Rod: Good evening, everybody. My name is Rod Escayola and I'm your condominium lawyer with Gowling WLG. Welcome to October. I can't believe that it's October. It's, before you know it, 2021 will be over. Tonight we have an amazing episode, actually. I've been waiting for a long time. I've been wanting to tackle the EV charging station topic for a long time. I have to tell you that this is what we would all be talking about if we weren't distracted by this God awful pandemic. The reality is that the condominium industry is facing its greatest task so far. It has to retrofit 40 years of concrete buildings to allow, to accommodate, electric cars. We've got to retroactively go and bring the industry into this century. That's nothing less than that. So think about a couple of things. Recently Canada has announced that it had a plan to eliminate the sale of all new combustion engine cars and light trucks by 2035. That's in 14 years. So this part, of course, of the net zero emission goal. So in the next 14 years, obviously, is going to be more and more electric cars that are going to be offered and, in fact, manufacturers are offering an increasingly attractive set of options. The demand, there's no doubt, is about to explode. There's no doubt. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word explode when I'm talking about EV charging stations. We'll talk about that too. The problem, even though this is coming down the pike very, very, very few condos have in place the required infrastructure to be able to accommodate this, and I don't want to over state this, but the tsunami of demand is going to come our way. We're not quite there yet but I mean it's just going to happen. The task ahead, for the industry, is daunting. It's complex and it can be quite expensive. Now there's a couple of grants that are coming down the pike from Natural Resource Canada. We used to have also some grants from the Provincial level but that's when the leaves were green. Now the leaves are turning red so I don't think that's available anymore. But we'll talk about the grants available to people. So to tackle this topic tonight I've assembled another amazing panel of experts. Slightly different than what you've seen before and I'm going to really quickly go over the introduction without much sort of pomp simply because we're going to run out of time. We have so much to cover tonight. So let me just list our good panelists tonight.
We have Philip Clark from Envari. He's going to be doing all the heavy lifting tonight. He's going to show you, step by step, the process to go from the Flintstones to being EV charge ready in your building. You don't want to miss that one.
Then we have Aji Montenegro. He is a manager with FirstService Residential. He's also a condo director so that's an interesting kind of breed. I don't think we have that many of those out there. He's going to give us the manager's perspective and what consideration you have to keep in mind when you prepare your building for this.
Then we have a director, George Parry. He's a director in the Ottawa area and he's leading the implementation of the EV infrastructure in his building and he's going to tell us how he did it.
We have a returning guest star to our webinar. We have Tricia Baratta from Gallagher Insurance and she will answer a recurring question that I've been flooded with in the last couple of days; should we be concerned about any risks associated with the installation of these new stations and this new equipment and what, if anything, should we flag our insurance provider with? So that's for Tricia. Thank you, Tricia. Welcome back.
Of course we have our hockey coach, as we baptized him a while back, Jason Reid from the National Life Safety Group. He will do a quick guest appearance to speak today about the National Fire Prevention Week. Like that's just like Christmas for Jason. This is the week, right? So he's going to talk about that a bit.
And, of course, we have our condo twins, David Plotkin and Graeme MacPherson, both lawyers with Gowling WLG. So there they are. So again, the chat channel is on. If you have questions, put them in the Q&A. If you want to chat with your condo peeps do it in the chat line and, very brief, quickly, housekeeping. Obviously we are in Ontario. We're talking from Ontario and we're talking about Ontario so you may need to adapt this if you're watching us from another beautiful place on earth. The date of this broadcast today is October 6 so whatever we tell you today is valid as of today, I guess. So be careful if you're watching this on a rebroadcasting. The information we provide today is of general nature so you may need to go and get actual advice that you pay for from experts, managers, engineers, lawyers, if you want to make sure you adapt it to your situation. Finally, this session is being recorded. Don't ask me when I will post it. I get this question every month. It usually take 5 to 7 days to post it on Condo Adviser. Then you'll be able to watch it. We're already behind schedule by 3 minutes. So, Jason, National Fire Prevention Week. I forgot to move the slides as I go. There it is. Jason, take it away. What are the sounds of fire safety?
