But my understanding is that they typically don’t have generators, not even any old 5kw generator. The wiring does nothing, because there’s nothing to hook it to.
This is a big building with remote carports, not townhouses with parking adjacent to your door. We’d need to:
A) Install enough amperage supply to the complex for a couple hundred cars to all charge simultaneously.
B) Install properly conduited feeder wiring underground from the building out to the several parking areas.
C) Terminate the wiring in a separately breakered high amperage outlet or charging device at each space. For a couple hundred spaces.
D) Install metering or at least anti-theft protections for each termination. For a couple hundred spaces.
Based on local costs it’d easily run $2000 per space and there’s no legal way for anyone to DIY their own individual space, nor to have a proper contractor do just their own space. Good luck getting older unit owners who don’t drive or who already own what they think of as the last car of their life to vote for their pro-rata share of something that expensive that they believe they will never ever use.
It’s all or nothing as decided by majority vote of the membership. Such is condo living. It has upsides, but it has downsides too.
Across many condos in Florida this is becoming an issue various boards of directors, management companies, and memberships are grappling with. New-build facilities, especially the higher end ones, sometimes do have parking space charging power installed. On present trends that will only increase with time. It’s the retrofit of the existing stock of a couple *million *condo parking spaces that will be very slow & fitful.
Largeish trailer-mounted portable generators are readily available for rent. And are commonly trucked in by the hundred from elsewhere after a storm. Having all the wiring and cut-over switches pre-installed makes getting the gas station up and running very quick, easy, and best of all, safe. Jury-rigging some half-assed connection using antsy unskilled labor is a poor idea where large amounts of gasoline are stored.
I agree with the posts saying you can’t judge a problem like this without seeing what technology, infrastructure and public policies as a whole come along with ‘going EV’. Obviously the technology has to improve (range, cost etc) and more so infrastructure for EV’s has to expand. To be fair I doubt OP was thinking ‘what if everybody had EV’s but the charging infrastructure was just like it is now?’ Obviously that wouldn’t be the case.
OTOH I think some are a bit eager to put a smiley face on the whole thing. Govt and markets will work it all out so all capabilities remain as now. Maybe not. A reduction in the ability of populations to evacuate, every once is a great while, is just the kind of thing that might result by such a shift. Especially if the govt has to force consumers to accept higher costs in the first place because EV’s, and non-carbon power plants don’t turn out to be strictly* economically attractive by the time the mandates take effect. So in that case govt is also going to tax further to buy fleets of buses for evacuation? Probably not. The general tendency in green public policy is to downplay the real costs and difficulties of lowering carbon emissions. I doubt this would be an exception.
*short term, minus externalities. If you’re going to say the externalities always justify the mandate, then the whole issue of economic viability becomes a tautology. Green alternative costs 2X, therefore the avoided climate etc externalities must cost X and the shift is free so of course it should be mandated. 
The cost pre-externalities matters in practice.
Retrofitting will be slow and fitful and of course not complete. Of course the replacement of vehicles on the road is a slow process too. The “white space” for growth in the market is huge enough without those difficult to convert those difficult to convert large buildings. Just looking at Florida 64% of occupied units are single family homes, another 6% 2-4 units, and only 6% 50+. Smaller buildings, and even some larger ones, can allow minimally for a 220 or even 110 outlet at an owner’s parking space at the owner’s expense and develop a system to charge them for the electricity used without much difficulty at all. IF EVs become the norm a smaller association may opt to upgrade electrical to allow for that option for most units as something needed to protect their resale value.
I know that the “couple million” was pulled out of the air but to give some actual numbers … roughly 6.3 million households in Florida with about 4 million of them single family homes and 1.4 million in buildings that have 5 or more units, the minority of which, about 378K are the large units. “Couple million” is a bit of hyperbole. Still some nontrivial minority, you LSLGuy among them, live in buildings that will be unlikely to provide for overnight EV charging in any near term future. Residents there who might otherwise want an EV won’t get one unless they have charging available at the workplace, or very rapid public charging conveniently located, instead.
