In the electric car industry’s battle to produce more charging stations across the country, the result in many cases has literally been trench warfare.

That’s because constructing charging facilities usually requires digging up streets, sidewalks and parking lots in order to put in the infrastructure needed to build the stations.

But a San Diego-based company has come up with an alternative.

“We didn’t need to dig a trench, we didn’t need to run power to it, we didn’t need to pour concrete or do any sorts of foundations and it is deployed in about two minutes,” said Desmond Wheatley, the president and CEO of Envision Solar International.


The company has patented a charging station it calls EV ARC, which stands for Electric Vehicle Autonomous Renewable Charger, which earlier this month won a global award for energy innovation.

At first glance, the EV ARC looks like just about any other charging station for an electric or plug-in car.

But each unit is comprised of a dedicated solar panel overhead that generates its own electricity, a storage unit, a charger that hooks up to the vehicle and a pad on the ground that is one-inch thick.

The vehicle parks on top of the pad while getting charged.


The entire unit fits in to a legal 9-feet-wide by 18-feet-long parking space and weighs just under 10,000 pounds.

The EV ARC is placed into the parking space by truck and is not moored or connected to any grid infrastructure, a feature that Wheatley says is critical because many businesses don’t own the parking facilities where their employees work.

“We lease our own building but when we move, we take our EV charging stations with us to our new location and that’s fantastic for businesses that lease,” Wheatley said.

The EV ARC can store between 24 to 36 kilowatt-hours of electricity.


Since the units stand alone and generate their own power, there is no electricity bill from a utility that the owners have to pay each month.

Envision has its own tracking system that orients the single solar array towards the sun during the course of the day, thus getting about 25 percent more usable electricity than it would get from a stationary site.

The company buys its solar modules from outside companies.

“We want to get as much energy density as we possibly can into our parking space,” Wheatley said. “We buy the most expensive ones.”


The energy storage system in each unit can charge vehicles day or night and generates enough electricity to power up to 150 miles of EV driving each day. Wheatley said one unit can be used to charge three vehicles at a time.

In other words, if a prospective business owner wanted to satisfy the charging needs of 15 employees or customers in the owner’s parking lot, the business would need to buy three EV ARCs.

Every hour of charging translates into about 15 to 20 miles of range for each vehicle.

A typical unit can cost about $45,000 and can go as high as $60,000 but Wheatley said with clean-energy tax credits most customers can cut that price nearly in half.


There is also no inspection or permitting process required.

“It does sound like a lot of money but anyone who knows how expensive and how disruptive it is to dig up a parking lot and to upgrade their electrical gear and go through the whole process, they know very quickly that’s this is not actually a lot of money,” Wheatley said.

The solar panel on top almost looks like a sail or an aircraft wing while the pad on the bottom of the unit provides traction and ballast.

The solar modules have 25-year warranties and the structure itself is designed to last for “50-plus years,” Wheatley said.


About 60 percent of the EV ARC customers are from government and higher education, such as the California Department of Transportation and the University of California system but Wheatley said the company has also sold units to customers in New York City, Colorado, South America, Europe and the Caribbean.

Among the 40 percent of EV ARC’s private sector customers are Google, Johnson & Johnson and the biotechnology company Genentech.

Less than 100 units have been sold so far but Wheatley said 2016 is the first year the company has marketed EV ARC in earnest.

The EV ARC was named the best product of the year in the energy innovations category at the Golden Bridge Awards, an organization in its eighth year that recognizes companies in North America, Europe, Middle-East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.


“We’re thrilled to bits over that, obviously,” said Wheatley, a native of Scotland who took over at Envision Solar in 2011 after the company that was founded in 2006 went through a reorganization.