Jason: I'll be brief. This was proclaimed annually as a week of celebration and reminder for fire safety. There's a different theme every single 12 months. The Governor General first recognized this back in 1923 after the 1871 Great Chicago Fire. This year's campaign is called 'Get Loud' and learn to recognize the different sounds of smoke or carbon monoxide alarms in your suite. We've prepared only two slides for you to discuss today and help Condo Adviser, and everybody here, kind of celebrate Fire Prevention Week. So we've got three tips for every condo resident. Number one, test your smoke alarms. The property management brings in an annual service provider, once every 12 months, to come in and inspect those smoke alarms. But in 2019 over a third of those residential cases of fires resulting in a loss, life or injury had a non-functioning smoke alarm. That's 33%. So what that means is we need to make sure we take our own responsibility as a resident and make sure that is also inspected and working. Finally, know the sounds that your other systems will make. You have a smoke alarm. You have a CO alarm. You have a fire alarm. Also, you building's equipped with an emergency voice communication system. So know what to do when those things kind of go off and sound. If you have any questions reach out to your professional property manager. Finally, if you require assistance in your evacuation, also reach out to your property manager because there is a PRA list. Here's quick five fire code requirements for property managers and I'm going to say good night. Fire safety plans are required to be reviewed and updated every 12 months. They contain what the resident's supposed to do, what the superintendent's supposed to do and what the security teams are supposed to do. Every 12 months residents should be getting a copy of those emergency procedures directly to their contact inbox. Finally, the list of residents who require special assistance during an evacuation, that's a joint partnership between the residents and the property manager, and that list gets updated every 12 months, and it's that list that's handed to the fire department when they arrive at your building. Finally, fire departments have committed to audit every high rise in the Province of Ontario at least once every 12 months. They've dong this publicly. So guess what? They're going to be coming and asking for proof of compliance. The fire code is the bare minimum. One of my takeaway recommendations is you are required to have a smoke alarm on every floor of your suite. I would put two. They're $24.00 and, remember, the fire code is the bare minimum. I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving.
Rod: Oh my goodness. We're done. So great job, Jason. Jason Reid, our safety coach from the National Life Safety Group. Of course the slides are going to be uploaded on the Condo Adviser. I do that quite quickly actually so you'll be able to sort of go over these points again. Thank you so much, Jason, and that's it. You get an early night out. Thanks so much. Take care.
Okay, wonderful. Look at that. That was the fastest segment in our history so far. Now we're going to dive into the main topic tonight and the main topic tonight is EV charging stations and how do you get your condominium ready for the demand? They're not going away these electric cars, in fact, they're coming. So how do you get ready? Before I go to Phil, of Envari, I'm going to go to you, David Plotkin, and you're going to give us, please, the legal framework in 5 minutes or less.
David: Thanks, Rod. I'll do my best. Lawyers are not known for their brevity. In May 2018 the Province implemented a new regulation, O. Reg. 48/01, under the Condo Act and the purpose of this regulation was basically to facilitate a process for installing the EV charging stations. So normally if you want to make a change to the common elements, if you're the condo, if it's a substantial you have to follow the process under section 97. If you are an owner and you want to make a change to the common elements you have to follow the process under section 98. Those are pretty beefy processes. They involve registering things on title, agreements and all that. So the purpose of this was to kind of facilitate and promote an easier process for people to follow to get these EV charging stations in. So there's two different pathways under this regulation. There's the corporation installing the charging station and that has two sub-branches. Either you would require a vote of owners, or you don't require a vote of owners, and the second branch is for owners installing the charging station and that's done generally through an application. We're going to go through the different steps on the next slides.
Rod: Okay. So keep that in mind, folks. Whether it's the corporation or the owners. So the first one you're going to tackle is when the corporation does it, David.