Frankly to me making costly conversions is not worth it, especially as we have no idea if some of these coastal communities will still exist in their present forms in several decades, which is going to be the time course of replacing the vehicle stock as cars, ICE inclusive, increasingly last 20 plus years. But no need to digress into a climate change impact discussion.
It also must be emphasized that most coastal cities in this country that might/will get evacuation orders are not Miami at the end of a peninsula and would not require driving 650 miles at one go as part of evacuation. 650 miles from Long Beach Island NJ (just about epicenter of Superstorm Sandy) for example would put you already across Ohio and coming into Indiana.
Miami and other portions of south Florida in any case need to develop comprehensive evacuation plans even for the eventuality of increasing numbers of households not owning any vehicle at all.
Agree with all of that. For certain any retrofitting in complexes like mine will greatly lag retrofitting in individual single family homes.
And thank you for generating actual numbers. For sure the geographic distribution of high density condos is very skew. In areas with buildings like this the vast majority of residents live in such buildings. As you say, they’re more than counterbalanced by the much larger body of ordinary suburbia and ruralia elsewhere. I wasn’t trying to be hyperbolic; I just over WAGged how much of FL is like the coastal wall-o-highrises near here.
My main point was aimed at debunking SamuelA’s blithe statement: “Just run an extension cord out your window; easy peasy.”
My personal irritation about the obstacles to condo retrofit is that by and large the condo-dense parts of FL are otherwise ideal pure-EV territory. The high residential density promotes high retail density which means only very short drives suffice for almost everyone almost all the time. That this EV-friendly area is exactly the place EVs are least likely to be able to be homed is a vexing perversity. To me.
You’re welcome!
Thing is that the same factors that make high residential and retail density areas otherwise ideal for EVs also make them pretty ideal for non-ownership models, such as autonomous vehicles that are not owned and that if EV return to distributed self-charging bays when not in use. More Americans are not owning their own vehicles than before, and in the most dense areas the numbers are quite large.
Agreed.
It’s interesting that EV, zipcar, uber, and autonomy are all different approaches to changing away from self-owned/self-driven ICE cars. But each in their own way reinforces the others. The future will be some blend of each. It’ll be fun to watch.
We own two cars, but the second is rarely used. We’re now coming around to the idea that when it goes, Uber will replace it. We have the somewhat unusual problem that when I go to work, its A) too far to cost-effectively Uber, and B) the car just sits there for 3 or 4 days until I return. So the one time we need the second car intensively is when the first car is sitting unused. Just too far away to readily retrieve. An autonomous shared-vehicle system would be perfect for that use case.
When I retire in a few years we might well try going carless. It does “feel” kinda like being trapped though. Which loops back to the OP. For our retired 99.9% use case a bicycle supplemented with an occasional Uber-like service would do it. But for the 0.1% use case that’s both utterly vital and utterly urgent, bike+uber is an epic fail. How to square that circle will be a big issue individually and societally.
650 miles would put me in low earth orbit.
Honestly, if it’s one huge parking garage, it would be easy peasy. All you’d need to do is retrofit a strip of parking spots to have EV chargers or at least outlets. You can do that by just running the conduit along the ceiling or walls, no need to bury anything, though you would need to possibly increase the power supply to the parking garage with more underground conduit/thicker wires.
The EV spots would go to residents willing to pay a small charge for access. If it can’t be done for less than $2000 a spot, and you want the condo association to make it’s money back over 5 years, that’s about 35 bucks a month. Probably find some takers at that price. If you can find an electrician willing to do a row of ~30 120 and 240 volt plugs and some conduit for only $1000 a plug, that brings the charge down to 16 bucks a month. 10 bucks a month if you can get the cost to $500 a space.
Frankly, 10 feet of straight conduit and a plug, bought in bulk, ain’t going to be $500.
The main cost would be the thousands of dollars to dig a new trench from wherever the power meter is and install a new subpanel on the parking garage. That just depends - the parking garage might have it’s own power meter, in that case you could just have the power company upgrade service to it.
