Kay and Bruce Schilling decided last year that they wanted to install electric vehicle charging at an apartment building they manage in Belmont, California, but they had no idea where to start.
They figured adding the convenience might attract renters, and Kay loved driving her own EV so much that she hoped providing chargers would help renters make the switch themselves. “Once people experience driving an electric car, it’s like you can never turn back,” she said.
The Schillings considered their options. DC fast chargers charge a car in as little as 30 minutes, but were way too expensive. They looked in Level 2 chargers — like those commonly seen outside grocery stores and office buildings that typically charge a car in four to 10 hours — quickly ran into challenges.
To provide enough power, they will need an expensive electrical upgrade, which could take at least a year due to long queues allowed. The required improvements and charging hardware were so expensive that they would only be able to install a few chargers, requiring tenants to share. And since a powerful Level 2 can fill an EV battery in a few hours, residents will have to move their cars when they’re done to open the stall for the next driver.
“It didn’t feel like a very friendly way to provide a service to our tenants,” Kay told Grist.
Then the Schillings heard about a program by community-led electricity provider Peninsula Clean Energy, or PCE, aimed at getting apartment building owners to adopt a widely frowned upon method of EV fueling: Level 1 charging, done with a reliable wall outlet.
Level 1 charging is slow: It uses a 120-volt outlet, like a TV, and charges batteries at a rate of about five miles every hour. But it is also relatively cheap and simple. The Schillings discovered they could install 30 Level 1 “smart” outlets — one for nearly every parking stall — without major electrical work. PCE picked up almost the entire bill.
Courtesy of Orange
While most EV drivers who own a single-family home can install a charger, the one-third of the U.S. population who live in multi-family residences depend on property owners to make that decision. But those who want to provide the convenience often face infrastructural barriers, prohibitive costs and the conundrum of how to implement a system that is convenient for tenants.
It’s a problem the US is only beginning to confront, as most early EV adopters live in single-family homes. That will soon change, according to Brennan Borlaug, a research analyst at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL, who co-authored a study on national charging needs.
“We’re getting into a period where the used EV market is going to start getting flooded and there’s going to be a lot of people adopting EVs in multi-family homes,” Borlaug said. “It’s going to be exciting to see how more people can drive these cars, but there will be growing pains.”
To support 33 million electric vehicles on US roads by 2030, NREL estimates the US will need almost 27 million Level 1 and 2 charging ports at residences and workplaces.
Achieving that number will require an enormous effort, but PCE believes that one tool to get there is to deploy ‘right-size’ charging solutions, which place less focus on speed and more emphasis on ubiquity. The community choice aggregator provides clean energy for residents of San Mateo County just south of San Francisco, where EVs have been responsible one third of new car registrations last year and around 250,000 residents live in multi-family dwellings. It focuses millions of dollars on incentives for Tier 1 levy. The strategy, it says, will get more people some power instead of a few people a lot of power.
“Using low-power solutions appears to be the fastest, most affordable and most scalable solution to getting instant charging access to where people live,” Phillip Kobernick, head of transportation programs at PCE, told Grist. “So instead of posting one [fast] charger, which is the default way, let’s put 20 in, and at a much lower cost.”
By her EV Ready program, PCE has already spent more than $2 million to help install nearly 1,000 charging ports, most of them at apartment buildings and condos. Another 3,000 are in process.
To craft its strategy, PCE sought census data and surveyed customers. It discovered that most drivers leave their cars parked for at least 12 hours a day, and drive no more than about 40 miles daily. It also found that the customers who did use Level 2 charging at their apartments were plugged in all night but drew electricity for less than three hours.
“It was like, well, it’s obviously an overbuilt solution,” says Kobernick, “if you just sit there with a plug in your car and do nothing for nine hours.”
The long periods that cars were parked at night, and the short distances they drove during the day, meant that plugging into a standard socket could easily sustain drivers’ batteries. “It’s not that we’ve reinvented the wheel,” Kobernick said. “It’s more that we fit our program to do what a lot of people are already doing.”
The low-and-slow approach also meant that far fewer buildings would need electrical upgrades, putting less strain on California’s already strained grid. But the strategy will only work if the outlets are installed in large volumes so that each tenant can access one and connect as long as needed. PCE has created a program that will pay up to $2,000 per Level 1 or “low power” Level 2 outlet (which uses a 240-volt, 20-amp outlet and can add about 140 miles overnight), with no limit on the number of outlets. The subsidies are higher for affordable housing buildings. All projects include free site design.
The Schillings’ project at the El Dorado Apartments took just two weeks to permit and another two weeks to install. They needed some panel upgrades, but not nearly the amount of work needed if they had chosen Tier 2 stalls. With PCE’s help, the $77,000 venture cost them just $8,000. Residents plug into the Orange Level 1 “smart” outlets with the cord that comes with their car and pay for the electricity through a connected app. The Schillings said their tenants have embraced the approach.
“You just plug in and forget about it,” Bruce Schilling said. “It’s good for the night.” Not long after the outlets were installed, a resident told them that now that he could charge at home, he was going to buy an EV.
There is a public fast charging station across from the El Dorado Apartments, which tenants can use if they need to fill up quickly for a long day of driving. Borlaug said that kind of symbiotic relationship helps the Tier 1 approach work while taking pressure off the fast chargers, who are underfunded and oversubscribed for now.
“Level one is to get what you can, and then you rely on the public networks to supplement whenever you need it,” he said.
By reducing reliance on public charging, which typically costs more than filling up at home, PCE’s approach could also broaden EV access.
The St. Francis Center, which manages affordable housing units in San Mateo County, used PCE rebates to install smart outlets in six parking stalls at the Alma Lea Apartments in Redwood City. There aren’t any EV drivers there yet, but the center wanted to make sure a lack of home charging didn’t stand in the way of anyone considering switching to electric.
“It’s about thinking about the long-term experience of our tenants and setting them up for success,” said Michael Pierce, board chairman of the St. Francis Center, said. “The families in our properties should have the opportunity to own an electric vehicle and get the benefits of lower cost per mile and less maintenance.”
Pierce believes that now that the outlets are there, it’s only a matter of time before electric vehicles appear in the parking lot. “I think it’s a chicken and egg thing. When they need another car, this is an option they can choose without worrying about charging.”
The GoPowerEV PowerPort connectors, capable of both Level 1 and Level 2 charging, Alma Lea’s tenants can save even more money on charging costs. Drivers set how many miles they need to add to their range and what time they need them through the connected app, and the software can wait to charge the car until electricity rates are cheapest. Users can even tell the app to load only during the cheapest times, even if it means you don’t get as many miles as filling up the entire time the car is plugged in.
That option works, Pierce says, because drivers charge every time they park, rather than when they manage to find a spot at a public fast-charging station. “You realize, I don’t have to do this binary ‘full-not full,'” he said. “I can just add a little bit at a time and it’s going to be fine.”