David: For sure. So the first question the corporation has to ask itself is what's the cost of the installation going to be? If it's less than 10% of the annual budget and the installation, in the view of the board of directors, would not cause a material reduction or elimination of the use or enjoyment of the units of the common elements, and the corporation provides a basic 60 day notice to owners. That notice is just we're going to do this. Here's what it's going to cost, how we're going to pay for it and what the basic information about how they're going to be doing the install is. There's no vote that needs to be put to the owners or no opportunity for owners, necessarily, to vote on that change. So less than 10% of the budget, not a material reduction of the use of the common elements, and 60 days of general notice that we're about to do this installation.
Rod: Sure, and an example may be, David, of the elimination of use of enjoyment of a common element, one that would come to mind could be if you eliminate all the visitor parking spots, for instance, because you're going to electrify that section. That could be an example. If you meet the first two requirements then 60 days notice, no vote. Okay. What if you don't meet these two requirements?
David: Right. Either it's going to cost more than 10% of the budget or there's the possibility that there's going to be that serious change, like the example that Rod just gave about the visitor parking. You have to provide a more detailed notice to owners about your intent, the corporation's intention, to install the charging stations and specifically advise them of their right to requisition a meeting. So just like under section 46 of the Act, any owner initiate a meeting, that needs to be provided along with a copy of the regulation, to owners, to invite them, if they want, to requisition a meeting to discuss the issue. The corporation would only be able to proceed with the installation if owners don't requisition a meeting within those 60 days. So if 60 days passes and they're silent, you're good to go. If a meeting is requisitioned, but quorum is not met, and if quorum is met and the owners vote not to vote down the proposition. So those are basically the ways in which the corporation would still be able to move forward. It sort of allows the more involvement of the ownership since there's going to be a more direct effect on their use of the common elements. It permits them to call a meeting to discuss the issue.
Rod: Right and just going back to that decision tree here. Folks, when you tackle this you're going to need to see which branch you're following here. Very quickly, because we're not going to talk too much about it today, David, what about if an owner wants to go ahead and they want to install a charging station. So the corporation is not really tackling, yet somebody gets a Tesla or an electric car, they want their own station. So what's the process?
David: For sure. So there is an application process the owner would have to follow. There are templates on the COA website to help owners fill that out. The corporation has 60 days to respond. They generally cannot reject the application without having sufficient reasons and those reasons are such things as if they get an expert report saying it's going to overpower the power grid and everything's going to light on fire, or the electricity can't manage it or for whatever which reason it's going to too greatly negatively impact the use of the common elements. The corporation could reject the proposal on those bases. They have to respond within 60 days, and then thereafter the parties have 90 days to enter into an agreement, similar to a section 98 agreement but less formality in that. It's really setting out who's going to pay for what, how the installation is going to be done, who's going to be doing it. This is assuming the corporation agrees to proceed and if there's any dispute about that the owner and the corporation can proceed through alternative dispute resolution, mediation, arbitration to deal with that issue.
Rod: Okay. So I'm flashing the lights. You've used up all of Graeme's time tonight. But thank you so much for that. I'm going to switch to Phil. We're going to go to the Envari presentation. David, there's a question in the chat room if you want to have a look at that, if you're able to tackle it. Phil, you're on. Let's see, we're 2 minutes behind, so we actually caught up 1 minute so that's great. So, Phil Clark is with Envari and he is going to help us see what's the process, like from beginning to end, what are the steps? What do you keep in mind? So, you're up, Phil.
Philip: Rod, thank you very much for the invite. I look forward to helping everybody out. Rod, if we can quickly skip to slide 6 and we'll just really dive right into the world of EV. Some of this has been covered already. Because the government is mandating electric vehicles more manufacturers are coming on line with their EV models. So this slide is really just kind of talking about what people are planning and preparing for. You can switch now, Rod.
