America’s planned station. 

The City and County of San Francisco outlined ambitious goals in its 2021 Climate Action Plan: By 2030, it aims for at least 80% of trips in San Francisco to count as low-carbon trips — including via EVs. 

But while San Franciscans are “ahead of the EV adoption curve,” the city has a shortage of charging stations, Moore said. 

“We wanted to help fix that by providing an indoor space that is safe and clean and would take stress off the smaller charging stations around the city,” he said. “Large charging stations such as these can solve some of the charging puzzle for dense metropolitan areas where people may have only street parking.” 

To serve customers, the site would need 3.6 megawatts of power — about the amount of power that serves the Salesforce Tower, the second-tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi River. 

That meant the type of electric service and size of equipment would need one-of-a-kind system plans. 

For starters, plans called for the kind of high-voltage energization usually reserved for transmission-level projects that connect directly to a substation. 

It’s “very rare” for a developer to directly tap into that high-voltage, or primary, service, said Neema Yazdi, a strategic analyst on PG&E’s Clean Energy Transportation Strategy & Policy team. 

“Usually, you have to be closer to a substation, and a project like that will have long lead times,” he said. 

In fact, the Harrison station would mark the first time Electrify America tapped into primary service anywhere across its 950-station, 47-state network. 

That service level would create capacity issues, because electric infrastructure that serves the neighborhood was in full use and couldn’t deliver significantly larger amounts of power to the area. 

And the sheer size of electrical equipment required on-site would bump up against space and access constraints. 

With those challenges on the drawing board, PG&E and Electrify America began working on the station in mid-2022, with a targeted opening of May 2024. 

Even that timeline would present big issues: The project began as pandemic-driven supply-chain issues led to equipment shortages in sectors including construction and utilities. 

“There are just so many nuances to developing a project that is the first energization of its kind, with equipment we’ve never had to purchase,” Moore said.  

Undaunted, the teams got to work. 

‘A great partnership’ 

On the PG&E side, industrial power engineer Taylor Fong set clear expectations from the start and maintained constant communication with Electrify America. 

“As we do with all our customers, we discussed issues that could delay the project so that we could prepare the customer and explain how we might handle those concerns,” she said.  

Weekly check-ins to talk through emerging issues also helped, said John Storm, a strategic account manager on PG&E’s Business Energy Solutions team. 

Fong worked with the estimating team on innovative project designs to enable connection of the building’s full electric demand without triggering capacity issues, and to house and allow access to large pieces of electric equipment. 

Moore said he appreciated the creative work. 

“We had a really extensive interconnection planned, and PG&E’s Service Planning & Design team evaluated their grid in a way so that we could reduce the scope and time required to get energized,” he said. “That ensured we could expedite the project and save both teams time and money.” 

The “home run,” Moore said, was close coordination between PG&E and Electrify America’s construction contractor to make sure the charging center’s switchgear—the equipment that controls, regulates and protects power systems — met both the utility’s standards and Electrify America’s needs. 

“With the challenges we faced, PG&E really delivered,” Moore said. “They worked with us hand in hand and excelled at helping us to think creatively when we got into tight spots to make sure we were meeting all required codes and clearances.” 

Recent process improvements in PG&E’s Service Planning & Design organization have helped complicated projects succeed, Fong said. 

“These processes help everyone communicate based on a similar goal, with understanding of the deadline,” she said. 

Added Moore: “The PG&E team and our team were able to work together on milestones we needed to hit to effectively take on any challenges that came up along the way.” 

Beating the schedule 

As a result of that teamwork, Electrify America’s charging station opened in February, about three months ahead of the company’s plan. 

“Internally, we knew we still had this long and arduous interconnection effort in process,” Moore said. “We planned for that in our forecast, but our teamwork with PG&E allowed us to crash that final schedule and open the site early in time for all the important travel periods, including serving customers who wanted to head to the mountains to ski in the winter, or head north to Wine Country at the beginning of summer.” 

Opening early — and in time for busy travel seasons — could only help potential buyers make the leap to an EV, Moore said.  

“The additional weeks the site was open allowed Electrify America and PG&E together to increase confidence among the potential customer base that they can go ahead and make that leap,” he said. 

So far, the reception by EV users has been “phenomenal,” Moore said, with the station averaging more than 8,000 charging sessions in its first month. 

“It’s one of our highest-utilized stations in the country. We get constant feedback from customers that this is truly one of their best charging experiences. They will go out of their way to charge here versus other stations. It’s something they didn’t know they needed. We want to thank the PG&E team. This project showed that our teams can work together to deliver a project of major magnitude. We look forward to working with PG&E in the future.”