Irish EV buyers who live in apartments, or other accommodation where there is no off-street parking, may soon have solutions to their home charging dilemma if plans being made by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) come to fruition.
Two-tier grants system
What the SEAI is proposing is a two-tier grants system for apartment EV charging systems, with the top tier aimed at landlords and building management companies, and the lower tier aimed at individual residents.
Approximately 12 per cent of the housing space in Ireland is made up of apartments, and the majority of those - some 60 per cent - are occupied by people renting from private landlords. Which probably means that the lower tier - one where people individually apply to have a charging point fitted - will be the one with the lowest take-up. It can be presumed that most people won't want to spend money, grant assisted or otherwise, to have a charging point fitted to an apartment in which they may not be living in the longer term. Nonetheless, the SEAI plans to offer the 20 per cent of apartment dwellers who actually own their own home the same €600 grant towards buying and fitting a home charging point.
The higher tier is a rather more complex setup, and involves getting buy-in from landlords - both individual and corporate - and building management companies to invest in the infrastructure needed for multiple charging points per apartment complex.
Looking for public input
The SEAI is currently asking for public input on a consultation into how such charging installations can be partly funded by grants. At the moment, the target is to subvent the major infrastructural works - the digging and laying of cables etc - by between 50 and 80 per cent, with the same €600 per individual charger grant as per private users. So-called 'upstream' costs - whereby improvements might need to be made to the local electricity grid to support multiple vehicles charging at once - will not be grant-aided and will have to be worked out between the building owners and the ESB.
According to the SEAI, the major stumbling blocks are the potential costs involved and getting approval from apartment block residents, many of whom may not yet be considering the purchase of an EV, and who therefore might not be especially interested in approving expenditure on such projects. "Some of the residents might say that this doesn't benefit them directly at the moment, although it might in the future. So that might create some difficulties" said the SEAI's Robert Cazaciuc, who also admitted that there are some other significant questions. "Who will pay for the electricity? Who will pay for the maintenance and then we have also assigned versus shared parking spaces? In terms of expandability do you build just what you need at the moment? Or do you build for growth in terms of the infrastructure?" pondered Cazaciuc.
How to pay for charging?
There are other issues, such as questions over ESB regulations on charging for electricity use in public, shared areas and whether the costs of charging will be passed on directly to users, or shared among all apartment occupants regardless of whether they have an EV or not. There are also concerns that some less-than-scrupulous management companies or landlords might try to pass on charging costs with a mark-up so as to turn the charging system into a profit centre, although the SEAI says that they will be monitoring such things, and that the equitable passing on of costs will be built into any agreement for a grant. Each grant will be an individual agreement entered into by the SEAI and the landlord or management company - there won't be a simple blanket scheme.