226 - The Apartment Dweller Episode

Gary: Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode 226 of EV Musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today we'll be looking at living in an apartment with an electric vehicle. Before we start I wanted to remind those of you who are new to EVs that this podcast has a playlist specifically for you.

It's the top 10 most relevant episodes for those who are just about to take delivery of their first EV. The link is in the show notes. Our main topic of discussion today is living in an apartment with an electric vehicle.

I talk often on this podcast about co-founder Simon Rowe. Now if you're new to the show, Simon was a guest host with me for the first few episodes of the podcast and at the time he was one of the early adopters who bought a BMW i3 because he liked the tech and the car and he wasn't worried about the fact that he didn't have the ability to charge where he lived. What was interesting about Simon's situation was that he actually had off-street parking for his car.

He lived in an apartment block that had a car park on the grounds. In fact, as I recall, some of his neighbours actually had garages in that car park. So he had off-street parking but he still couldn't charge his car.

Why? Because were no charges installed at that location. And there are any number of reasons why there were no charges, most of which were to do with the fact that they weren't installed as part of the original build a number of decades back.

Nobody wanted to pay the cost of installing charges as there was just one renter in the apartment block who had an EV. This is an issue that I would imagine is happening all over the country and to a greater or lesser extent all over the world. So how do we solve this issue?

Well, the problem is quite an interesting one. In an ideal world, people who live in an apartment block should be able to charge their cars using their own in-house electricity supply. That way they can take advantage of cheap overnight rates, load balancing and, if installed, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load technologies.

But that means that the car park will need to be configured so that either all the parking spaces, or at the very least a proportion of the parking spaces, are designed and created with a power feed to them which can be linked to a specific apartment meter. If the owner of that apartment moves and is replaced by someone who doesn't have an EV, what happens to that charge slot? Well, the alternative solution is to dig up part of the car park and install a third party public charging solution.

This could be via connected kerb, or Chargy, or any of the companies we discussed in episode 199 when we talked about this. What this means is that the car park loses a number of parking slots – let's say six – and the hope is that these slots can be used by any EV that is owned by a resident of the car park. The resident pays standard public charging fees which may or may not be reduced as a result of subscriptions – and we covered subscriptions earlier this season too.

But neither of these solutions is optimal. Each of them has upsides and downsides. I have heard tell of people who live in flats – at least the flats on lower floors – literally dropping an extension cable from their window, parking their car as close to the building as possible, and using the three-pin plug to charge their cars.

Now that's not an ideal solution but at least it solves the issue for a minority of apartment dwellers. But that does bring up the question of how many apartments there are that might need a solution such as this.

Denis: Just shy of 22% of households live in apartments.

Gary: That's Denis Watling.

Denis: My name is Denis Watling and I'm the Managing Director for ChargeGuru in the UK and Ireland.

Gary: ChargeGuru have a solution for this sort of problem.

We'll get to that shortly but first I asked Denis about the concept of alternate base charging.

Denis: Our belief as a business is that it's really, really important for EV drivers or those looking to move to an EV to have what we term an at-home charging solution or what others in the industry have termed an alternative base charging solution. So predominantly or in fact our view is that in every single case of at-home charging or alternative base charging that will be AC charging.

We of course also don't overlook or ignore the necessity of DC charging but we really do feel that that is very much an en-route solution. So for those drivers who are travelling a longer distance than their vehicle will do in one charge, so even if we say 200 miles which is quite conservative nowadays, then that's where we would see the DC charging element certainly in the future of EVs. One thing I would add to that is of course at the moment, which we're trying to help solve as we'll come on to, but at the moment not everyone can have that at-home charging and perhaps the education around that alternative base charging is also not there so people either believe they can't charge an alternative base or at the moment aren't able to.

So we do appreciate that DC charging at the moment still certainly has its place for those people who don't have at-home charging.

Gary: So if we're looking at apartment dwellers, Denis, what's the scale of the problem here? Is it a few thousand potential car drivers or is it bigger?

What do the data tell us?

