EV Charging Is The Next WiFi

Twenty five years ago, almost none of us knew what WiFi was. It wasn’t even called WiFi. When you stayed at a hotel, you weren’t looking for it, you weren’t expecting to get it, it wasn’t an issue.

About fifteen years ago, it became a critical amenity for business travelers, and a new profit center for hotels. If your WiFi wasn’t good – business travelers wouldn’t stay with you. If it was, you could charge more.

Nowadays – it’s just table stakes. You can’t operate a hotel, a convention center or a mall and not provide reliable WiFi.

In a few years – EV charging is going to be just like WiFi.

Most hotel guests in America get to their destination by car. Many of those who fly in, rent a car and expect to be able to park it at the hotel. As a hotelier, parking may be an amenity or a profit center, but you have to have it.

Today, those cars stop somewhere at a gas station to refuel. But EV charging takes a long time and public stations are slow and hard to come by. When guests are at home, they normally charge right in their garage. It is easy, they don’t need to look for it, it doesn’t take time (literally “refuel while you sleep!”) and the car is just ready to go in the morning. Guess what – that’s what they want to do when they are traveling too. No one wants to go looking for an EV charger and then wait next to it while they are traveling. If you can do it while you’re sleeping at your hotel – it saves you time, effort and stress – and you are happy to pay for it.

EV drivers want to charge at night, in their hotel’s parking.

Now let’s look at what’s happening in the EV market. Despite what some lobbyists want you to believe, EVs are here, they are here to stay, and they are replacing gas cars. Whether you believe the federal government, California or Goldman Sachs – the price and utility of owning an EV or close to or even cheaper than gas vehicles already and is dropping. And as governments both incentivize EVs and regulate against gas vehicles, this trend is now inevitable.

What does it mean? Look at your parking lot. Count the cars. Now imagine that 30, 50, 90% of them are electric, and that all of these guests want to charge their cars while parked in your parking lot. Because they are there already, because they are paying you already, and because it’s what they are used to at home. It’s a big opportunity for hotel owners. Instead of spending money at a gas station (or a public charging network), these guests are willing to spend money with you. Build a good experience for them, and they will pay.

Most cars in YOUR parking lot will be EVs in the next decade – and want to pay YOU for energy.

The problem is implementing this. EV charging takes lots of power. What we call “slow charging” today – Level 2 charging, takes as much power per charger as do several single family homes. Level 3 charging, also known as fast charging – as much as dozens or hundreds of homes. Multiply this by the number of guests’ cars, and the power and energy requirements are way above what your hotel’s spare capacity is today – and getting significantly more from the utility could take many years. Now, this sounds complicated, and what many hoteliers have done is simply say “this is way over our head. Can we get Tesla or a Chargepoint or someone like that just do it”?

Stay in control – Don’t hand this off to a charging network.

Letting a charging network like Tesla or EVgo do it means you are giving away both the guest experience and most of the financial opportunity in this amenity. On top of that, you are actually picking an imperfect solution on both the energy and the guest experience side.

The power your hotel gets from the utility, and the power you have an opportunity in generating, for instance by having solar panels on your roof – it comes to you. Getting more power, is getting more power to your property, and it affects your building’s value regardless of the EV charging aspects. It is something you want to be in control of, and optimize for your overall electricity needs. If Tesla or Chargepoint or one of their competitors ends up controlling your utility hookup – you’ve essentially given away a critical piece of your real estate value.

Now let’s think about your guests. What your guests need is very different than what Tesla or the public charging networks provide. Guests want to park when they get in, connect, and leave in the morning with a full battery. They don’t want to download a 3rd party app and put in a credit card number – they already have a billing relationship with you. They want to be automatically identified as they check in, billed on their guest bill, and get some benefits if they are loyalty program members – in short, feel like welcome hotel guests, not gas-station customers. The guests don’t need the car ready in an hour or two, and definitely don’t want to come out of the room to move their car off of a charger to free it up for another guest. They want charging where they’re parked, for as long as they are there. You’re not telling them to leave the room in the middle of the night cause someone else needs the bathroom. Why should the parking space be any different?

Guests want to feel like welcome hotel guests, not gas-station customers

What you need is a system that provides as many chargers as possible. These chargers don’t need to be very fast – you typically have a whole night to charge a battery that is maybe half-full to begin with. And the guest experience needs to be perfect – as a car pulls in, you want to identify the guest, and just say, “Hey Mrs. Jones, we see you, we will charge your car, enjoy your evening.” So chargers need to be connected to your guest reservation system so it can identify license plates or guest apps and close the loop.

Electrically – you need a system that manages power in a very different way than public charging works. Such a system looks at your electric infrastructure and your power sources, it looks at what your hotel is using for lighting and HVAC at every moment – and it rations the remaining energy to all the chargers in a way that enables running many chargers, concurrently, and slowly. You also want it to optimize the source of that energy – so it costs you the least, and makes you the most money. You want to put solar on your roof – because that’s practically free energy, and you may also want energy storage (batteries, essentially) in order to take the solar energy you collect during the day to use it at night. And then you want a system that takes all these resources and automatically uses them in a way that creates the best experience for your guests, and the highest return on your investment.

Did we say investment? Many funders in the market will be more than willing to pick up the tab – with no CAPEX to you, in exchange for a share of the long-term profits.

At Port Power, we call this Intelligently Managed Charging and Energy – an intelligent system that looks at the cars, chargers and energy at once and optimizes the needs and the resources.

Intelligent managed charging improves the guest experience and makes hotels money.