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.