Denis: So the data, not necessarily our data, we'll come on to our specific data that we've recently conducted, but the public data is that just shy of 22% of households live in apartments. I'll be honest, we haven't quite got to the bottom of the exact number of people that own a vehicle within those 22%, but we know that the average household, again depending on which data you look at, is between 1.2 and 1. 6 vehicles. As a broad figure we can assume that that is less in apartment buildings because they're in more built up areas, but broadly we're looking at between 5 and 6 million vehicles within those households that at the moment live in apartment blocks.

So our data, so we worked with CensusWire to survey a proportion of residents who live in apartment blocks and also property managers and landlords as well. So with residents we found that over 70% of those residents who live in apartment blocks would be, or currently are, because some of those respondents, around 12% of respondents did already have an EV, but over 70% of those people who live in apartments would be or already are completely reliant on public charging. On top of that, what's really interesting is that around 50% of respondents, residents said that it was a consideration, EV charging was a consideration, not their main one, but a consideration when they look to move to where they currently live.

And a further 25% said that even though it wasn't a consideration when they moved to where they are, actually it would be in their next move. So the reason I mention that is because it's not just the ability to charge that is kind of hindering the EV transition, but what we're trying to highlight is the importance for property managers and landlords that, you know, residents or potential residents are considering this in their next move.

Gary: So if we look at putting charging into an apartment, it's pretty easy, right?

Stick a couple of charges in the ground, meter for every apartment, sorted. Well, no, I'm kidding of course, it's quite a complex problem to solve, right?

Denis: We try to keep it as simple as possible for our landlords, property managers and residents, but you're right that the reality is behind the scenes, there's lots of potential complications.

So I'll try and list them off, not in any particular order. I think one from the landlord's perspective is who pays for the electricity and who maintains the charge points. So it's very, very common, if not almost entirely at the moment in the UK for any charge points to be installed very often comes off the landlord's supply and the landlord meter in the communal car park, which essentially means the landlord or whoever pays that communal electricity bill is paying for the EV charging or paying for the electricity used within EV charging.

So the first barrier or concern from a landlord perspective is, well, how am I going to recoup that money? Who's going to manage that for me? And yeah, is it even possible?

Do I want to do this? Do I want to kind of pass my electricity on to residents? The reason I'm starting with landlords and property managers is because the nature of ownership structure of apartment buildings in the UK, certainly privately owned ones, means that without that buy-in from landlords or property managers, unfortunately, so this is certainly a barrier for residents, but unfortunately, there's nothing in legislation that says that a property manager or a landlord has to allow a resident to install a charge point.

So that's why I'm starting with this side of things, because that gives a bigger picture. So the first point is cost. Second is, as I briefly mentioned, maintenance.

So again, once these charge points are installed, who's going to maintain it, which is a big concern for property managers and landlords. The third one is the scalability of that solution. So even if they allow one, two, three residents to install their own individual charge points off of that electricity meter, quite often they're installed at different times, potentially by different installers and even different hardware, usually all on different software back offices.

They are normally CPO back office type solutions, but quite often can be separate ones. And very quickly what happens is the ability to load manage those charges becomes impossible because they're all separately installed and not talking to each other essentially. So that's the third thing.

An alternative to that, and what we do see is property managers and landlords installing communal charge points, which kind of solves that issue of one network, one electrical network, but it poses another issue of scalability where it's great to have two or four or six charge points. in a hundred space car park in you know visitor's bays until of course you get the seventh driver who has an EV and obviously no longer means that they are able to charge whenever they need to.

Gary: Okay so tell me what ChargeGuru are offering that solves these particular issues?

and: 1100

But some can be way in excess of three or four thousand pounds so what our solution does is it puts a flat price for every single resident so at the moment that price is 899 so 899 pounds they pay as a resident to have their charge point installed in their dedicated space and then as mentioned we are investing and so therefore own everything else up until that point of the charge however the resident does own their own charge point the last bit of the commercials if you like and the ownership structure is that the resident pays a monthly fee to essentially subscribe to our solution but obviously it provides them access to our common infrastructure so they pay a fee of 20 pounds per month now that is irrelevant of any electricity they use so they pay the 899 which is kind of a very a very good price for a normal driveway installation so very in line with the market so we're trying to level that up for them and then they pay 20 pound a month and crucially they only pay for the electricity that they use after that but the price is going to be around the domestic price cap pence per kilowatt hour that the resident is paying which is a really really important part of our solution and because as anyone in the industry knows that you know the difference between charging at home versus on the public network is anywhere between three and up to 10 times more if you were able to get a seven or eight p night rate

Gary: If i've understood you correctly this is domestic electricity but users can't take advantage of operators such as OVO energy or Octopus energy who offer cheap overnight charging it's all at the standard domestic rate are you depriving ev owners of potential cheap charging?

