Practice 04 · EV & Microgrid
Los Angeles · Orange County · Inland Empire
Charging plazas, islandable microgrids, and mobile substations — generation, storage, and switchgear staged on site so load energizes on a construction schedule while the permanent interconnection works its way through the utility.
Ranges are planning benchmarks — every site is sized on its own load profile, circuit, and permitting path.
01 — The Problem
Chargers are funded, fleets are ordered, and factories are leased — and all of it is stacked behind the same constraint: a distribution system that was not built for this load and a queue that does not care about anyone's delivery date.
The answer is rarely "wait." It is to stage power the site can own — and design the permanent service underneath it while the load is already running.
Vehicles arriving next quarter, depot service sized for a warehouse, and a utility upgrade that lands two years after the lease on the diesel replacements ends.
Signed a charging deal on a parking field with no room for a pad, no spare panel capacity, and a service entrance on the wrong side of the property.
Critical process load that cannot ride through an outage, a generator permit that limits run hours, and no plan for what happens during a PSPS event.
A site plan approved on the assumption the utility would deliver — now holding a project whose critical path is a transformer with an eighteen-month lead time.
Funding an asset whose revenue starts at energization — and a schedule where energization is the only milestone the borrower does not control.
Staged power turns an open-ended queue into a date on the schedule.
02 — Delivery Modes
Most projects use more than one: mobile power first, microgrid for resilience, permanent service underneath — sequenced so each one is retired or absorbed by the next instead of stranded.
Depot, fleet, and public fast charging. Load profile and diversity modeling, service and transformer sizing, pad and cabinet siting, trench and conduit, make-ready design, and utility program paperwork.
L2 · DCFC 150–350kW · make-readySolar, storage, and generation behind one point of common coupling. Islanding and transfer schemes, protection and relay coordination, controls, and the interconnection agreement that lets it run parallel to the grid.
Rule 21 · PCC · island & resyncSkid and trailer-mounted transformation, switchgear, and generation stood up on site — bridging the gap until the permanent service lands, or carrying a temporary campus, event, or outage window on its own.
Skid · trailer · temp serviceLoad and generation applications, circuit capacity checks, study and upgrade negotiation, metering and telemetry requirements, and the persistent follow-through that keeps an application from sitting — the same utility discipline we run in Hard Tech and Rebuild.
Battery sizing against the real load curve, peak shaving and demand-charge strategy, generator and fuel permitting, fire code and setback compliance for storage, and the control layer that decides what runs when the grid is gone.
What we deliver
03 — Who We Serve
The trucks arrive whether or not the depot can charge them.
Depot load modeling against real duty cycles, phased charger deployment, and staged power that keeps the first vehicles running while the permanent service is built.
Model a depot →Revenue starts at energization, not at award.
Site screening before the lease, make-ready and incentive program navigation, utility design and submittal, and construction through commissioning.
Screen a site →Resilience is an engineering scope, not a generator purchase.
Islandable design for data, fab, medical, and civic load — what stays up, for how long, on what, and how it resynchronizes when the grid returns.
Design a microgrid →Underwrite the energization date, not the optimistic one.
Independent read on interconnection risk, upgrade cost exposure, incentive capture, and what staged power does to the revenue start date.
See the energization layer →04 — Site Types
Southern California · LADWP & SCE territory
Overnight dwell · high diversity
The friendliest load shape in the practice — vehicles sit for hours, so managed charging can flatten a peak that would otherwise force a service upgrade. The fight is yard geometry, trench routing around operations, and phasing without shutting the yard down.
Short dwell · peak coincident
Fast charging where dwell is twenty minutes and every stall wants full power at once. Storage carries the peak, the utility sees a smaller service, and the landlord keeps their parking count — if the pad, the setbacks, and the fire access all work.
Continuous load · must ride through
Fab, data, medical, and civic load where an outage is the event you are designing against. Islanding scheme, protection coordination, fuel and emissions permits, and an honest ride-through duration instead of a marketing number.
05 — The Energization Layer
For every site we model the same thing: what the utility can deliver and when, what staged power costs to bridge the gap, and where the crossover sits. Sometimes waiting is right. Usually it is not.
Across a program it becomes a sequencing plan — which sites go first on utility service, which get mobile power, and which justify a microgrid on resilience alone.
Request an energization review06 — Field Work
A depot was quoted a full service upgrade against nameplate charger capacity. We modeled the actual duty cycle — vehicles dwelling nine hours, never charging simultaneously — and showed the existing service could carry the fleet under managed charging with storage covering the morning overlap.
→ Chargers energized on the existing service instead of behind a two-year queue.
A campus needed load online months before the utility could deliver a permanent bank. We staged transformation and switchgear on skids, designed the permanent service to absorb the temporary gear rather than discard it, and sequenced the cutover into a single planned window.
→ Revenue-generating load ran through the entire utility lead time.
A facility had solar, batteries, and a generator that could not run as a system — no islanding scheme, no protection coordination, no defined ride-through. We rebuilt the design around a real point of common coupling and a controls sequence, then took it through interconnection.
→ Equipment already on site finally behaved like a microgrid.
An operator was deploying sites in the order the real estate closed. We screened each location on circuit headroom, pad feasibility, and program eligibility, then resequenced the rollout so the fast sites funded the slow ones.
→ Same capital, energized revenue pulled forward by quarters.
07 — The Ask
The projects that get built are the ones that stop treating the utility as a schedule assumption. We want to work with the fleets, operators, and capital willing to design around the queue instead of waiting in it.
08 — Contact
Send the address, the existing service, and what has to run — vehicles, stalls, tools, or critical load. We come back with the delivery mode, the energization date, and what it costs to pull that date forward.
You get a plain answer on all four modes — what the utility gives you and when, what a microgrid or mobile deployment costs to beat it, and which one your schedule and your capital actually want.
Review a Site → Reviewed by a consultant, not a bot