How to send a load letter for a charging depot

The name varies. Some utilities call it a load letter, some a load data sheet, some a new business request, some just a service application. The document is the same and so is the reader: a planning engineer who has to decide whether the transformer and the feeder serving your yard can carry what you are about to add, and if not, what has to be built.That engineer works from a queue. A letter that arrives with the data already in it gets studied. A letter that says the company is exploring fleet electrification and would like to discuss options generates a phone call three weeks later asking for the numbers you could have sent on day one. The whole trick is to make the first document complete.

The example entries below show the format. They are not our figures and none of them is a recommendation. Replace every one with yours.

What can the existing service carry? You want their answer, not yours. You may have done the arithmetic on your own side of the meter and concluded there is headroom, and you may be right. The transformer feeding your yard may also feed the two buildings either side of you, and their limit binds before yours does.What would a new or upgraded service cost? The answer comes back as a construction estimate with a line-extension allowance netted against it, and producing it may take a formal study. Ask what the study costs, whether the fee is credited against construction, and whether the estimate carries an expiry date.What is the transformer lead time right now? This is the question with the longest calendar and the shortest half-life. We do not publish a national lead-time figure, because there is no honest one to publish — it varies by utility, by equipment class and by the month you ask. So ask, write the answer down with the date beside it, and re-ask before you commit to a vehicle delivery schedule.

Demand-metered commercial accounts are recorded at interval resolution. Most utilities will export it, and many support Green Button Download My Data, which gives you a standard file rather than a PDF of a chart.That data tells you the measured peak, the hour it happens and the season it happens in. A yard whose peak lands at 14:00 in August is not competing with a charging window that runs 19:00 to 05:00, and showing that in the letter is more persuasive than asserting it.

This one sentence in the letter is worth more than the rest of it. Twenty 11.5 kW ports is 230 kW only if all twenty run flat out at the same moment, which on an overnight depot they never need to. An energy management system that holds the site under a fixed limit turns that 230 kW into whatever number you choose, subject to one floor: the total energy the vehicles need, divided by the hours available to deliver it.Be ready to back it up. Name the control method, say whether the limit is enforced at the service or inside the charger group, and say what the limit does if the network connection drops. Utilities and electrical inspectors both ask. A design that fails open is a design that will eventually draw the number you told them it would not.

Utility make-ready and fleet programs, where they exist, run through a different desk with different forms and, often, a rule that work started before approval is ineligible. Find out whether that rule applies to you before anyone breaks ground, and keep the paperwork on its own track.On the federal side there is nothing to apply for. The Section 30C credit terminated for property placed in service after June 30, 2026, and there is no federal replacement. If a proposal you receive nets a federal credit against your capital cost, that line is an error and it needs correcting before you sign.

The screening review answers the cheap question: does this fit inside what is already there? If it does, the project shortens dramatically and the remaining work is all on your side of the meter. If it does not, you are into a study, and the study is where the line-extension allowance and your share of the construction cost get calculated.Two practical things. Ask who your single point of contact is and get a direct email address, because a request living in a shared inbox moves at the speed of the shared inbox. And put a review date in your own calendar. Utilities rarely chase you, and a request that has gone quiet for a month has usually gone quiet on a desk rather than in a queue.