Rod: Okay, and folks at home, these slides are going to be on the Condo Adviser so you'll be able to read all about Phil and Envari and what it does and all that good work.
Philip: I'll just try to skip through it quickly but most of our time is spent with multi-res condo buildings, commercial buildings and it's really helping them kind of through this journey to make their building EV ready. They look at it as a nice way to kind of make their building and add some more amenities and kind of, hopefully with owner retention, and kind of add more value to their property.
Rod: Okay.
Philip: There's three types of chargers. I think that for those people who may not know, and again it'll be in the material, but you've get levels 1, 2 and 3 and for condos and multi-res buildings that we're looking at, it's a really level 2 type charger that we would be recommending for people to install into their parking stalls.
Rod: Okay and it gives you an idea of how quickly they charge and it also gives you an idea of like level 1 is 120 volts, level 2 and up is 240 volts and it gives you an idea of how quickly these charge. Level 3 are the ones that you find sort of at Sobeys, or Farm Boy, or whatever and they charge very quickly. Right?
Philip: That's right.
Rod: Okay.
Philip: We'll talk to this one probably a little bit later but a lot of these chargers now they've actually added a lot of smarts to them. So the charger can actually power share. So you can actually have multiple chargers on the same circuit. These chargers can also do all your billing, reconciliation and make sure that the whole cost recovery for the condo has been taken care of and factored into.
Rod: Okay. Perfect. This is interesting because a couple of years back we had an assessment done at where I live and we could only charge I think up to 15 cars. But now with these smart technology we can probably have over 200 cars charging. But you're going to talk about and how that works.
Philip: That's right so we can skip this one because I did talk to it. I'm trying to save you some time, Rod, but when we get into the whole journey and this is where it starts. Where there's an owner, the board, they want to start to investigate and make their building ready for EVs. So what we do is we kind of help walk the condo through that journey. So we kind of help them understand just how many people in their building may want to add chargers. Whether it's immediate, in the next couple of years, because that will help us kind of future proof our solutions for people.
Rod: Okay and so you would do this with like a survey, I guess? You want to get a sense of what people want.
Philip: Yes. We'll recommend and a lot of condos or boards will actually put a survey out and it doesn't have to be a 20 page survey. It could just be a very simple, focused, what's everybody's thoughts? Just to let people know that the board is looking at introducing EV charging. What would be the potential demand over the next 12 months, 3 years or whatever the timeframes they want to look at.
Rod: So good news, folks. Stop at nothing to do help the condo community. I'm going to post online on Condo Adviser a template survey that you can use to build your own. So you'll have a link to that in a minute.
Philip: Step two really becomes kind of a key piece to it. So we will help buildings and condos really understand what their current building is using from a utilization perspective. So we call this a readiness assessment. We will help that condo understand what is the current supply to their building. What is the current peak utilization? We'll go back several years to make sure that we've captured both a summer and winter peak. Then from that we'll kind of help prepare a report just to show how many EV chargers could be supported in their building. Then we actually start working with the condo board, the property management, on kind of helping to design options th at will help kind of take care of, from the survey, what's kind of the near term need. What is the short term, next 3 to 5 years, just so that they can put together a solution that takes care of now but also helps future proof so that we've kind of looked down the road as far as we can.
Rod: Okay so this assessment, this capacity assessment, is key because it's going to give you a picture of how much juice you have available.
Philip: That's right.
Rod: It's going to give you an idea of how many cars you may be able to plug, what kind of system you may want. So where I live, for instance, we did an assessment and it turns out that we're using about roughly 30% of our capacity already. Give or take historically, winter, summer, etcetera. That means that we have about 70% capacity that we can still tap into. Now we're not going to use all of that. We may use 50% or 60%, like to have a little bit of a buffer, but you want to have that picture taken at the beginning to know what you have to play with. Okay, back to you.
