How one condo complex installed EV charging for just $405 per parking spot

One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.

But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.

While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.

And so, when we heard about a condo complex that installed EV chargers for all of its units, and at an incredibly low cost of just $405 per space in one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the country, we had to find out more.

The condo complex is Woodland Creek, with 90 units in East Palo Alto, CA, in the heart of SIlicon Valley, the epicenter of electric vehicle adoption in the US.

The project was installed by Pando Electric, an EV charging company that focuses on multifamily and commercial buildings. We spoke with its CEO and founder, Aaron Li, for some insights into the project.

Pando says this is the largest “100% coverage” project in North America, but that it’s not stopping there. It’s the largest project the company has installed yet, but that record won’t stay for long.

It differs from others in that most multifamily projects will cover some percentage of available spaces, but this one decided to add outlets for every single parking spot on the property – 90 spots, each for one unit, and 2 handicap parking spots.

The chargers are small boxes, equipped with connectivity and a NEMA 14-50 outlet. Each charger doesn’t have a cable connected – that’s for the owner of the car to provide, in the form of a mobile charging connector. Most EVs either come with one of these cables, or one can be purchased separately for a few hundred dollars.

Pando says the benefit of going this route is that in a world with a wide variety of electric cars, OEM-supplied equipment will always be the most reliable, and will often come with a warranty from the vehicle manufacturer.

It also means that each owner is responsible for their own cable, which means you don’t need to have one maintenance guy on the property responsible for keeping all 90 units up and running, or people mistreating attached cables, because each person will take ownership over their own equipment and take better care of it (there’s a similar provision in the new NACS/J3400 spec that should help with public charging). And that there will be no need to update systems if charging standard change – as we’re seeing currently as the industry transitions to NACS.

Instead of adding dedicated service to each spot, Pando’s system shares electricity between all the outlets on the property. In this way, it can use 300 amps of three-phase commercial service to charge all 90 cars overnight – albeit not as quickly as if each vehicle had its own dedicated 7-10kW level 2 charger. And it said installation costs went down by 80% when connecting to communal electricity rather than adding service to each individual unit.

It accomplishes this by implementing a queue through Pando’s charging app. When a car wants to charge, you plug in, initiate a charging session through the app (or through a “tap-to-charge” NFC system), and get added to a queue. If you have a particular need for immediate charging, you can jump to the front of the queue and pay a premium (of around 20%) for faster charging. Charging costs the same amount as electricity would normally cost in the area, and your electricity usage is monitored through the Pando app.

For most owners, this queue won’t really make a difference – most people are driving some ~40 miles per day and would only need an hour or two of charging per night anyway. So the effect is the same: you get home, you plug in, and you wake up to a full charge.

And having centralized control over charging does open up possibilities for grid services. We’ve seen services like virtual power plants that are able to leverage grid-connected storage to feed the grid on demand, and Pando would like to move in that direction eventually – but its current NEMA 14-50 solution is not bidirectional-capable.

However, dynamic load management is still useful, as the system can try to deliver maximum power at times of lower demand, then scale back when demand (and prices, and grid stress) are high. Some utilities have started offering incentives for users to cut back usage at certain times (or asked everyone to cut back on usage to avoid blackouts), so a centralized system can help to manage power automatically in these situations without having to get every resident onboard.

The most impressive part about the project is the price that Pando was able to achieve. It did take advantage of a hefty utility credit from Peninsula Clean Energy, the local electric utility co-operative, which covered $2,000 per unit installed.

After that incentive, the all-in cost including the charging units themselves (~$500 each), project design, installation, conduit, permitting, labor, etc, was only $405 per unit. This is less than a month’s worth of HOA fees at the condo complex, where units cost between $500k-$1m. So, a drop in the bucket, really, in order to add new capability to every unit (and thus, better resale value, especially given the popularity of EVs in the area).

Typically, adding traditional level 2 charging can cost a lot more than that for an apartment complex, especially if there’s a need to pull more capacity from the utility (which takes more time, too, adding further to project costs). So this load-sharing method results in great benefits on cost.

And by covering every unit, residents won’t need to worry about sharing chargers, or needing to wait for upgrades if all of a sudden there are more EVs than there are spots. It future-proofs the complex so that even if everyone gets an EV (it is Silicon Valley, after all), there will still be places for them all to charge.

Electrek’s Take

I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is charging for people who don’t have access to their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.

There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best bet is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.

So there’s a need for solutions in this space, and Pando’s seems like a pretty good one. There are other companies doing installations for multifamily dwellings, but we haven’t heard of one that was this cheap before. It really makes it seem economical to install these units for every single parking spot, instead of fussing about with some smaller percentage of units and having to do additional upgrades later.

The one problem with it that I see is that it’s attached to an app. While Pando says that it’s worked to ensure the app is reliable even if the system goes down (e.g., it communicates locally instead of needing to connect to the internet at all times), an app is just an unnecessary step after plugging in that I’d like to see removed.

Pando says that it’s working on bringing a “plug-and-charge-like experience” to using its chargers – which I’d imagine would be possible by doing local bluetooth communication with a phone when a charging session is started, much like the phone-as-key system on Teslas and some other EVs these days. You’d still need an app, you just wouldn’t need to open it every time, which would be good enough in my opinion.

But overall, I’m quite excited about this project, because it solves a big problem, and I cant wait to see more multifamily communities install something like this. And, frankly, we also need legislation/building codes to hop in and require this sort of thing, so it becomes the rule rather than the exception and apartment dwellers can feel secure that they’ll be able to find a place to charge – and if install costs can get as low as $405/unit, that makes a regulatory answer much more possible.

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