Onsite charging for EVs has long been seen by many advocates as an essential feature of apartment living, if the technology ever has a chance of breaking into the mainstream.
The United States includes some 23 million apartments, Theresa Kaiser-White, vice president for asset management and procurement at Willow Bridge Property Company, reminded panelists during a webinar Wednesday organized by Forth Mobility, on the issue of EV charging at multifamily housing.
“We are starting to see developers advancing some of their initiatives for EV charging. And then there’s also states that are mandating EV charging,” Kaiser-White said during the panel, as she urged her colleagues in the multifamily housing sector to become more informed about how to plan for charging infrastructure, and the many different approaches this can take. That’s because on the one hand, she said, more states and regions are requiring new construction to at least be wired for chargers; and, on the other, residents are increasingly coming to expect chargers as they would any other amenity.
Kaiser-White compared charging to television cable service “in the old days.”
“You’ve got to have service,” she said. “People demand the service. And it has to be good service. It can’t be marginal.”
That service can take many forms. One approach often used is to simply let a third party install and operate the chargers, with residents paying to use them, much like they might pay to use a charger in a parking garage or retail location. In this model, the property owner or manager could, Kaiser-White said, even work out a revenue-sharing agreement.
That arrangement could raise eyebrows among residents, however, Randy McCourt, honorary member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, said, noting multifamily housing residents “are really clamoring” for EV charging at a fair rate where third parties are not setting charging rates at an astronomically expensive level.
When a third-party vendor gets involved, “the user is feeling that’s not really good for them,” McCourt said during the panel. “I’m not sure we’ve landed on the right solution quite yet.”
The growth and transition to EVs continues to press forward, experts say. Rex Hazelton, senior associate at the Cadmus Group, a consulting firm, said EV adoption is as high as 30 percent in some parts of the country, as electric vehicles made up about 10 percent of new vehicle sales last year.
“EV adoption has grown extremely rapidly over that few years,” Hazelton said Thursday during a Transportation Research Board panel on EV charging at airports.
Hazelton said he expects to see “a slight slowdown” in the next two years, as federal purchase incentives wind down. However, electric cars will “continue to be a large portion of new vehicle sales.”
It’s not just apartment building owners, managers and developers who need to understand the nature of shared EV charging; charge-point providers and policymakers designing incentive programs also need to understand the many nuances of the multifamily housing industry.
The developer who builds a property with the plan to immediately sell is “a different business model,” and charge-point operators need to understand how the car-charging system they propose or install needs to work within this scenario, said Whitaker Jamieson, a senior specialist at Forth, during Thursday’s panel.
“That is something I have not seen, incentive providers really understanding and creating incentives that are geared toward that specific build-construction setup,” he said. “I want to see more incentive providers looking at these different build scenarios and retrofit situations, based on different market segments, based on the age of the building.”
And likewise, building planners and operators need to understand the nature of charging, various development codes, and the need to collaborate with utilities and other stakeholders before deploying EV infrastructure.
“You just can’t put chargers in and have them there,” Kaiser-White said. “You have to have a systematic approach to managing and monitoring the performance of the chargers, and the maintenance of the chargers.
“There’s a lot more to it than just sticking some chargers in the garage, and trying to satisfy the requirement, or what you believe is a need for residents,” she said.
