2024
Electric Vehicle Charging Facilities at Four Walmart Sites
Buildings Retail
Plan Group for ChargePoint at Walmarts
Squamish, British Columbia, Canada - Virtual Visit Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada - Virtual Visit Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada - Virtual Visit Langford, British Columbia, Canada - Virtual Visit
Civil engineering design to support third-party charging systems within the parking lots of Walmart stores in British Columbia, starting with four sites. Site engineering and utility coordination for buried electrical infrastructure.
Walmart chose to stop the program after we finished revised construction drawings for all four sites, before installing any electrical equipment.
Learned
This project emphasized two wise practices that limit re-work and one that highlights how important context can be:
- require or develop site base models in geographically correct space before starting electrical design, to eliminate positioning problems and limit rework
- even small projects need multiple stages of issue and feedback, progressive detail gives all parties involved opportunities to adjust concepts to fit discovered conditions with limited rework between stages
- know the overall project structure beyond your direct client, so that your design considers the needs of other possible tiers of client in the other project stakeholders and rightsholders
Compared with 2015, by 2024, municipal and regional geographic information systems have enough open data to allow engineering teams to work out concept designs that will overlay simply and in correct scale which compares directly to other utility mapping. Our team could have had prompt and responsive help from the our internal GIS technologists to export scale mapping directly from municipal GIS via their REST APIs for a base mapping in design tools.
Involved
We supported our electrical engineering colleagues to finish construction drawings for Plan Group for four sites. When I started, the request seemed simple: Walmart and Plan Group needed our design for a few sites to pilot a process that would become a longer program for installing electric vehicle charging throughout British Columbia.
To proceed with the concept, Walmart required our client (the installation company) to use Stantec as the engineers of record for systems on their land. Straightforward projects with short time-frames. Easy.
As work progressed, I learned that the approval structure had at least two more layers. We submitted to Plan Group who took it to the charging company who took it to Walmart. The turnaround time for reviews suggested that we might also involve Walmart's head office, making it four layers of review. And, the charging company changed along the way.
The work involved simple electrical panels, charging cabinets, and cable runs at which Plan Group excelled. We were responsible for pulling together the additional information Walmart needed for decision making and construction permitting.
Our original deliverables were 90% design drawings and construction drawings for the sites. Representatives from our teams reviewed the sites with the other three parties and selected locations. After feedback from Plan Group, we had revised drawings for Walmart. Walmart's comments on the 90% designs at two sites involved changing where the charging stalls would sit on the parking lot; complete re-design.
- Squamish
- in widest median island
- nearby trees and buried utilities
- Kelowna - re-designed
- Walmart disagreed with first location - competed with regular customer parking
- Walmart preferred edge of site along Enterprise Way, next to delivery-pickup stalls by the building; within right-of-way for gas utility, requiring Fortis approval and involvement
- Abbotsford
- stalls in one bank of parking on the east side of the lot - far from the driveway
- nearby tree
- Langford - re-designed
- Walmart preferred a smaller footprint on this site
- stalls in one bank of parking on the northwest corner of the lot - far from the driveway
- adjusted for smaller parking impact and fit with existing median island, removing existing tree
For our work, Plan Group supplied PDF versions of architectural site plans for each site. These showed the detailed building and landscape layouts we needed for fitting the design to Walmart's operational needs.
To meet our short deadlines, we started electrical engineering design based on the site review decisions before we had adjusted the detailed site plans to municipal mapping. Once the civil base plan was ready, we reworked the electrical layouts against the essential base information.