Eaton’s Joseph Cappeta and Miguel Rivera bring a wealth of knowledge and experience around energy transition. Joe has been with Eaton for the last 14 years and has engineered, designed, and supplied electrical equipment for a multitude of end user segments including datacenters, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities. Currently he is leading a team of application specialists focused on providing products and services for solar installations, energy storage, and electrical vehicle charging infrastructure. Miguel is an electrical engineer with 10 years of design experience in residential, commercial, and industrial segments with an affinity for renewable energy. He has worked on energy storage and now turns his talents to electrical vehicle charging infrastructure (EVCI) technology.

Joe and Miguel are singularly focused on preparing electrical contractors at SPARK to answer the calls from their customers about incorporating EVCI technology into their existing or new builds, whether on the front end with design and install or the back end setting up and enabling communications and helping with commissioning.

“EVCI affects all aspects of the electrical contracting world,” Joe says. “EVCI is changing the power system in different ways whether it’s adding electrical vehicle chargers into different commercial and residential facilities or incorporating with other distributed energy resources. This changes how the power system typically works and brings with it a host of technical and safety considerations.”

Joe and Miguel note that in some cases, electrical contractors are just beginning to be contacted for EVCI work. They intend to share their knowledge, research, and experience to help contractors understand that it’s more than putting a row of charging stations in a parking lot.

“Understanding electrical vehicle infrastructure, EV charger nuances, networking and software is becoming more important every day,” says Joe. “We’re going to explain different technologies, talk about how to budget properly, and offer tips and tricks to ease the commission process. 

They plan to share best practice stories on EVCI installation, as it’s important to understand the full capabilities of the system versus simply going for the quick install. Miguel recommends educating customers on advanced features like networking and planning ahead to account for necessary steps. He remembers working with a university customer who skipped past setting up the communications part of the installation process. As a result, campus parking lots became full of people coming to charge their cars for free – and using significant resources the university was paying for. 

They share stories of the dangers of simply going for the quick install without full consideration of capabilities. Miguel cautions about understanding the full ramifications of charging station install and billing as he remembers a university customer who skipped past setting up the communications part. The result was campus parking lots became full of people coming to charge their cars for free — and using significant resources the university was paying for.

“They came back to us and said, you know, we do need your software so that we can have control over load management and the ability to bill users,” Miguel says.

Joe and Miguel say contractors have a huge opportunity to help their customers think through proper EV planning and execution resulting in work for years to come.

“EV owners are beginning to make decisions about where to eat, where to shop, and maybe even where to work based on the availability of EV charging,” Miguel says. “Let us help you help your customers.”