Hi Cathy,
We use Chargepoint here and we use a third party (Voltrek) for much of the maintenance. Installation is completed by our in-house electrical utilities group. A level 2 charger is about $8000 to purchase and depending on the installation site, can easily be double that, especially if there is a long distance between the charger and power source. The chargers are generally very reliable, and the consumables are the charger plug, cables, screens etc., essentially anything that the consumer can come in contact with. A level 3 charger is extremely expensive and will have a very long ROI.
To that end, the life span is difficult to pin down but I think you can plan on about 15 years, therefore you will have a difficult time recouping costs at a standard kW pricing, especially if it is a low use area. Our goal is to be cost neutral for our fleet vehicles and that means that the public network chargers will have a higher rate and bear much of the cost burden.
As far as how to charge--I rely on Chargepoint to collect charging fees and remit back to us, and this has been relatively painless. For internal usage, we use a departmental chargeback just like we do with fuel usage, and our Chargepoint cards are linked to our Wex cards.
It is important to conduct site surveys early on before making any plans to install. You will need to make sure there is good network coverage otherwise a repeater will need to be installed too. In addition to that, different types of commuters have different charging goals, and it is important to understand what type of customer you have and where they park. Doing that will help you understand what type of charger you need and how many. Bear in mind that this may lead to further infrastructure projects as your current electrical utilities may not support a major increase in demand.
We also have a "charging club" and members of it get a reduced kW/parking price up to 6 hours if I remember correctly. Some users will throttle back their charging speed so as to game the system and get preferential parking for free and we needed to curb that habit early on, just an FYI.
In short, it is an expensive and time-consuming affair to create a charging infrastructure, but electric vehicles are rather nice to drive and solve a few other transportation issues that arise with ICE vehicles.
I hope this helps. FYI, I have a contact in Washington State that could probably give you more information that is relevant to your geography if you like.
Best of luck
Brian
------------------------------
Brian Sodders
Assistant Director of Fleet & Technical Operations
University of Massachusetts Amherst
------------------------------