Denis: Because it comes off of the communal supply in the car park they don't have the ability to choose their own energy supply anyway it's it's the supplier that the landlord or property manager freeholder has has agreed for that electricity to come into the the landlord supply so we're not taking that away from them I think the other thing to add there is I quite deliberately said we're not able to get to that night rate at the moment naturally that is the ambition and the aim and and we've we haven't touched on our kind of european footprint but we're a french business at heart and we've been around in france for 12 plus years and we've actually been doing this this fully funded apartment block solution for for 10 plus years of those and we've rolled out across 18 000 buildings the reason i'm saying that is not to just say some nice numbers about the business but naturally that enables us to then have those conversations with energy suppliers to say to enable us to offer very very attractive night rates to to residents and secondly all of that energy is being used for domestic ev charging even though it's an apartment block scenario and that's really important because that differs our model very much differs from a traditional cpo charge point operator model where clearly their commercial model is to buy and sell electricity at a margin ours is very different to that so that enables us to have those conversations which we are already having you know regarding how do we get to a cheap off peak rate

Gary: If I look at this proposal I see an immediate problem let's imagine the scenario an apartment has 30 parking spaces five people in five apartments have electric vehicles so you put five chargers in and they've all got allocated parking say apartment three has an ev they subscribe to your solution you put the charger in there and then the people who own apartment three move somebody else comes into apartment three who doesn't have an electric vehicle but their allocated parking space now has a charger that they have no need for and then somebody comes into apartment 11 who has an ev and their allocated parking space doesn't have a charger how does this get dealt with?

Denis: In that scenario there's a couple of things that can happen so one because the the resident who so I forgot the apartment numbers but was it because the resident who had an ev and moved yes owns that charge point technically and legally and in theory they can take that charge point with them if they so wish clearly they would need us or qualified electrician to ensure that's done correctly and and the supply is closed off correctly but that's the first option in reality again in france within the 10 years we don't see that happen because actually someone moves to another apartment block and gets the same solution or moves to home and is happy to leave that charger there so we assume that is the case so they've left the charge point there really importantly for the resident who's moving in so the contract with the resident between us and the resident is a 30-day rolling contract so there's no liability of course for the new incoming residents they don't have to pay anything that's the first point of course it does mean in theory that the charge point is is kind of irrelevant now and not in use but of course the way we see it is it also encourages or at least enables even more easily that that resident to make the switch to ev if and when they wish so that's a really important point for us because obviously we're trying to encourage um ev adoption that that's all that happens with that charge point so either the resident who's leaving can take it with them or the new resident has no cost and if and when they want to they subscribe for 20 pound a month and then they can use it the resident I think he said in apartment 11 who's just moved in and does have an ev that is when quite honestly they would then come to us and and purchase another charge point so 899 for that charge point and we would go and install that for them i'll be honest on that sense that is the commercial model right you can understand that it doesn't we've invested in that building we've invested in company infrastructure on the principle that we're going to enable everyone in 10 15 20 30 years to be able to charge their vehicle in their individual space which is why we don't have a simple solution delivery don't have a simple solution for you know that resident to kind of utilize the other charge point of course what it doesn't stop is leaseholders discussing with freeholders a change in allocated space it does not stop that whatsoever so there's nothing to stop that conversation which is a fairly simple one and actually something that we're seeing we're not involved in but we do all of this due diligence of course up front with the building to say there's a few caveats to the solution if you like one is it has to be underground covered over kind of walled car park essentially minimal civil works quite honestly the the second one is allocated spaces now that one is it really isn't a barrier or freeholders don't see it as a barrier they say well we don't have allocated spaces but as long as there's enough spaces we'll just allocate them you know no problem so similar principle here whereby actually a conversation with the freeholder or via the property manager to say look i'm moving into apartment 11 but I can see apartment 4 has already got an ev charger do you mind if we collectively have a conversation with the apartment 4 and say can we just swap out our space from a leasehold perspective and then that person who's moved in all they're doing is just paying the 20 pound a month this sounds like a great solution for apartment dwellers however as with many things in the ev arena and life in general the devil is in the details we're saying at the moment we will assess every possible building but at the moment the vast majority of those overground if you like or open air car parks we can't put the solution in at the moment to be quite open and honest that's because we can't offer that consistent national or now european but national pricing structure and ease of moving to an ev ie saying to the resident that you pay £9. 20 a month and your electricity we can't do that if we start initially installing our solution in open air car parks because of the cost of our investment ie civil works digging up ground having to put the cables to every single space initially so to be to be quite honest that that's for commercial reasons that we can't do that at the moment because it just doesn't work from a payback period.

