If you live or visit Vancouver you probably have noticed how many EVs we have compared to the rest of the country. Vancouver actually has the highest EV per capita than anywhere in Canada. More people are buying EVs, reducing their emissions and making considerable savings on their commuting costs. But you may have also noticed that EV adoption amongst tenants is lacking, which is interesting considering EVs are now in the same price range as regulars cars with internal combustion engines. In this post I am going to explain why EV charging in multi-unit residential building is a win win for both tenant and property manager.

Fueling vs Charging

Now that EVs are more or less within the same price range as gas vehicles, the biggest barrier to adoption is charging. People are used to filling up their gas tanks in a matter of minutes and moving on with their day, and they expect that fill to last them on the order of days. EVs have less mileage on a full charge than a regular car on a full tank, and so we are more sensitive to their charging needs. But having a charger at home can alleviate most of these worries. With a Level 2 charger, you only need about an hour of charging to compensate for your typical daily mileage. If the expectation is that you’re going to come back home every day and plug in your car, then there is going to be plenty of time while the car is parked to replenish the energy consumed during the day. This available or free capacity is even more important in a high-rise that has access to a larger electrical supply but more chargers to manage.

Metering options for apartment buildings

In multi-unit residential buildings, electricity consumption is metered for each unit. Building appliances such as water pumps, HVAC and elevators, are supplied through a “home” meter which the landlord or strata pays for. BC Hydro provides several options of how the EV charger consumption can be measured. The simplest from a logistical and wiring point of view to install chargers on a common circuit that is managed by landlord or strata because they already have wiring running to the parkade and a working relationship with the tenants or owners. 

With an EV comes tremendous savings in energy costs. EV owners spend about 75% less on energy per distance travelled depending on how much they are charged for electrical energy. So if you are spending $120 bucks every month like I am, you will be spending about $50 to get to the same places you need to go. While the savings in operating costs are substantial.

How much does an EV owner spend on energy?

• Let’s talk numbers. 
• If you drive 15,000 km per year, and you pay about $1.8/L and each litre will get you about 10.5km, then you are spending about  $200 per month on gas. 
• With an EV, your electric efficiency is around 5km/kWh, and at an energy rate of $0.20/kWh, that equates to about $50 per month. 
• So there are savings of about 75%, one of EVs best features. That leaves behind $600 per EV per year of energy revenue on the table, and the question is, who is going to gain from your new expense. 
• Landlords have the advantage that the tenant’s EVs are parked overnight, and therefore have the greatest access and at potentially lower energy rates. Therefore they are best suited to facilitate this energy provision.  

Why property managers are best suited to build EV charging infrastructure

You need a new energy provider by potentially anyone who can provide parking access, whether at work, the mall, community centre or at home. A home charger has the advantage that it provides power access where an EV is parked most often. This is particularly important as it allows EV owners to take advantage of lower time-of-use rates overnight, significantly reducing charging costs. 

BC Hydro charging rates are $3 per hour which works out to be X. Of course this rate also includes the service of parking in a commercial zone. On the other hand at home, energy rates are normally around $0.15/kWh, which is about 50% less than commercial charging rates. (This does not include demand charges that typically increase with greater EV demand, more about that later). The point being here is that commercial charging isn’t always competitive way to charge and are best used as a last resort. 

Therefore, property managers are not only best suited to build the EV infrastructure and manage charging energy arbitrage, but because parked cars are mostly found at home, they are also most likely to generate the highest revenue compared to other charge providers.  

Charger types

With a charger at home, tenants can plug in their car when they get home, and it would typically have until the next day to make up for the energy that was spent commuting earlier. There are three charging levels or capacities. Level 1 is the slowest rate of charging, which can be supplied by a 120V receptacle. They are limited to 12A, which translates to 1.2kW or three full days of charging. On the other end of the range is Level 3 which is actually a high voltage dc supply that  can charge a battery in the order of an hour, and in the middle is a Level 2 which is the most popular charging rate. Level 2 is typically a single phase 208V or 240V, which is the same voltage as your stove. Actually a stove accepts the same kind of power as a charger and it  can draw more power from than a Level 2 charger if you turn on enough elements. If you already own an L2 charger, you may have noticed that it is sold with the same stove plug NEMA 14-50R “stove plug”. 

Dynamic load management

You may have read that EV charging is adding pressure on the electrical grid, and that refers to the loading of the wires and transformers that transfer electrical energy along the path from where it’s generated to where it’s needed, and I think it’s interesting noticing how this is true on both a small and large scale. from the single detached home all the way up to the transmission level. For example some homes with small electrical panels are not designed to handle an L2 charger at full power and some stove elements turned on at the same time. Short of upgrading the electrical panel which can be costly, there needs to be a monitoring and control system in place that ensures that the chargers don’t overload the home panel so you don’t trip the main breaker and lose power to all your household appliances. In the utility world this is referred to as demand response. Grid operators can ask large electrical consumers to ramp down their loads when needed. When it comes to the distributed world, this is referred to as dynamic load management which is especially relevant for multi-unit buildings that are supplied by undersized transformers that are themselves supplied by heavily loaded distribution grids, both of which haven’t caught up with the rate of growth in their area.  

Demand charges

Utilities do not just charge for the amount of energy consumed over a period of time. For large consumers they typically also charge a rate of their max demand, which is a measure of the electrical load at any point in time. This is because they want to reduce the loading on their own assets, which includes overhead power lines and transformers. These chargers don’t typically apply for residential customers, but can apply for common area or house meters of high rises. You can actually look up these rates by your local utility. For example, for a BCH customer consuming less 

Therefore a smart energy management system would try to distribute or flatten its energy consumption as much as possible in order to ensure that their demand rates are kept low.  These rates are typically posted by the utility, and there is usually a base amount that’s free and a rate that escalates as demand increases. This encourages building managers to spread out their loads and avoid concentrating power use at any point in time in order to keep their max demand as low as possible. When you introduce EVs into the equation, you will then want to use them when there is enough capacity available for charging. That way, they don’t incur any further demand charges 

At this point, adding more EVs to the parkade will not increase the amount of energy supplied to the EVs, and in order to increase available power, we need to increase the load capacity of the EV load centre. In reality however, each customer, including the building owner who is drawing power for the EVs, is subject to demand charges, which can be considerable for small services. So this effectively means that we want to limit the total power draw at any point in time or demand of the EVs.

By installing more chargers than what you are capable of supplying , you effectively boost your ROI because you are generating more and more cash. You are working your electrical equipment at its rating for more time, which means you are also maximizing its utility.

EV charging in multi-unit residential building is a great source of passive income for property rental managers.