EV

Condo paves way for EV charging on large scale

Friday, October 26, 2018

One Bedford Condo in Toronto is now equipped to support electric vehicle (EV) charging in just about every exclusive-use space in its parking garage, says board president David Forgione.

The condo corporation has inked a contract with a San Francisco-based company called EverCharge, whose fully managed solution is touted as increasing the EV charging capacity of buildings by 10 fold. At One Bedford Condo, that means being able to support as many as 200 EVs on Level 2 chargers versus just 20.

The feat comes at a time when a new provincial regulation is forcing condo corporations in Ontario to figure out how to accommodate requests from owners to have EV charging stations installed in spite of electrical capacity challenges. (Although the new government may have slowed down demand when it cancelled incentives to buy EVs, Forgione observes.)

It was two Tesla owners who triggered One Bedford Condo’s search for an EV charging solution. Forgione says he believes EverCharge’s solution, which has been up and running at his building since September, could have applications in other condos.

“When something works in practice like this, I like to share it because it’s not easy to implement large-scale projects in the context of a condo corporation, and we made it work and we wanted to help other condo corporations do the same,” he says.

One Bedford Condo may be EverCharge’s first residential installation in Canada, but it’s one of thousands of across North America. The solution runs on proprietary SmartPower technology, which helps increase EV charging capacity by managing loads in real time.

“What that means is when a charger’s not in use, which is a substantial part of time, that available capacity can then be used by other charge stations,” explains Kyle Lyons, director of member services.

He says condo corporations typically bear the costs associated with any shared infrastructure required to support the installation of individual EV charging stations.

“Most buildings you’re going to often need a transformer installed to access some of the building power, so it’s usually a small transformer upgrade, distribution panel, and then we wire from the resident’s parking space to those breaker panels,” says Lyons.

Forgione counts One Bedford Condo as lucky in that it didn’t require electrical upgrades to accommodate the solution and faced no upfront costs, meaning no need to seek owner approval or potentially issue a special assessment to fund the project. He explains that the condo corporation negotiated a deal that effectively gave EverCharge exclusive rights as a service provider to a set amount of the building’s transformer capacity.

Once any shared infrastructure is in place, Lyons says owners pay for the installation of their personal EV charging station, which typically ranges from $2,500 to $4,500, depending largely on how far the wire needs to be run to reach the distribution panel.

Under the fully managed solution, the board and property manager handle the basic paperwork associated with registering individual installations while EverCharge handles requests from owners for EV charging stations, along with their set-up, submetering and billing, which includes a monthly service fee.

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