It doesn't take, obviously you can't share background commercials, but it doesn't take a mathematician to stick a few numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, certainly one that works in the industry, to work out that even with underground or covered over or walled car parks, so if you imagine anything where you don't have to dig lots of stuff, we're happy to do, it doesn't take a mathematician to work out the investment that we're putting in versus the recouping of that investment, i. e. the £20 a month because the customer owns their charge point.

It's a long payback for us already, which is a positive because we're in this for the long run.

Gary: Is there a minimum number of dwellings needed in an apartment?

Denis: Yes, so it's 30 spaces as a minimum at the moment in terms of the installation, so we pre-qualify the building, of course, providing we are, and again it's very, very rare, less than 2% over 10 years that we say unfortunately we can't do it for whatever reason.

Once we qualify the building, we don't need any number of residents to raise their hand, so as soon as that, that's really important, so even if there's say there's 50 spaces, the apartment manager or owner has signed up to the solution, zero cost to them, we're ready to go, we're just waiting for that first resident. As soon as the first resident raises their hand, signs a subscription contract, we go and install everything that's required for that charge point and we don't require, you know, 10% or a nominal number of 5 or 10 people to to say yes before we install it.

Gary: But hang on, when we talked earlier about the potential market, you mentioned some figures. Do these figures alter now that you're only looking at apartments with 30 dwellings or more and underground car parks? How does this affect your figures?

Denis: The short answer is we don't know 100% because the data, despite our efforts and willingness to pay for certain data, the data isn't there to clearly define how many, you know, what proportion of the building, apartment building stock is underground.

The spaces is a little bit easier, but it's underground. It's another reason, really important reason, we're working with large property managers and freeholders because they're able to say right, well this is our estate, we know that, there you go, there's the 45% of our estate that have over 30 spaces. They'll then either know whether it's underground or not.

If they do, great, that might then reduce that to 25% of their building stock. If they don't know, then from that 45% they have over 30 spaces, then we will work with them to investigate and validate those buildings. I think coming back to what I mentioned earlier, the other important thing is this is the solution right now, but that's not where we're stopping.

We're not saying that's it, we're just going to get through all the underground car parks and then we're done. We're starting with that in the background, whilst in the background we are continuing to look and are confident that we'll find a viable solution that will also enable us to roll this out across the other, you know, open-air car parks.

Gary: So Denis, no doubt I have listeners who were either EV drivers or potential EV drivers who live in an apartment block with a minimum of 30 dwellers and an underground car park. How do they get the Charge Guru offering installed at their home? Do they have to speak to the landlord?

Denis: So we always ask and encourage residents to come to us.

We want to make it as easy as possible for them. When they do come to us, if we don't already have the information of the property manager or landlord, then we ask them for that. Just simply, please provide us the details.

Then we say, leave it with us. We will then have that conversation and progress that with the property management company and or the freeholder slash landlord. Important to note, just from a business perspective, on the other side of that, we are, we have a team, a small but growing team in the UK, but we have a team of essentially business development managers who are actively talking to property managers, freeholders, landlords and the larger entities naturally in that space so that more residents, either when they come to us, we go, yep, don't worry, that building is actually already in progress.

