Startups aim to bring EV charging to apartment and condo dwellers

In 2015, Carter Li decided he wanted an electric car. He was living in a condo in downtown Toronto, and figured he could negotiate with the condo building to get an EV charger installed in his parking stall if he agreed to cover not just his own costs, but some of the building's costs.

"I mean, I'm helping them upgrade their own infrastructure," he reasoned. "Why would they say 'no'?"

But the property manager did say "no" — after more than half a year of research and discussions with Li. "They're like, 'This is too complicated. You're touching common infrastructure. We don't want anything to do with this,'" he recalled.

While a third of Canadians live in multi-residential homes like apartment and condo buildings, a 2024 online survey of more than 2,000 Canadian EV owners by the non-profit Pollution Probe found only 12 per cent of those EV owners lived in multi-residential buildings, and those that did were far less likely to have at-home charging than those in single family homes.

Many people won't buy an EV if they have no place to charge, say Canadian Climate Institute researchers Arthur Zhang and Anna Kunduth.

"Access to charging remains a key factor on whether, and which drivers decide to go electric," they wrote in a 2024 blog post.

Li realized his frustration as a would-be EV owner in a multi-family building was a common one. So he resolved to work on a solution, co-founding a startup called Swtch Energy that aims to make charging easy for buildings where many vehicles may be charging at once.

It's among a handful of startups across Canada that are trying to provide EV charging access for people who live in condos and apartments. Here's a look at three of their solutions.

Vancouver-based startup Parkizio Technologies has what's probably the simplest and lowest-tech solution, a device called Plugzio Universal Outlet.

"You can kind of think of it as a power vending machine," said Ali Mohazab, the company's co-founder and CEO.

In many cases, a tenant or condo owner may already have a nearby outlet, for example one designed for block heaters. In some cases, Mohazab says, the landlord or property manager won't allow it to be used for EV charging.

The Plugzio Universal Outlet is a smart meter that allows the landlord or property manager to charge EV owners for the electricity they use, while controlling things like who can charge, when, how much and for what price — addressing concerns that might otherwise make them wary of allowing tenants to charge their EV.

The company says it's only a fifth the cost of a traditional Level 2 charger. While it only allows for Level 1 or "trickle" charging – adding about six km of range per hour of charging – Mohazab notes that most EVs are driven for only short distances and parked all night.

"Level 1 charging is typically enough, I would say, for 95 per cent of people," he said, with the exception of people who drive all day, such as taxi or Uber drivers.

Abdel Ali, founder and CEO of Toronto-based Kiwi Charge, said he thinks many buildings are reluctant to install EV chargers because the hardware for Level 2 charging, which can charge a vehicle's entire battery overnight, is expensive. Meanwhile, most buildings don't have a lot of residents with EVs, and those that do generally don't drive them very much each day.

That means for all the expense and trouble of installing a charger for a parking spot, it's "only going to be used a few hours per day," Ali said. "For the rest of the day it's just sitting idle."

Sharing chargers may be more efficient, but no one really wants to come down to plug or unplug their car at 3 a.m. so multiple vehicles can charge overnight.

Kiwi Charge aims to provide shared chargers that move from vehicle to vehicle automatically, thanks to a robot that it hopes to start testing this fall.

Ali likens it to a robot vacuum that autonomously navigates and cleans the entire floor: "It's like a smart Roomba for EV charging."

The battery-equipped robot would use Level 3 fast charging to charge a vehicle in half an hour, recharge its own battery from the building's power supply, then move on to the next vehicle.

"The goal is ultimately to be able to charge a different vehicle every hour," Ali said.

The company plans to test its robots with developer Tridel in Toronto this fall.

So far, it has run short pilots with a trailer-mounted mobile battery in the City of Vaughan and the City of Markham outside Toronto. That allowed it to test some of its technology, which can connect to a car without its owner's presence.

Ali also envisions using this lower-tech system — "like Uber Eats for the vehicles" — to encourage EV adoption in buildings that don't already have EV charging. The company would deploy the robot once there were four to six EV owners in the same building subscribing to the service. He said that would cover the costs of installing the charging infrastructure for the robots, which would then be ready for up to 60 additional vehicles.

Ali estimates that would allow a building to provide charging to its residents for 40 per cent of the cost of installing Level 2 charging in every spot.

Arthur Zhang, senior research associate with the Canadian Climate Institute said EV charging infrastructure is generally cheapest if the planning, assessment and installation for an entire building (new or retrofit) happens at once and the costs are split by many people rather than being paid for multiple times by multiple individuals over many years.

Carter Li, CEO of Swtch, said his company aims to make larger-scale deployment of EV charging cheaper and easier for building managers.

Providing access to EV charging in an entire building can be very expensive, Li said. "They have to upgrade conduits, subpanels, panels and may be even asking for more … energy from the utilities."

Local grids generally have the capacity to deliver only a certain amount of electricity, and only allocate a certain amount to each building. Any building that needs more than that has to pay for additional grid infrastructure to add more capacity — something that adding too many EV chargers may require. That could potentially add millions to an EV charging installation project, Li said.

Swtch aims to solve this problem with a range of technology that helps maximize the number of EV chargers that can be installed with existing electrical infrastructure or minor upgrades.

It does this with technology that can control and adjust the speed and timing of charging for multiple EVs to reduce the impact on both the building's electrical system and other appliances, such as heat pumps.

Building owners (or a group of condo owners) pay a monthly subscription and either buy or rent the chargers. Swtch manages everything, including billing the user for the electricity and remitting the fees to the building owners.

So far, Li said, it has deployed more than 20,000 charge ports across North America — about 60 per cent of them in Canada, in multi-family residential and commercial buildings in most major cities.

Zhang said it's uncertain whether solutions like these can get "to scale," but he thinks it's good that companies are exploring alternatives to traditional charging infrastructure in places where it may be challenging to install. "It certainly opens up the options," he said. "I do think that it's encouraging."