A new energy management system for large buildings is holding out the prospect of easier, more efficient electric vehicle charging for apartment and condo dwellers, just as the need for charging spots becomes more immediate—and, in some buildings, more controversial.

The new system unveiled last month by Toronto-based SWTCH Energy should make it possible for building owners to manage up to a 10-fold increase in EV charging before they have to upgrade their existing electrical infrastructure, Electric Autonomy Canada reports.

“More than one-third of all North Americans live in multi-tenant properties, and most still can’t charge at home,” said SWTCH CEO Carter Li said in a release. “This bottleneck is only going to get tighter as more people choose to drive EVs.”

But using the new management system, called SWTCH Control, “early adopters have been able to instantly expand their charging options and/or make EV charging possible for the first time.”

Those early adopters took part in what Electric Autonomy calls “stealth” testing at pilot sites in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Test clients included Onni Group, a Toronto-based real estate developer, and Skyline Group, a real estate investment manager in Guelph, Ontario.

SWTCH Control is built around a smart sensor that tracks a building’s electricity use and allocates power to EV chargers when it’s available, the company’s head of finance and strategy, Samuel Bordenave, told Electric Autonomy. That often means charging the vehicles at night, when there are fewer demands on the system.

“When everyone comes home, maybe they turn the lights on, the oven on, and you have a big spike in demand for electricity from all those different loads,” Bordenave said. “You don’t want to add EV charging to that.”

With more and more jurisdictions setting ambitious EV adoption targets, Electric Autonomy says SWTCH is focusing on older, multiple-unit buildings that were never designed with EVs in mind, and now need retrofits to accommodate the change in technology. The company cites Skyline Group as a company with more than 200 older properties across Canada, all of them built between the 1960s and the 1990s, that has baked SWTCH Control into its retrofit plans.

“We’re future-proofing our buildings to benefit our tenants and incorporate clean energy alternatives that reduce our carbon footprint,” Skyline Energy President Rob Stein said in the SWTCH release. The energy management software “takes the electrical load management off our hands while providing a solution that makes financial sense.”

SWTCH made its announcement just as the owners and operators of multi-unit residential buildings (MURB) are coming to grips with a sudden, new shift in expectations. In some jurisdictions, condo or strata councils “are under no obligation to accommodate any requests for access to EV charging, even if the homeowner is prepared to pay 100% of the cost,” said Ryan Chan, EV charging specialist at ChargeFWD.com, in a recent interview with Driving.ca.

Ontario has right-to-charge legislation, Chan said. In British Columbia, it takes a 75% vote of strata owners to approve an EV installation.

But even with legislation in place, Ontario condo dwellers can still face tough obstacles. Electric Vehicle Council of Ottawa (EVCO) member Lawrence Williams found that out after a neighbour objected to him using a power-equipped bollard to charge his car, the Ottawa Citizen reported late last year. Now, after his condo association voted against installing any EV chargers at all, he said he finds himself “always frantically trying to find places to charge.”

The Citizen said Williams’ predicament “exemplifies an ongoing debate: Could ever-increasing demand for chargers from electric vehicle purchasers drive their installation at multi-residential buildings, or should charger installation and availability precede EV buying decisions by rental apartment tenants and condo owners?”

With the federal government working on a 2035 mandate for all new car sales to be electric, and more than one-third of Canadians living in multi-unit buildings, Electric Mobility Canada President Daniel Breton said the demand for EV charging will have to come from building management.

“Most of the time, it’s going to be the owner of the apartment building who’s going to be interested, or not interested, in installing chargers,” Breton said. “For those apartment building owners, if they start installing chargers, this will become an incentive for people who want to buy an electric car to go live in that apartment building. To me, I see this not as a cost, but as an investment. But not everyone sees it like that.”