› Flat Chat Strata Forum › From the Front Page › Myths and fears behind resistance to EV charging › Current Page
You are absolutely right about this being a possibly illegal change of use of the parking spaces but I can’t see any council in NSW breaching a block that uses visitor spaces judiciously for EV charging.
Look at what happened with Airbnb. Apartment blocks had DAs that specifically forbade short-term letting but councils refused to do anything about it, often using the excuse that they didn’t have the staffing to police it.
To get back to your other points, any vehicle being charged at a fast-charging point is unlikely to be there for longer than one hour at a time. Rules and by-laws could easily regulate this.
Current fast charging powerpoints are regulated by the providers such as Tesla and Chargefox. They bill the car owner then pay the Owners Corp for the electricity used. They could also easily sanction drivers who leave their cars in visitor spaces for too long, by employing recognition software to not allow them to charge up for, say, a week.
Leaving cars on charge overnight is unlikely and could easily be controlled if it became a problem.
And yes, the best solution may be for drivers to charge up overnight in their own space, on a user-pays basis. But, as Dale Cohen explains in the original story, it’s a “chicken and egg thing.” Install some basic infrastructure and the cars will come, when more cars come, move to the next stage of facilities provision.
The Richmont (and my block, too, coincidentally) has “backboned” the building so that owners in the future can charge up in their own spaces, overnight when power is plentiful and cheap.
It’s incremental but it has to start somewhere. Buildings that block EV charging will eventually become fossil fuel ghettoes, full of gas-guzzlers and the people who either don’t want EVs or can’t afford them. That’s a very interesting demographic: ten years from now, would you want to live in a block with a disproportionate number of climate deniers and financial strugglers?
The use of visitor parking for EV charging isn’t perfect, but then we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.