Your employees need to charge their cars, and you want to avoid footing the energy bill. Why does that have to be so expensive?
If you have looked around, you might be aware that this problem has yet to be solved by the big names in charging. Luckily, Liberty Plugins has spent the last decade-plus perfecting access control and billing for workplace charging systems.
What’s wrong with the leaders in charging?
Nothing. They’re just solving a different problem than the one you have. The big, publicly traded names in the EV charging space are playing an important role in driving the expansion of EV charging networks: half of the chicken-and-egg problem that we need to solve before we can obsolete ICE vehicles. That said, these companies are also the reason for the gulf between the average cost of a commercial kWh (12¢, eia.gov) and the average price of a kWh dispensed by publicly accessible EV chargers (~50¢ / kWh).
Like an ATM network, these leading providers tack 8-15% in “revenue share” fees onto every transaction, on top of the monthly software fees, and costly proprietary charging hardware (often >$10,000 per charger). If you’re going to make it work with one of these companies, it will necessarily mean passing high prices to your team to offset the high cost of offering the service.
Cost of monthly service or software subscriptions compared among competing workplace charge station providers. O&M Packages excluded.
Why should you care?
Year after year, more and more of the best people that you can hire to drive the growth of your business will be driving electric vehicles. It’s not just them of course; it will be everyone else too. Whether you have a flexible work-from-home policy or require office attendance, those employees are going to be more likely and happier to come into the office if they can charge their vehicle when they get there.
If they don’t have access to charging at home (because they live in an apartment or condo), charging at the office becomes an incredibly valuable perk. If you can convince just a few employees to stick around for an extra year or two, it’s absolutely worth doing:
- It costs 33% of an employee’s salary to replace a worker who has quit
- On average, 2.5% of employees quit each year
If you could reduce the rate at which employees bounce by just 5%, (that’s a reduction to 2.375%) it could be tremendously valuable for your company. Given the number of EV drivers that you have on your team today, and the rate at which that number will grow, making that difference with EV charging is not a stretch.
What does Liberty’s solution look like?
Rather than load you up with high costs that must be passed on to your employees, Liberty divides an overall lower cost model across stakeholders: your company and the employees who use the equipment.
- You pay for the annual subscription that enables you to control access and pricing parameters for your system. We can retrofit your existing chargers for this service, or you can buy new. The Liberty Plugins system is compatible with nearly all level-2 and DC fast chargers, so you’re not locked in by our equipment.
- Your employees pay a nominal $3 subscription each month for us to host their wallet. They will also pay a nominal (30¢ + 2.9%) fee to our credit card processor when they reload their wallet.
- The fees paid by the host (you) and by your employees, when combine, are still usually less than half of what the national charging networks charge for their services.
With Liberty, you’re enabled to charge a fair rate for energy, and your employees can enjoy a low rate for charging at the office. Our business model uniquely supports charging just a few cents more per unit of energy than what you pay the utility in most cases, where other network providers might require you to burden your employees with significantly more than that to support their software costs.
What’s next?
Talk to our team and let us show you a better way to manage your new charging infrastructure. Visit us at www.libertyplugins.com/contact to get started.