Every tenant improvement starts with a question that rarely gets asked early enough: does the existing electrical service have the capacity for what we are about to build? Answer it in week one and you design within reality. Answer it after drawings are done and you may be looking at a service upgrade that adds weeks and tens of thousands of dollars.
What drives the load
- HVAC — usually the single largest electrical load in an office or retail space.
- Kitchen and process equipment — restaurants, labs and medical suites can double a space’s demand.
- Receptacle and workstation density — dense open-plan offices and data-heavy tenants add up.
- EV charging, IT rooms and supplemental cooling — increasingly common, often overlooked.
How we check it
We pull the existing panel schedules, meter the service under load if the space is occupied, and run a code load calculation against the proposed scope. The result is a simple answer: the existing service covers it, it covers it with some panel work, or it needs a utility-coordinated upgrade. Each path has a cost and a schedule, and you get to see all three before design locks in.
If you do need more capacity
Service upgrades involve the utility, and utility timelines are the least flexible part of any project — often months. If an upgrade is likely, the application goes in immediately, in parallel with design, so the utility clock runs while everything else proceeds. Sometimes the better answer is load management — shedding or scheduling non-critical loads — which can avoid an upgrade entirely.
The cost of a load calculation early is a few hours of engineering. The cost of discovering the problem late is measured in weeks.