Question: Where do electric car chargers fall if an owner wants to install one in their garage?
Answer: If it is a simple case of your garage, you can pull the door down, it’s just you using it and you’ve got a modern power board, get a bylaw motion, 51% resolution, that’s all you need.
This is a really difficult one. You need to get the people installing the EV charger to have a look at the common property meter board. The meter board may need to be upgraded, particularly if you’re looking at an older building and as soon as you do, you’re talking common property. It’s not just as simple as plugging your car into the wall. You also need to think about how are you actually powering that.
What type of system are you going to be using? Are you just going to be pulling electricity straight from the grid? Are you going to want to install a solar panel or battery, because they’re all factors that need to go in.
An EV charger is a sustainability infrastructure motion. Technically, you should only need 51% of unit entitlements to say yes, because of the special resolution change. It depends on what other work you want to do. If you just keep it to all to sustainability infrastructure work, then it should be a 51% resolution to pass your bylaw. But there are lots of factors at play with these things.
It may be just a simple update to a modern power board and all you have to do is make sure the wiring is in your garage so you can pull it down. This doesn’t change the external appearance of your lot. You don’t have to secure your chargers so that nobody can sneak into your car space and plug their own electric vehicle in, because that’s another consideration as well. Then all you need is the resolution to pass a bylaw to approve it for your specific garage.
If you’re talking about EV chargers that are going to go on the common property, in shared car parking spaces, how are they going to be charged? Or how is the power going to be charged? Is the Owners Corporation going to be paying for that electricity use? Or is there some way of metering it? If I’ve got my car being charged, am I going to pay for that. Then if Joe next door charges their car, are they’re going to get a bill for doing that as well? You need to think through these considerations.
Are there going to be rules about if it’s in a common area? Who can use it? How long they can use it? Are there rules about getting slow charges, fast chargers, different power draws.
If it is a simple case of your garage, you can pull the door down, it’s just you using it and you’ve got a modern power board, get a bylaw motion, 51% resolution, that’s all you need.
It starts getting a bit more complex if it’s in a shared area. If it’s your car space but it’s fixed to a common property wall and only you want to use it, you probably want some way of locking it off. This is also going to change the external look and appearance of your block. This would need a bylaw again, but it’s a special resolution at the 51% level.
We are trying to encourage people to look at EV chargers from a broader scale. If one person in your scheme wants to install an EV charger, other people are going to want to do it at some point in time. It doesn’t make sense to me that while the EV and the hybrid car users number are so low, why not have one or two common area EV Chargers.
Once it gets to the stage where we’ve all got electric cars, we’re all going to need chargers. Could you make it a bit of a revenue draw? A service that your Owners Corporation is providing to its lot owners by agreement, and an owners corporation can do this. You can say “Okay, we’re going to charge you for the provision of this electricity”. There are providers looking at doing that sort of thing now.
I know some schemes are still really reluctant, particularly where you’ve got to upgrade the electricity system because it’s going to be a big problem for the meter boards. If you’ve got old wiring, there are a lot of schemes still out there with the old vulcanised rubber and it’s obvious an issue.
This post appears in the November 2022 edition of The NSW Strata Magazine.
Allison Benson Kerin Benson Lawyers E: allison@kerinbensonlawyers.com.au P: 02 4032 7990