November 14, 2024
The news story linked above details how one strata recently lost their ability to charge residents for using EV charging infrastructure. It’s a cautionary tale with lessons for any strata hoping to effectively manage charging expenses and revenues. Cost recovery is an important EV charging operations consideration, as councils work to ensure recovery of all charging activity costs – or enable a small surplus.
See September 30, 2024 CBC news story here:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/white-rock-strata-ev-charging-fees-1.7337777EV charging systems can have impacts on electricity and other costs that are not always well understood by strata councils. When deciding how best to manage this challenge, many councils weigh the difference in costs – but they may not have full information about their options.
Some stay out of the details entirely, hiring a network charging company to manage collections. While this approach is easy for the strata, it always involves profits for the network supplier – typically resulting in excessive costs for low mileage EV drivers who pay more in fees than the underlying cost of electricity.
At the other extreme, a council volunteer may do the work to figure out costs for each EV driver and submit this data to the strata property manager for collection per regular monthly strata fees. More work for already busy councils!
Given the recent CRT ruling, understanding all the costs is crucial to avoid disputes and treat your resident users fairly. In the case reported by the CBC, it looks like no one effectively made the argument for the strata’s position or guided them to make a strong case for their approach before an owner took the matter through the full course to arbitration.
Electric Advantage provides independent advice to strata councils on all matters surrounding EV charging infrastructure. We support stratas and their property management companies with the analysis, tools and information to properly account for EV charging operations. We also advise on cost effective collection options periodic basis, avoiding the high costs of charging network operator payment schemes and minimizing related workload.