Or obviously the idea is when they start thinking about it, they find out that the solution is already available in their building. So we are doing that in the background, we're not relying on residents coming to us and you know, we wait for the residents come to us and then that's when we initiate it. We are doing that in the background.

But of course, we're not able to cover the whole building stock. So there's two routes for us. One is direct with those property managers, landlords, and the other is a lead from a resident who says, I would like this solution in my apartment block.

And then that still feeds into the same process where we start the, we initiate the conversation with the landlord.

Gary: Are there any live sites currently under the Chargeguru offering?

Denis: No, we don't at the moment. So we've only launched this offering March, back into March this year. And by launched, we mean, yeah, even started speaking to landlords, property managers about that. We do have our first handful of buildings, 12, 15 large apartment buildings who are signed up, so ready to go.

And we're just going through the processes of technical evaluation and DNO application, et cetera, with those. So a chunk of those will be live, certainly before the end of the year, but hopefully considerably sooner.

Gary: Well, I've got to say that all sounds quite fantastic.

I've got a couple of takeaways from a discussion with Denis. The solution's ideal for landlords and renters who have apartments with underground car parks and more than 30 spaces. It's less suitable for those who have outside car parks, which would effectively have cut Simon Rowe out of the equation.

And as I said, the minimum size is 30 dwellings or 30 car parking spaces. Now, Denis didn't say on air who the energy company is that they're working with to provide the electricity for their offering, but I have it on good authority that when it's finally announced, people are not going to be too disappointed. Now, overall, the issue with the apartment dwellers in electric cars is still one that's dominated by the landlords.

It's very difficult for an individual leasee to get permission to put a charger in a car park with all the associated groundworks and cabling and metering, et cetera, to charge their car. This needs approval from the landlord, as well as some sort of offering from a third party to make this happening. For those who don't meet the Charge Guru criteria, therefore, it looks like you're going to be thrown to the mercy of one of the public charging networks, such as Chargy or Connecticut.

Now, obviously, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not quite as neat a solution as Charge Guru. This season, we're looking at raising the awareness of carbon literacy with our listeners, and one way we're doing that is with the carbon fact, as read by carbon literacy trainer Anne Snelson.

Anne :Domestic flights have by far the greatest footprint of any transport method at a whopping 246 grams per kilometre.

National rail, coaches and electric vehicles have less than a fifth of that footprint, so please let the train take the strain whenever you can.

Gary: It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing to share with your listeners. Now, we've talked before on this show about wireless charging, and one of the things that people put forward as a reason why it won't work commercially is charging speeds.

Well, in a recent test at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Porsche Taycan set a new world record for wireless charging speeds, when researchers managed to transfer a peak power of 270 kilowatts to the car. For the company Senti amongst us, that is the peak charging speed attainable on that version of the car being tested. The distance between the sender unit on the ground and the receiver on the car was 4.

85 inches, with the system achieving an impressive efficiency of 95%. It was achieved using lightweight electromagnetic coupling coils with a diameter of just over 19 inches that allow for higher power density in the smallest possible coil. This is similar to the systems found in the small computer devices like smartphones, but the main difference is the polyphase coils in the development Taycan feature rotating magnetic fields generated by the coil phase windings to boost the power.

It's expected that Porsche and the coil manufacturers will continue working together in the near term to improve the system and make it smaller, more cost-effective and easier to manufacture on a larger scale. I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show. It was put together this week with the help of Denis Watlin and Nicola Banchet from Charge Guru.

Many thanks for your help. If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms or other general messages to pass on to me I can be reached at info at evmusings. com.

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If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this point by tweeting me at musings ev with the words a breed apartment. Hashtag if you know you know nothing else.

Thanks as always to my co-founder Simon. You know he's looking to expand into the world of techno DJs and wants to make a name for himself as a dubstep master. First order of the day is to organise a rave at which he can show off his skills.

All he needs now is a venue of some sort.

Denis: He's not too fussy about where but he certainly doesn't want anywhere that'll get him wet while he's playing. Even with underground or covered over or walled car parks.

Gary: Thanks for listening.