Philip: Part of the overall design is really when I talked about going in and looking at what is that service coming into the building and then from that kind of tapping off kind of a section of that capacity and kind of dedicating it towards our EV infrastructure. So what we'll come back with is a kind of a game plan to put EV infrastructure that's just dedicated for the building. Some buildings have multiple layers of underground parking. Some have fewer, so we'll figure out how to kind of centralize that equipment, so that when the owner needs to connect to that infrastructure they will have a centralized demarcation point that they can connect to.
Rod: Okay. Are you going to talk about billing a bit later in the presentation? If not, I'm going to pop a question here. Is that coming later?
Philip: So it will probably factor into maybe the third slide that talks about some of the recommendations. Let's just take a look.
Rod: Okay.
Philip: So the design and install. So this is where we'll work with the condo to figure out how do they want to do it? What are their key requirements? Then from that we can come up with the recommendation of the right charger for you. In most cases people are looking at a smart charger that will help them do power sharing. So if they need to extend the reach to more parking units with maybe a limited capacity, or they maybe want to use their capacity efficiently, these smart chargers will also do all the bill collection and kind of the reconciliation for the condo. So the smart charger has the ability to charge per hour. Has the ability to charge per charging hour or you can set up a rate to charge per session. So in a lot of cases, when we do a condo, we would set up the structure to go per charging hour. The game plan for that is so that once your vehicle stops accepting the charge you're no longer being charged for consumption. Or no longer being charged for being connected to the charger. In a lot of cases when you are plugged into a charger, so this was maybe at a grocery store, mall or anywhere else, the charge per hour is really set to help motivate people that when you're done to move on so that somebody new could kind of pull in and start to use that charger. It's a bit of an opportunity cost. So if you're going to do a charge per hour, then you're charging even if that vehicle stopped receiving hydro consumption, but you're motivating the driver to move on so your next customer can move in.
Rod: Okay, so if you're going to be sharing a limited number of charge station, if they're going to be communal, you do want somebody to just hog the space even after they're done charging. So by charging by the hour they will be incentivized to go and move their car when they no longer need the spot and you allow somebody else to come. But if the chargers are in unitized parking, well then I don't think you want Graeme to come out at two in the morning in his pajamas, to have to go unplug his car because there's no real need to incentivize anybody. So even though his car is plugged in all night, on his station, if he's done charging at 2:00, he's done paying at 2:00, basically.
Philip: That's right. I don't know if they did all their work on the system because of Graeme, and maybe his housecoat, but that's definitely kind of one of the main drivers is that there's no reason for somebody to have to leave their condo and kind of go down and unplug when the charger's not doing any work to the car. Because it's yours and it's in your private parking stall and you don't need to kind of keep paying when you're connected.
Rod: Okay. Next slide. What have we got here?
Philip: This kind of gets into some of the functionality of how it works. So the smart chargers would typically have an annual fee to be able to connect to that network and that would vary depending on the type of charger. Then a lot of those systems would actually have kind of a maintenance fee where there'd be a fee that the application, or the person that's kind of taking care of it, that they would retain based on all the fees collected. So in a condo, all the money that would be collected from the individual charge sessions, and that's how it typically works is that you pay per session. So you pay at the time of consuming the electricity. So you would pay that way and it's typically through an RFID card or through an app on your smartphone. You can just set it up, very similar to say your Tim Hortons card, your Starbucks where you preload it with funds from your credit card, and it's really just a tap and go. It does kind of build in a kind of an inherent security system because now Graeme and his fancy housecoat, who's coming down, he can't really go plug into somebody else's parking spot and think that he's consuming hydro at their expense. He would have to have a smartphone or an RFID card that would allow him permission to charge on that charger.
