Condo developers adding EV chargers to their parking lots
On Monday, Concord Pacific Developments unveiled the largest fully electric vehicle parking structure in Canada.
All of the 1,974 parking spots for the parkade of the Concord Brentwood four-tower condominium project in Burnaby, B.C. are not only wired to be EV-ready (as has become standard in the building code in the Vancouver region) but also come equipped with a charger. The building has the electrical capacity to charge a vehicle plugged into every charger all at once, well ahead of the industry standard.
But if you ask Terry Hui, CEO of Concord Pacific Group (and Concord Green Energy), going all-electric is a “no-brainer” that everyone in real estate development will be doing soon.
Concord didn’t set out to break any records with its electric parking lot, said Mr. Hui. Concord Green Energy has been adding EV parking to its buildings for more than a decade and has also been investing in sustainable power generation; it now has facilities for wind, solar and hydroelectric power generation in five provinces.
“I have a very large green energy portfolio; I don’t like burning stuff,” said Mr. Hui. “I’m not on board every green initiative, but the electric car proposition is a no-brainer.” He compares it to adding fibre-Internet infrastructure to buildings decades before that was standard. “Thirty-five years ago, fibre was unheard of,” he said. “What’s very much embedded in our thinking is – I wouldn’t say future proofing – but we do consider how to make it upgradable.”
t’s likely to take a while before most of the nearly 2,000 stalls in Burnaby will be filled with EVs. According to Statistics Canada, in 2023 there were fewer than a million registered passenger EVs of all types (3.9 per cent of the 23.6 million light-duty motor vehicles such as passenger cars, trucks and vans). That said, when it comes to Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) – such as plug-in electrics that need a charging facility like Concord’s – British Columbia is the leading province for adoption with 3.8 per cent of such vehicles (compared to the average of 2 per cent for the whole of Canada).
According to Carter Li, CEO and co-founder of charging network builder Swtch Energy – which has helped build 15,000 charging spots across 1,000 buildings – getting Canadians to adopt EVs is a bit of a chicken and egg problem because of the need for specialized charging infrastructure.
“The whole genesis of the company was me in 2015 trying to own an electric car, initially unsuccessfully, in my condo in CityPlace [in Toronto],” he said. With no EV charging spots in his building, he had to find creative workarounds. “I had a Chevy Volt and the nearest charging spot was a paid parking garage, about 800 meters away. I made do for about a year and a half, but this was not the path of widespread adoption.”
Retrofitting huge concrete parking structures has proven a challenge. According to a Natural Resources Canada study this February prepared by Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisor, there were less than 50,000 EV ready parking spaces in multi-family buildings in Canada. That is barely enough for 3.3 per cent of the 1.5 million apartments in buildings five storeys or more in the country. A survey referenced in the study said that, as of 2022, fewer than 12 per cent of EV owners lived in multifamily buildings.
In the Vancouver region, municipalities have changed new building planning rules to require multifamily buildings have EV-ready parking garages. But the mandates for actual charging stations are typically for only about 20 per cent of the spots, according to Chris Koch, head of growth and partnerships for Hypercharge Networks Corp., which announced on Monday it had delivered 778 charging stations to PCI Developments’ King George Hub project in Surrey, B.C.
“We’re seeing higher and higher numbers in terms of the proportion in a garage,” said Mr. Koch, not least because some builders are pitching the charging gear as an optional upgrade that adds resale value to a new-build condo unit. “Even if I don’t have an EV today, there’s a pretty good chance a charger will help me get better rent. And if I’m planning to flip the unit, that’s an amenity. We completed a project 6 months ago where we did that model – we had a 73-per-cent uptake.”
One wrinkle in the market, according to Mr. Koch, is that, as new condo sales slow, more projects are switching to rental, which typically has far less parking than a condo project.
Mr. Hui expects that the question of whether to install chargers will become moot as EV adoption ramps up. “Would I buy a place without a washer and dryer in it? This is going to be something people are going to expect to have,” he said.
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
