Report calls for all new apartment buildings to have EV charging capability

Downtown Vancouver resident Abhay Gambhir has owned a Tesla for over a year, and despite loving his car, he has to drive to Richmond regularly to charge it.

That's because Gambhir, like many of the city's residents, lives in an apartment. While he wants to buy an EV charger for his parking spot, he hasn't heard back from his landlord for two months.

"It's not just 30 minutes. It's driving to the supercharger, supercharging, then staying there for 30 minutes," he said. "It's overall like 45, 50 minutes."

A new report from Clean Energy Canada is calling on all levels of government to ensure new apartment buildings come equipped with electric vehicle chargers, and also provide funding to retrofit older buildings.

The report, published Wednesday, argues that a lack of at-home charging for apartment dwellers is an impediment to EV adoption more generally — especially in a region like Metro Vancouver, where census data shows 60 per cent of residents live in apartments.

"There's a number of different municipalities across B.C. that are starting to take action and look at EV readiness in condos and apartments," said Rachel Doran, vice-president of policy and strategy at Clean Energy Canada. "But what we're calling for is really a bit more of a comprehensive approach."

Clean Energy Canada is a think tank that's based out of Simon Fraser University in Metro Vancouver.

Its report says that Quebec leads the country in requiring new multi-unit buildings to be 100 per cent EV-ready, which means each parking spot has the capacity for a Level 2 EV charger.

Doran said B.C. has some rules that say apartment dwellers have the legal right to install EV charging stations, once they have permission to do so, at their own cost.

"A good policy solution will also include, you know, supports to try to help retrofit these buildings," she said. 

"Those bigger policies, and hopefully not a piecemeal approach across municipalities, but something a bit more uniform would be helpful."

Doran said that having new buildings be equipped with EV-charging capabilities is more cost effective, as it costs four times more to retrofit an existing apartment building.

The analyst said that in Metro Vancouver, federal data showed that some of the municipalities — like Lions Bay and Belcarra — that had the highest rate of EV adoption last year had no apartment buildings at all, according to the 2021 census.

"We're really seeing a correlation here in some circumstances, and clear evidence that the people who are buying the EVs today are likely ones where they can go home and plug in," she said.

"We really need to be making sure that we're not creating, kind of, a cost down the road."