Rod: Let me just go back to this slide here and let me just maybe share my very late in the game understanding of how the whole system works and hopefully it's going to help because when I explained that to a director on my board, he kind lit a light. Basically you tap into the condo electrical grid. The condo receives electricity. It sends it to various transformers that are going to be added and then it goes to various chargers. One in my spot, one in Graeme's spot and so on and so forth. But at the end of the day the corporation is paying for all this electricity. We don't have another sort of sub-meter or tap sort of a different source of electricity. So the corporation's going to get the invoice for all the electricity that's being used and the corporation has to find a way to recover that cost, based on however you set it up, but usually on per use. So that's why you need these smart chargers to be able to sort of monitor my use versus David's use and to charge me, my consumption, and then to remit these funds to the corporation to sort of indemnify it for whatever electricity I have used, and David has used, and that's the purpose of these smart kind of charging stations. So that's something that wasn't obvious to me before. Phil, are you going to talk about what do you do when you add the extra cars and how you're not dropping one car to charge the others? You know what I mean? Like how do you share the load between multiple cars? How do you exponentially increase how many cars you can plug in at once?
Philip: So from a smart charger, or power hearing is what you'll hear them referred to, you can actually have up to 4 individual chargers in 4 individual parking stalls, connected to the same circuit. So what that would mean is that in the event all 4 cars are plugged in at the exact same time, and all taking charge from the circuit, the throughput would be dropped down to 25%. But in the case where there's only 1 car of the 4 plugged in, that car would receive 100%. So it really comes down to a probability of multiple people being plugged into the same circuit at the same time, but it also gives me the benefit of being able to extend my reach to multiple parking stalls, because now the probability of 4 people needing to be charged on the same day at the same time becomes quite small.
Rod: Right. So rather than charging, just to use an example 4 cars with 100% power dedicated to each of them, you could maybe charge 8 but they would get a slower charge because now you have more people.
Philip: That's right.
Rod: Exactly. So that's like you're sharing the load which allows you to have more cars connected at the same time and since most of us are charging at night, well then it's okay if it takes a little longer to charge because you don't need it at that point in time. Okay.
Philip: It helps extend that reach from a capacity. Capacity is always the limiting factor in a condo because we're really trying to look at that supply of power without having to go to a service upgrade, or increasing the level of power coming into the building, which is just a different economical equation.
Rod: Right, and all of that you get a good sense of all of that. Your output, your capacity, your needs, when you do first the capacity assessment and then after that you will get a proposal from someone and they'll provide you various options. I take it Envari you folks do the assessment and then after that you actually also come up with a proposal.
Philip: That's right. So we'll help the client with the assessment of their building. Help them understand kind of the profile. Then we'll help them with kind of recommendations on what are some of the features to it, and what might be some solutions for them, and then depending on where we are in the whole world of grants and funding we'll help them with any applications for funding through Enercan.
Rod: Right. So this is very important, I think, because there were grants and more grants are more than likely to come down the pike, and so how do we tap into those?
Philip: Enercan, I don't think we have the link on here, but Enercan had various phases to their program. All the phases have really the same dollar value incentive where if you're looking at a level 2 charger there's the ability to obtain up to $5,000.00 per charger, and depending on the size of the charger, as you go bigger and bigger you'll see the dollar values do increase. The challenge in a condo world and looking at say the fast charger, the 50 kilowatt for that kind of $50,000, those chargers become significantly more expensive than just a level 2 charger. These projects take into account the whole infrastructure that's required in your building and the chargers themselves. So you really need to have both pieces to be able to apply for the incentive. Because if you just put the infrastructure in, the way the math works on these grants, it's really driven by a dollars per charger. If you just take infrastructure and no chargers, there's no incentive built into it.
Rod: Okay. Perfect. I'm going to put the link to the Enercan link as well. I think you were almost done, are we?
Philip: Yeah. I think we're almost done and just to help people just from a ballpark price. The level 2 smart charger with the power sharing and all the billing functionality to it, you're probably in that $3,400.00 maybe $3,500.00 range, and just to help people understand that if the 50 kilowatt, DC fast charger that will do your vehicle in let's say 20, 30 minutes, you could be anywhere getting close to $100,000.00 for them.
