The shopping centre’s gross floor lettable area is approximately 32,500 sq. m and comprises 2 shopping levels. Major tenants include Frasers, Tesco, Next, Zara and a 13 screen Omniplex. The shopping centre is considered a core asset within Deka’s large pan-European real estate fund.

Key learnings

• The relationship between the shopping centre and Tesla was critical to the overall success. Whilst pushing the USP agenda and our desire to host any Tesla car events, a trial Tesla pop up shop was introduced to offer test drives, charging information & vehicle health checks. This 3-month trial has been further extended after 500 new Tesla’s were sold from this location.

• The brand has enormous potential given its pre-immence in the area of Electric Vehicles and offers considerable social media opportunities. The association with such a brand also cements and enhances our sustainability credentials.

• Given Tesla has formally announced its intention to open its network to all EV manufacturers, the service offering will be considerably widened.

BACKGROUND & TIMING

In 2019, we commenced undertaking a feasibility study on the introduction of EV charging to the site in order to add to our growing sustainability credentials but also to widen our car customer options.

This feasibility provided a detailed understanding of slow and fast chargers, the cost to install, back of house functionality (end user paying for the service), location within the site, proximity to substations, load demands and payback.

This report brought out the overall cost of the project which presented problematic financial challenges to funding this initiative. Consequently, we started to explore other options in 2020 to find a provider that would install the equipment at a zero cost.

During early 2019 we were contacted by Tesla to explore the introduction of Tesla EV charging, but they subsequently paused the roll out of their infrastructure in Ireland.

This pause however, changed in November 2020 so we resurrected the conversation.

Construction & TECHNICAL ISSUES

The single biggest technical challenge was the enormous electrical load required by Tesla. 4 Superchargers would require 250Kva if all running simultaneously. To put this in context, the Maximum Import Capacity (MIC) for the whole site (excluding tenant areas) is 475kva. There was also the further requirement to future proof the expansion of this service, so the key was having enough available capacity in our electrical substation, without having to incur the cost of upgrading the main ESB sub-station.

In order to have a direct tenant billable metre, the ESB had to become involved, so a separate metre room was built with associated electrical cabinets along with new large underground cable runs out to the car park, all funded by Tesla.

In total, Tesla have invested heavily on this project which went live at the end of June 2021.

USAGE SESSIONS

On average the Superchargers are utilized approximately 400 times per month, well ahead of expectations. This is approximately one third of the maximum available sessions which are open 24/7 (as negotiated by Tesla).

LOCATION & Car parking

Mahon Point is located at the end of the M7 Cork / Dublin motorway so geographic representation was important to Tesla, given they had no presence in the south of the country. The 4 branded Tesla superchargers are located in P4 car park with prominent visibility on the internal roads. Location from both a branding perspective and close access to a major electrical substation were critical elements in the overall discussions.