Specialized tech gets residential parking garages prepared for EV 'tsunami'

Accelerating electric-vehicle adoption, a strengthening business case and government cash are encouraging the wider rollout of EV chargers in multi-unit residential buildings (MURBs). As a result, innovators are introducing specialized technology to get parking garages up to speed.

Once focused on other green building projects such as LED retrofits and heating and ventilation upgrades, Toronto-based EnerSavings Inc. began installing chargers in MURBs in British Columbia four years ago. It’s now offering turnkey charging services coast to coast and preparing for a surge in demand as building owners and tenants make the EV transition.

“The tsunami is on its way,” EnerSavings CEO Kevin Lisso told Automotive News Canada.

Charger installations account for about 10 per cent of the company’s revenue today, but that’s expected to increase to 40 per cent by 2025.

The company, which employs about 130 people, offers end-to-end service, Lisso said. The process begins with an energy audit to determine how much electricity a building has available for EV chargers, then runs through design and installation.

NO MORE SLAP-AND-ZAP

While “slapping” a charger on the wall beside a parking space and running power from the building’s electrical room was a common way to give tenants access to a charger in the early days of EVs, Lisso said, the market has become far more sophisticated.

On the typical MURB project today, EnerSavings roughs in the infrastructure for 24 chargers, but only installs as many as the building needs in the short term. This allows for expansion without overspending.

The electrical infrastructure is then fed into a central hub, where it’s connected to the building’s electrical system through an energy-management system. The system keeps tabs on electricity requirements throughout the building, limiting power to EV chargers during times of high use and dialing up the output to chargers when other systems are idle.

“It talks directly to that condo building. It knows where the power is... and it knows whether it’s active or it’s not active,” Lisso said.

Using this approach, building owners can make the most of their current electrical infrastructure without costly retrofits, which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars if the building needs upgrading to pull more power from the grid, he said.

The precise size of the MURB charging market is difficult to measure. But according to the latest census, about 29 per cent of Canadian families live in apartments or condos, a figure expected to climb as cities grow denser.

LOCATION, LOCATION, CHARGER

The Toronto-based charging technology company Swtch Energy Inc. is also among the innovators helping older buildings adapt to the EV era. Swtch is seeing demand balloon as more EVs hit the street and building codes begin requiring roughed in electrical infrastructure, CEO Carter Li said.

“The business model is getting more and more clear for real estate developers,” Li said. “If you have EV charging, then you can inherently charge a few more dollars per square foot.”

Since its founding in 2016, Swtch has focused primarily on software. Its cloud-based platform monitors the electrical draw of charging stations, letting EV or building owners delay charging until the overnight hours when more power is available.

The company, which employs about 60 people in offices in Toronto, New York and Boston, manages more than 10,000 chargers in MURBs in Canada and the United States.

Realizing the “limitations to just pure software,” Swtch on April 3 announced that it was branching out a “hardware-light” energy-management system, Li said.

As with other such systems, the tool, called Swtch Control, monitors electricity consumption in real time and adjusts the amount of energy that EV chargers pull from electrical panels. The company had already installed the system in about 20 MURBs ahead of the official launch, Li said.

SIMPLER, CHEAPER RETROFITS

Managing electricity loads is not new, he said, but Swtch’s blending of inexpensive hardware with software that can respond to load changes in real time will enable MURBs to simplify retrofits, paring costs by as much as 80 per cent.

For the average rental apartment in Canada, installing two charging stations often requires a new electrical panel, which can easily cost more than $10,000, Li said. Swtch’s hardware costs several hundred dollars, a price baked into the company’s wider software services fee.

More sophisticated technology is one contributor to the increase in MURB charger installations, said EnerSavings’ Lisso, but government incentives also play a role.

The Zero Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Program (ZEVIP), which covers up to 50 per cent of costs, is the key initiative for MURBs because it backs smaller-scale projects, he said. Initially launched in 2019, ZEVIP received a $400 million commitment in the federal government’s 2022 budget to keep the program running until 2027.

Unlike last year, the federal government’s latest financial plan, tabled March 28, included no new commitments to EV infrastructure.