EVs stand to change the relationship that people have with commuting, touring, where and from whom they buy their vehicle energy.

Currently 92% of daily EV charging occurs at home or work. 3 out of 4 DC-area residents say they would strongly consider a plug-in EV for their next vehicle. 82% of those say that having access to a home or workplace charging is a top priority. Access to L2 fast-charging is the single biggest factor leading to EV owner satisfaction.

Virginia has a ‘Right to Charge Law‘ that requires associations to permit electric vehicle charging unless the CC&Rs prohibit it.  Of course our CC&Rs were written back when consumer EVs where not contemplated.  Yet there are still implications that maybe are covered, and navigating those contours will be the subject of court cases in the next few years for sure.

One issue would be how to accommodate owners that want a dedicated EV charger attached to their unit, but whose said units are far from the parking lot.  That scenario presents an engineering challenge.   It turns out that there are viable engineering solutions for owners of units that are far from the parking lot to have their own dedicated L2 unit. Those solutions would be very expensive for a single owner, but nevertheless possible from an engineering standpoint.

As for community chargers, there are many product options for semi-private EV chargers. Some EV chargers have smaller physical sizes than others. The smaller ones might be more desirable for parking spaces where space is more constrained.

The HOA leasing EV chargers instead of buying them might be an attractive option. Leasing in general cuts initial costs. There’s a general business adage that says, ‘Lease a depreciating asset, buy an appreciating asset.’  Any given EV charger model would certainly depreciate, require periodic repair/replacement, and certainly suffer from technical obsolescence.

For us, leasing might allow us to shift funding from acquisition of the chargers themselves, to provisioning of infrastructure. That is, we might be more able to run upworked electrical infrastructure more extensively throughout the property such that more parking spots can be EV charger ready.  In addition to along the Exxon wall, the Langston Blvd wall is a viable location for chargers, as is the area to the right of the Washington Blvd entrance. Again small profile chargers might be attractive for parking spaces where the walkways make for a tight space constraints.

Post installation, the HOA would probably become the primary source of residents’ vehicle fuel. That is, the HOA would become like a gas station. As Dominion Power would bill the HOA, the HOA would in turn have to figure how and how much to bill individuals for usage. Controlled, multi-user, metered-access capability is what separates single-home dedicated L2 chargers from semi-private chargers, and explains their 10-fold cost difference.  EV chargers come with various methods of controlled access, physical keys, physical cards, coded-access, all with or without phone apps.

Our next steps are to gather more cost data. This spreadsheet is a model of when might a purchase contract might be executed. That is, given a certain upfront cost in today’s dollars, what savings would be necessary to afford the installation given a certain phasing schedule, inflation rate, and fund interest rate. You can play around with any of the parameters and assumptions. There spreadsheet could/should be a lot more complicated if the payments to some fund were made quarterly instead of annually. It could/should include post-installation maintenance as well as operational profit/loss from charging itself.

Of course, leasing would be a completely different scenario, of which we do not have a financial plan as yet.

EV chargers are categorized in several ways, e.g., by the connection type and by the time it takes to fully charge a vehicle, and by private home installed or semi-private access, metered chargers.

So called Level 1 chargers charge via a normal 120 V household electrical socket.  There are cables that apparently come with the vehicle from the manufacturer.

There are Level 2 charges that themselves come in two main types,  ones for private use, say for individual homes, and ones for semi-private (community) use.  The latter is what a community association like Laurel Mews would primarily be considering, though we do have a few owners for whom a private L2 charger might be a practical solution.  The main thing about L2 chargers is that they require electrical capacity that’s upworked from what’s normally in homes, and for sure from our outdoor lighting circuit.

There is another level, Level 3, aka fast-chargers , which as of 2022 are still super-expensive.

Semi-private L2 chargers are the ones you might see at grocery stores or strip malls, and more and more at rest stops along interstate highways. (Some of those might be L3 chargers.)   In our situation, what seems likely is that we would install L2 chargers along the Exxon wall.  They would be connected to an upworked electrical junction box near the shed at 6711-I.  Each vehicle charge would somehow be metered such that each user would have some kind of card or code so to capture individual use for back-billing.  The chargers would thus have to be somehow connected via telephony, broadband, or satellite communications.

Cost estimates run ~$20k for the electrical upworking, and $15-20k for each charger.  So if we got 3 chargers (6 charging stations) today, the cost estimate would be ~$80k.

(Private L2 chargers are a lot less expensive, depending on how much electrical upworking you might require.)

There is a lot to consider before any decisions get made.  Dedicating spots for EV charging might be a bit much, and some of those parking spaces might be needed for disabled spaces going forward.  There are a few other issues in the law that stand to be tested in state and federal courts.

We would have to start thinking about how to finance the project.  Just off-hand, if this community was to implement this project for 2036 (when major manufacturers say they’ll be selling only EVs) then we as a community would have to start saving maybe ~$6400 per year ($120 per owner), assuming we can get an above-inflation interest rate on the fund, and that cost accelerations are normal at 3-4%.

But fourteen years from now is a long time, and we can expect EV charger technology and economics to turnover several times.

References

ChargeHub

EV Charging for Common Interest Communities

Tesla – Home Charging

Nextdoor EVs Group