How the EV Charging Site-Readiness Model Works

Model Purpose & Workflow

The model supports early planning decisions for public EV charging candidate sites. It is intentionally designed to help public-sector planners and local government staff systematically compare sites, prioritize starter candidates, identify future expansion needs, and flag specific administrative or engineering review issues early in the process.

How the model flows

The logic follows a straightforward, transparent sequence to transform raw site concepts into actionable planning categories:

Inputs and Scoring Dimensions

Candidate site inputs

The model evaluates a range of planning-screen inputs for each site. Because these are early-stage planning attributes, they may require formal confirmation and are not treated as final verified engineering data. Input categories include:

• Site identity: Site ID, site name, and jurisdiction.
• Context & Use: Public-serving use type, operating hours, and parking context.
• Demand proxies: Visitor or employee counts and nearby charging supply.
• Infrastructure: Likely charger placement, electrical service rating, and spare electrical capacity.
• Safety & Compliance: ADA and accessibility considerations, emergency disconnect visibility, garage/structure-specific needs, fire/AHJ indicators, and stormwater/site-work indicators.
• Testing conditions: Future demand scenarios.

Core scoring dimensions

Sites are evaluated qualitatively and systematically across six high-level dimensions:

1. Demand signal: Whether the site appears likely to support sufficient public charging demand based on context and visitation proxies.
2. Electrical and cost feasibility: Whether the site's electrical capacity, service constraints, and likely implementation complexity support immediate readiness or pose heavy upgrade burdens.
3. Accessibility and site suitability: Whether site access, ADA spacing considerations, parking layout, and likely charger placement are viable.
4. Public value and equity: Whether a site supports useful public access, serves the community context well, and offers strategic planning value.
5. Safety, review, and implementation burden: Whether AHJ, fire codes, structured parking rules, emergency disconnect visibility, or stormwater impacts may complicate or slow down implementation.
6. Future readiness and scenario sensitivity: Whether a site appears structurally and spatially able to support future demand expansion under varying planning scenarios.

Decision Categories

Based on the scoring dimensions, candidate sites are sorted into one of five decision categories. This helps teams quickly triage which sites warrant immediate detailed engineering study and which should be tabled.

• Advance / strong starter candidates: These are the strongest current starter candidates in the model, demonstrating solid demand and lower implementation friction.
• Good starter candidates with expandable design: These sites may support starter installations well, but should be planned carefully with future expansion and verification in mind.
• Resolve review issues before expansion: These sites may be useful public assets, but significant review burdens or electrical constraints should be addressed before committing to major capacity.
• Monitor / small pilot: These sites should be monitored over time or considered only for smaller pilot-style planning rather than immediate general expansion.
• Do not advance for general-public buildout yet: A site should not advance as a general-public charging site unless foundational assumptions (e.g., public access hours, fleet-only use-cases) change.

Right-Sizing & Review Burden Logic

Right-sizing logic

The model aims to prevent overbuilding while ensuring sites are prepared for the future. It does this by separating capacity into two distinct recommendations:

• Install-now ports: A smaller starter recommendation focused on immediate feasibility, electrical capacity, and proven current demand.
• Future-ready ports: The amount of underlying capacity (e.g., conduit, panel space, spatial planning) the site should be prepared to accommodate if demand grows over time.

Note: Right-sizing is a planning-support recommendation. It must always be checked against engineering, utility, procurement, site design, ADA, and permitting review.

Review burden logic

Review burden flags are not failures. They indicate where more information or administrative confirmation is needed before final planning or implementation can proceed. Recurring review fields include electrical service ratings, spare electrical capacity, emergency disconnect visibility, visitor/employee counts, operating hours, parking counts, likely charger placement, and specific garage/fire/AHJ/access reviews for special-use sites.

Scenario Testing

To ensure that future-ready recommendations are resilient, the model tests whether future-ready assumptions remain adequate under different simulated planning conditions.

Scenarios tested in the legacy_v2 sweep. The canonical milestone2_v3 contract carries four scenario names - baseline, base, high, stress_combined:

• Base
• High growth
• Long sessions
• Short daily window
• Peakier demand
• Combined stress

Outputs & Limitations

The execution of this model generates a suite of planning-support materials, including a comprehensive planning report PDF, visual summaries, site rankings, decision buckets, port recommendations, scenario results, and Tableau-ready CSV exports.

Planning-support artifact only

The outputs from this model support early screening, prioritization, and discussion. They should not be treated as final approval, final design, or a construction-ready determination.

This model does not replace:

• Final engineering design
• Utility coordination
• Formal permitting
• Procurement processes
• ADA compliance review
• Fire / AHJ review
• Stormwater review
• Construction approval
• On-the-ground site surveys
• Stakeholder confirmation
• Official municipal decision-making