As for anti-theft, well, the simplest would just be a padlock on the receptacle and to meter the EV charging section separately. Just charge everyone an equal cost for the electricity on that monthly surcharge. Separately metering each plug is another option, but at a certain level of cost, the cost of the equipment per month would be more than the cost of the power. For example, if each plug was a separate account + meter with the utility company, the fee is at least $5-10 per month plus installation. Depends on how much power those EVs actually use in practice.
But this is how to present it to the condo association. Find enough residents willing to pay a fee for access. Find the lowest cost way to do it, don’t just settle for outrageous $2000 a spot install costs. Present it as an optional perk that pays for itself through fees by those who use it, but also makes the condo complex more attractive to future residents, which means a small increase in market value for everyone.
So I decided to do a little more research. Basically you’d need a lockable, metal receptacle cover on each space. They make some where you can have something plugged in, while the cover is still closed and the lock applied.
Probably should have a 120 and a 240 volt receptacle for each spot, mounted high enough where cars can’t accidentally ram them. And then there are power sub meter products - that way the condo association would just have a single electric service for the whole EV charging subsystem, and then each space has a power sub-meter, mounted in a main electrical panel. Receptacles and conduits and covers and 50 amp wire, we’re talking about less than $50 in materials per space. Each power sub-meter costs around $100-$300, depending on the brand. And then, of course, all the labor for a professional to install all this stuff. A good rule of thumb is the total cost is 3 times the cost of materials.
You definitely do need the 240 volt, 50 amp receptacles for future EVs. Teslas already can fully utilize that much power. It’s about 10 kW of charging current, or 30 miles of range regained per hour. And you definitely want to meter that. A resident driving 60 miles a day, 20 days a week, would cost $36 in electricity a month.
The obstacles mostly aren’t technological or financial. They’re mostly socio-political.
Americans are lousy at group living. “I want a fancier garden but won’t spend a penny for a pool.” “I want a fancier pool but won’t spend a penny for a garden.” The outcome is sad but predictable. Both folks are semi-satisfied: they have neither a nice garden nor a nice pool. I shake my head at the zero-sum crabs-in-a-bucket thinking I often see around me.
Of course it’s far worse when none of the benefit will flow to the voter, no matter how indirectly or tenuous that benefit might be. Even somebody who doesn’t care for gardens would grudgingly admit the flowers are pretty albeit overpriced. Somebody else having an EV charging station benefits an ICE owner exactly zero. All they can imagine is the potential liability if somehow something goes wrong.
In a typical condo building each parking space belongs to some specific unit. This is true whether it’s in an enclosed garage structure or an open lot.There is no pool of shared spaces that could be partly diverted to be charging stations paid for by direct user fees.
Would that it were so. That’s exactly the kind of arrangement that would lend itself to slowly wading into deeper water rather than having to jump in full depth or do nothing at all.
Certainly there are some buildings with the right combination of forward thinking people, communal back-scratching attitudes, and scramble parking spaces that these obstacles can be beaten. I’m just not lucky enough to live there. Yet. IMO arrangements like mine are by far the norm around here. And IME we’re a more community-spirited building than many.
What I meant was remapping. Basically, in one block, install a row of EV chargers of some sort. ChargePoint are the most common ones, it seems, and with them, the cable is part of the charger. Smarter chargers have their own internal power metering, safety systems, and liability coverage.
Then, if you, the residents of unit 103, want an EV-spot, you agree to pay a few bucks extra a month and your parking space is now E-17 in the EV section. Your old parking space gets remapped to someone else. If there’s more EV spots than residents who want them, then ICE residents can park there, they just don’t get to use the charger, and if a new resident moves in who wants EV, you do the remapping switcharoo.
This would let you do the transition gradually, with EV folks paying their own costs. As more and more people own EVs with each year, you’d keep having the electricians come back and install additional blocks of chargers and plugs. Would realistically want to have some spots where it’s just a 120 volt outlet, maybe common metered, and some which have a higher speed ChargePoint charger. This is because most EV residents are only going to have a plug-in hybrid, high end EVs like Teslas and Bolts will be rare for a while.
