Federal “Managed Charging” May Just Be the Playbook for Every Big Campus

DOE’s fleet guidance quietly shows landlords how to add EVs without blowing up the transformer—or the utility bill.

Why Washington Suddenly Cares About When Cars Charge

The federal government is about to become one of the largest EV operators in the country. Executive orders and agency mandates are pushing federal fleets toward zero-emission vehicles, and that means thousands of chargers landing at bases, courthouses, labs and office campuses.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) has a blunt message for facility managers: if you treat EV charging as a “plug it in whenever” amenity, you will overbuild your electrical system and overspend on demand charges.

Instead, FEMP is urging agencies to adopt managed charging—software- and policy-driven control of when, how fast and in what sequence vehicles charge.

At the same time, FEMP’s new Federal Workplace Charging Program Guide walks agencies through how to offer charging to employees’ personal vehicles on federal property, from fee structures to roles and responsibilities.

For ChargedUp! readers, the punchline is simple: these are site-level playbooks that private owners - corporate, healthcare, higher ed, logistics, even REITs - can copy almost verbatim.

What Managed Charging Looks Like in the Real World

FEMP defines managed charging as an “adaptive means of charging EVs” that considers both vehicle needs and control objectives, often designed to support the grid, avoid equipment upgrades and reduce energy costs.

One of the clearest examples comes from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s own parking garage. NREL wanted to install more than 100 EV charging ports for employee vehicles without replacing the existing transformer—a capital project that would have blown the budget. Instead, the lab capped the garage’s total load and used smart charging software to spread individual sessions throughout the day. Here’s how it works in practice:

• When drivers plug in, they enter how much energy they need and how long they’ll be parked.

• The system looks at that queue, the transformer limit, building load and (optionally) on-site solar production.

• It schedules and throttles charging so that total power never exceeds the ceiling, pushing flexible load into lower-cost time-of-use windows where possible.

According to FEMP, this approach let NREL operate its chargers at or near their 6.7-kilowatt capacity while keeping the overall garage load under the transformer rating and trimming demand charges. That is a federal facility story—but if you’re running a hospital campus, airport, research park or corporate HQ, it’s also your story.

A Workplace Charging Policy in a Box

If managed charging is the technical layer, the Federal Workplace Charging Program Guide is the governance layer. The updated 2025 version provides model language for agencies to define who can charge, when, where and at what price when employees plug in their personal EVs on government property. The guide walks through:

• Roles (national lead, regional coordinators, facility coordinators).

• How to survey employees to right-size the number of ports.

• Planning, acquisition and installation steps for EVSE.

• How to set fees that recover electricity, network and installation costs without turning charging into a profit center.

• Data and reporting expectations, including how to track usage and align with broader fleet and sustainability requirements.

DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center now points non-federal employers to the same guide as a best-practice reference, noting that workplace charging can contribute to LEED and other building certifications—and that bringing in utilities, owners and contractors early is essential, especially in leased facilities where tenants don’t control the electrical room. In other words, FEMP didn’t just write a federal policy. It accidentally handed the private sector a template.

How Private Owners Can Lift This Playbook Almost One-for-One

If you strip away acronyms, the FEMP guidance reduces to a four-part playbook that works just as well for a university, medical center or business park:

1. Start with load and constraints, not plugs. Use your utility interval data and a simple capacity study to set a site-level power budget for EVs. The NREL example shows that a smart ceiling plus software can be cheaper than a transformer upgrade—and often faster to implement.

2. Write down who gets to charge and how it’s managed. Borrow the guide’s structure for roles, surveys and fee design, but swap “agency” for “owner” and “facility coordinator” for “property manager.” The policy clarity is what lets you scale from 10 to 200 ports without chaos.

3. Use smart charging to align with tariffs and on-site generation. FEMP’s “Smart Charge Management Applications and Benefits” page explicitly calls out shifting charging away from peaks and toward solar as a core benefit. For campuses with carport PV or microgrids, that’s where real operating-cost savings live.

4. Plan for fleets and employees together. DOE’s ZEV Ready guidance encourages agencies to share EVSE between government fleets and employee vehicles to reduce the total number of ports and keep power needs manageable. The same logic applies if you run service vehicles, shuttles or security fleets out of the same garages your tenants use.

The managed charging and workplace guides even nod to the next frontier: bidirectional charging, where vehicles can feed buildings or microgrids during outages or peaks. Most owners aren’t there yet—but designing policies and software with that in mind avoids painful rewrites later.

The Bottom Line for ChargedUp! Readers

FEMP’s documents are written in government-speak, but the underlying message is refreshingly commercial: EV charging is an energy asset, not a set of wall outlets.

For large campuses of any kind, the federal government has now road-tested a model where you:

• Cap EV load instead of oversizing every piece of gear.

• Use software to fit charging under that cap and around your tariff.

• Put clear rules and fees in writing so drivers know what to expect.

You don’t have to be a federal agency to use that playbook. You just have to be tired of treating chargers as an uncontrolled load—and ready to make them part of how your property actually runs.