The transition to electric vehicles will not slow down anytime soon, and legislators and the private sector are both hard at work creating enough infrastructure to support all of these EVs. Nevertheless, a major hurdle that has yet to exist is adding charging infrastructure to existing communal living spaces.
Building EV charging stations in new construction is important, but retrofitting in apartments, apartments and other communal living spaces is even more important. It’s also significantly more difficult, as many pre-existing spaces were not designed for EV infrastructure when they were first built. Ultimately, “the power problem begins and ends,” says a new report from Autonews Canada.
Existing buildings were often built with power requirements in mind and very little excess power was available beyond that original expectation. This means that simply adding chargers to the building’s power network is not a viable solution, as those chargers can consume more power than the system can supply.
One potential solution called Dynamic Load Management (DLM) works by distributing electricity evenly across all EVs being charged at the same time and only charging them at full volume if there is enough energy capacity to do so. DLM not only reduces infrastructure installation costs, but can also manage power in a way that protects the building’s electrical grid. Of course, the system isn’t exactly cheap, with costs regularly running up to $3,000 or $4,000 for a single space.
Those costs go up depending on how far the system needs to reach and that can be especially expensive for buildings with multi-level parking garages. “You may be at the P5 level and the closest panel may be at the P1 level, and that could take $1,000 in drilling to get down there,” said Mark Marble, a Toronto condo owner.
Carter Li, CEO of charging technology company Swtch Energy, has another unique solution for multi-family homes. He says that while most EVs take about three hours to charge, the average parking time in a residential building is actually about 11 hours.
“That gives a lot of flexibility in terms of how you can optimize,” he said. “If you slow down charging for people, they’ll get less energy, but… you can make sure everyone gets a little bit of a charge at the end of the day or the end of their stay period.”
He also thinks government support for building charging infrastructure in multi-unit residential buildings could boost adoption in the near term. For now, Canada’s Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program covers half of charger installation projects worth up to $5 million.
That financing won’t last forever, though, so many property managers see the value in moving sooner or later. Despite this, taxing apartment and condominium dwellers at home is likely to remain a serious concern for some time to come.