And if your condo association is doing this, and lots of people start having EVs, and nearby condo associations *aren’t *doing it - see how that increases market value?
Honestly, it might happen organically once EVs are available inexpensively in mass quantities. Imagine trying to sell spots in a condo building that doesn’t have air conditioning, 5 years after it started becoming common.
And that’s why families having only electric cars are never going to happen unless they have longer range than a Leaf. If one of the two people wants one for commuting to their job in the city fine, but they’re not practical as an only car considering that most car owners want to take road trips. The Leaf is going to stay in the garage and get flooded while the rest of the family takes the Tesla or the gasoline car.
Agree, the question yet to be determined is where the optimal point is.
The 2018 Leaf has 150 mile range. Tesla and GM and aiming for 220, 238, and 310 miles.
And then, of course, there is the option of substituting a generator for a larger battery, though one problem with this is you need about 60 horsepower, or 45 kilowatts, to maintain highway speeds. That is not a cheap generator.
Addendum : apparently, my estimate is way off. If the Tesla model 3 or bolt need 300 watt hours per mile on average, then at 70 mph, they need .3*70 = 21 kilowatts to maintain highway speed. Probably 25-30 to satisfy drivers who want to travel at 75-80 mph. This is sustained power - obviously if you try to pass someone in such a vehicle, additional power would be coming from the remaining charge in the battery to complete such a maneuver. You’d have the sustainer engine start when the battery is around 30-40% charge and stop when it’s above 60-70%, give or take.
I’m trying to wind down this condo EV charging hijack, but want to make another point. As is typical, things are more complex than you tend to assume. Almost all the obstacles are not in the engineering, but in the rest of the socio-legal-economic realm.
In some small minority of FL condo associations, “remapping” is provided for in the original and practically unalterable community documents. Conversely, in the vast majority of condos, each unit owns (or owns the exclusive non-transferable right to) a particular identified parking space and as such they cannot be permanently remapped. Period. FL law makes this functionally impossible to do unless provided for in the original documents.
There is nothing in the majority of documents to prevent informal remapping by folks who choose to swap the use of their spaces for reasons of their own. For payment or not. But any of these arrangements must be unwound when any swap-participating unit sells and the new owner gets their unit’s originally assigned space back.
This, coupled with the requirement to spend only community funds approved by the community to perform work on community property effectively stymies your very logical and sensible solution. At least while EV charging demand is a very minority interest. If 40% of unit owners were clamoring for EV charging we could probably get another 10% to go along. But as long as interest is limited to just 1% of owners every so often, nothing can happen. We’re a victim of the massive hysteresis built into the system. Hysteresis that was deliberately installed by law to preclude problems of people making a long-term purchase of a living space only to have the underlying community environment (and its owner-borne operating costs) radically altered on the whim of a tiny but vocal minority.
That is inefficient. This might require what it took to get satellite TV to become common - the FCC saying basically that state and local governments and local organizations can go pound sand, and anyone can install a satellite antenna whenever they want.
The only loophole I can think of is if the community documents say you own the right to park in 4-G, well, no problem here. Just grab a stencil and a spray can and move 4-G around the parking lot.
Yup. Laws that stymie the kinds of “innovations” that land shark developers and conmen like to come up with have the adverse side effect of also impeding innovations that represent genuine progress.
It also must be noted that large EV penetration cannot happen by just attaching to existing electrical infrastructure. Oh the capacity is there for fairly large penetration but there are bottlenecks in local distribution. Existing transformers are unlikely to be able to handle say half of a large residential building plugging in after work. Sure variable rate structures can incentivize programming your car to charge at lower demand periods, and systems are very possible to use the vehicles to actually stabilize the grid, but doing the latter will require (relatively modest) investments in upgrades, and a large residential building that “goes EV” will need much more than running some conduit and hooking up some sub-meters. It potentially represents a very large load if most plug in at the same time without grid to vehicles communication on how much to draw when so that the charges are coordinated to not overwhelm.
You’re making a poor assumption. Mainstreem EV’s in large quantities will require rapid charge capacity for out of town travel. That will mean “gas” stations and not home charging stations.