EV Charging Engineering Design in St. Louis

EVre is headquartered in Webster Groves, in St. Louis County, which makes St. Louis our home market alongside Kansas City. We’re a Missouri-licensed Professional Engineering Corporation (Certificate of Authority #2024017299), and every project — Level 2 or DC fast charging — is engineered under a PE stamp with Matt Norris, PE, as engineer of record. We design, build, own and operate charging infrastructure, and we size every install to the site’s actual duty cycle rather than selling the bigger system when the smaller one pays back faster.

This page covers what an EV charging engineering design project in St. Louis involves: the Ameren Missouri rate and interconnection reality, what we’ve already built in the metro, and how we run a project from first site visit to energized chargers.

Ameren Missouri territory: what changes the design

Most of the St. Louis metro sits in Ameren Missouri’s service territory, a different design problem than Evergy’s on the Kansas City side. Ameren has no EV-specific rate schedule, and the utility’s Charge Ahead incentive programs have expired — the EV program terminated December 31, 2024. A DC fast charging site in Ameren territory takes the standard commercial demand charge under Rate 3(M) Large General Service: roughly $7.43/kW in summer and $2.76/kW in winter, as published mid-2026. There’s no ratchet carrying a peak forward into future months, but there is a 100 kW billing floor, so a lightly loaded site still pays demand on at least 100 kW.

Without a rate escape valve, the engineering has to do the work a lower rate would otherwise do. That means load management — an EV energy management system capping the site’s draw, and staging charger acceptance testing port-by-port rather than pulling full power at commissioning, since a full-power test is itself a demand event that can spike the demand charge for that month. It also means right-sizing from the start: matching charger count and power level to expected session volume instead of over-building capacity that sits on the demand meter unused. This is where the load analysis in our engineering & design process earns its keep in Ameren territory.

On interconnection, Ameren publishes its new-service process at roughly 19–83 business days (about 4–17 weeks), excluding the utility’s own construction and material procurement — the real schedule risk, given industry-wide transformer lead times. The required submittal package is load sheets, site plans, electrical drawings, and signed plat and easement documents; we prepare all of it as part of a PE-stamped design package, and Ameren’s Construction Hotline (866-992-6619) is the number our clients’ contractors call once a project is in the queue. Ameren’s own Efficient Electrification Innovation Manager has put it directly to prospective clients: “Sending this email as a means of introducing you to and recommending the team at EVre as it relates to your EV charging locations in Ameren territory.”

What we have built in St. Louis

Our clearest St. Louis-area project is Olympic Oaks Village in Des Peres — a 92,000-square-foot center built in 1988 and managed by Sansone Group. We ran the full turnkey scope: assessment, PE-stamped design, permitting, construction management, and commissioning, landing on two 60 kW Blink DC fast chargers with CCS1 and NACS on every unit, plus reserved EV stalls with dedicated signage and striping. Construction and commissioning were done by Compass Electrical Solutions under our management, inside an active retail center, with no impact to center operations. Total installed cost ran about $200,000, and EVre owns and operates the site on the Blink network.

That Des Peres location is also one of our own charging stations — we own it and monitor it 24/7, part of the same public DC fast charging network we run at our other Missouri sites.

We also have a relationship with Dierbergs, the family-owned St. Louis grocer operating since 1914, through the Dierbergs Lakeview Pointe project at the Lake of the Ozarks — an equipment modernization replacing outdated chargers with two 75 kW Tritium DC fast chargers on the Noodoe network, with Plug & Charge and card/app payment, also in Ameren Missouri territory.

Who we work with here

In St. Louis, our typical client is a commercial property owner or manager — a shopping center, a grocery-anchored retail site, or a similar host location — who wants charging on the property without taking on the engineering or utility coordination themselves. We offer two ways to structure that: “You Own It, We Build It,” where the site host funds the project, and “We Design. We Build. We Operate,” our design-build-operate (DBO) model where EVre funds the build and shares revenue with the site host. Details on both are on Partner With Us; the organizations we work with are on Partners & Clients.

On the construction side, Compass Electrical Solutions is our St. Louis-area electrical contractor under our construction management — they built and commissioned Olympic Oaks Village.

How a St. Louis project runs

The sequence doesn’t change by metro, but the Ameren steps do. We start with a site assessment: existing electrical capacity, parking and ADA layout, and a payback screen based on realistic session volume. If the numbers work, we move into engineering and design — load analysis, single-line development, and a PE-stamped issue-for-permit package built to what Ameren requires. That package moves in parallel with Ameren’s interconnection queue and local permitting, then a licensed electrical contractor builds it under our construction management, followed by commissioning and network configuration. Level 2 projects typically run 6–12 weeks from assessment to energization; DC fast charging runs 4–9 months, driven by utility service and transformer lead times. Full detail is on our turnkey project delivery page.

Start with a site assessment

If you’re evaluating a St. Louis-area property for EV charging — retail, grocery, multifamily, or fleet — start with a site assessment: what your existing service can support, what a new Ameren service costs and takes, and whether the site pays back. Start a project or read more about who we are.