Case Study: How a 280-Unit High-Rise Condo Added EV Charging to Its Parking Deck

Riverpoint Tower is a 280-unit high-rise condominium built in 2006, with a fully enclosed 310-space parking deck spread across four below-grade levels. Like many towers of its era, it was designed long before electric vehicles were common, and the entire building runs off a single 1,600-amp electrical service. That was more than enough for elevators, lighting, and residents' units, but it left almost no obvious room for a fleet of car chargers.

By early 2025, the board faced a growing headache. Roughly a dozen residents had bought EVs and were quietly running extension cords to a shared 120-volt outlet near the loading dock, taking turns on an informal sign-up sheet. Another 35 owners had emailed the property manager asking when real charging would arrive. The board was worried about three things at once: fairness between owners, the fire and trip-hazard risk of the extension-cord workaround, and the price tag of doing it properly.

Rather than keep improvising, the board treated EV charging as a formal capital project. That decision, more than any piece of hardware, is what set the community up for a clean result.

The first step was hiring a licensed electrical engineer to perform a load study. A load study measures how much of the building's electrical capacity is actually being used during peak periods, rather than the theoretical maximum on the panel label. High-rise buildings almost always have less headroom than owners expect, because elevators, HVAC, and common-area systems already draw heavily.

At Riverpoint, the study found about 180 amps of spare capacity at the main service during peak evening hours, when residents come home and plug in. That is enough to run a handful of chargers at full speed, but nowhere near enough for 40 or 50 of them at once. Upgrading the building's service to add that capacity was quoted at more than 300,000 dollars and would have required utility coordination and a special assessment on every owner.

The engineer's alternative was automatic load management, often shortened to ALM. ALM is software built into networked chargers that shares a fixed pool of electrical capacity across many cars, slowing individual charging speeds when demand is high and speeding them back up when the deck empties out overnight. Because most residents leave their cars parked for eight to twelve hours, they still wake up to a full battery. ALM let the board serve dozens of vehicles on the existing 180 amps and defer the service upgrade indefinitely. All of the equipment was specified to meet NEC Article 625, the section of the National Electrical Code that governs EV charging installations.

The board did not want to raise dues or levy a special assessment, and it did not want the association to become an amateur electric utility responsible for billing, maintenance, and customer support. So instead of buying the chargers outright, Riverpoint signed an owner-operator agreement with a national charging network.

Under this turnkey model, the network provider paid for and installed the hardware, and it continues to own, operate, and maintain the stations. It handles all resident billing and support, sets the per-kilowatt-hour price within limits the board negotiated, and pays the association a small share of revenue plus a flat license fee for the parking spaces. The agreement runs eight years, after which the board can renew, renegotiate, or buy out the equipment.

The tradeoff is straightforward. The association gave up direct control of pricing and the bulk of any charging revenue in exchange for zero capital outlay and zero operational burden. For a board that mainly wanted the problem solved without a special assessment, that was an easy call. Boards that expect heavy usage and want to keep the margin sometimes prefer to own the equipment themselves, so it is worth modeling both paths before signing.

Even in an owner-operator deal, incentives shape the economics, because they determine how aggressively the provider can price and how many ports it will install. Two programs did the heavy lifting at Riverpoint.

The local electric utility ran a make-ready program that reimbursed the cost of the electrical infrastructure feeding the chargers, the panels, conduit, and wiring up to the parking stalls, at roughly 4,000 dollars per port for a multifamily property. Make-ready funding is one of the most common and generous utility incentives available, and it dramatically lowers the fixed cost of a project before a single charger is even mounted.

The provider, as a taxable business, was also able to claim the federal Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit, known as the 30C credit. In eligible census tracts, 30C covers 30 percent of the cost of charging equipment and installation, up to 100,000 dollars per item, when prevailing-wage and apprenticeship requirements are met. Because the association is a non-profit entity that cannot easily use tax credits, having the for-profit operator capture 30C put the value to better use and was reflected in the deal terms.

The project moved on a realistic timeline for a large building. The load study was completed in January, the board approved the agreement in March after two resident information sessions, permitting and utility make-ready work ran through the summer, and the stations were energized in September, about nine months from start to finish.

Phase one installed 24 dual-port Level 2 stations, for 48 charging ports, on the two parking levels closest to the electrical room to keep conduit runs short and costs down. The chargers are networked and speak OCPP, the open communication standard, so the board is not locked to a single vendor's software for the life of the deal. Residents start a session with an app or an RFID card and pay 0.32 dollars per kilowatt-hour plus a small session fee.

Six months after activation, 41 residents were active users, the informal 120-volt extension-cord setup had been decommissioned, and load management had kept the building within its existing service with no capacity problems, even on cold January evenings. The waitlist that triggered the whole project was cleared, and the board reserved conduit capacity to add a second phase of ports as EV ownership in the building keeps climbing.

Riverpoint's experience translates well to other towers and large condos wrestling with the same constraints. The technical and financial moves that worked here are repeatable, and none of them required the association to become an energy company.

If your building has an aging single service and a growing EV waitlist, this sequence is a reliable starting point.