Rod: Right. The other day when we were going through the condo corporation together, I gave them an idea of like how long it takes for a versus miles driven or kilometers driven, just give me an idea. How long does it take for me to have a charge to be able to do whatever? Like 10 kilometers or whatever it is.
Philip: You know what? Right at the very start I think it showed like a level 2 charger will roughly give you 30 kilometers per hour.
Rod: Right.
Philip: So now everybody has to sit down and figure out roughly how far do they drive every day. Even with batteries, your manufacturers will tell you better, they'll recommend that you don't charge it every day. They'll recommend that you don't use a DC fast charger on a regular basis. They'll want to encourage you, just like batteries on your cell phone or other laptop devices, to kind of help run them down a little bit then bring them back up to 80%, just to help preserve battery life as well.
Rod: Right.
Philip: Your vehicle manufacturer will have the best intel on what is the best rate for charging.
Rod: Right. So the end product for me, where I live, I would have a charger dedicated to me right behind my car. It's probably the size of a binder, or something like that, and I would with my smartphone plug in my car, I'd tap in a code with my smartphone, then this machine would charge my car and then I would be billed right through my phone. That would be the end result. One of the questions that came up, and this is more of a legal question, but one of the questions that came up is who owns the charger and who owns the conduit? And by extension, who's responsible to repair and maintain that? When David was talking about these agreements that you have to put on, these EV agreements, the corporation and the owners will enter into an EV agreement that will precisely divide who's responsible to repair, to maintain, to replace, to upgrade the charger, the wire, the breaker, and so ahead of time you reach an agreement. We've developed a fantastic EV agreement which has all the flexibility that allows the corporation to be able to face changes in the future, but at the same time sort of reassures the owners as to what are the rules of this game here going forward. In most cases, I think, you would want the corporation to become the owner but and the one responsible to kind of maintain it and repair it, but not at its cost. At the user's cost. That is what you would want because I don't think you want the owners to call in. You don't want Graeme to bring in his brother-in-law to start maintaining these things and accessing the electrical vault and so on. So all of that goes into your agreement. I think that's it but don't leave, Phil, because there's some questions in the chat and if you feel you're able to answer some of them, that'd be great. Obviously you'll have Phil's coordinates on our website.
But I want to turn now to you, my dear friend from Gallagher, Tricia. I want to ask you this question. Some people have asked me, what about the risks associated with having electric cars and charging stations in your interior garage? So then I Googled it and, of course, if you Google it you're going to get all the scary stories about how many fires and cars, and by the way there's like far more fires out of cars, internal combustion cars, then electric cars. But the ones that make the news are the electrical one. There is a recall. The Chevy Bolt is recalling 141,000 vehicles, related to the battery and they're kind of warning people, for the time being, don't park them inside, don't park them near structures. But as I said, if you Google it, you're going to find a broad range of stories. Some telling you don't freak out, it's all good, and others telling you that the sky is falling so you'll kind of have to make your own mind on that. But let me ask you this, Tricia, do we need to advise our insurance provider? Is it going to be more costly to insure our building if we bring this equipment?
Tricia: Yeah. To your point, you see a lot of the bad stuff about what potentially can happen, but as of right now there just isn't sufficient underwriting data to go on just yet to talk about whether or not it's a huge risk in the residential setting. For now, if the corporation is in fact putting in charging stations in the common element, which would be where you would put them, I would say that you absolutely have to let your broker know. So with any change to the common elements, especially those which include changes to existing infrastructure or the use of the property, the insuring remainder of the policy requires the corporation to make the insurance company aware. That's immediately. So the reason being it's considered a material change in risk and without notifying the insurer that a material change in risk has happened, there's a good chance that any claim may be related to that change, and installation of equipment, could be denied coverage.
Rod: I'm taking two things away from this. The first one, as with any new equipment you install, if there's a material change in the risk being insured you've got to tell your insurance provider. That's just like sort of good precaution to take. That's the first thing that I takeaway. The second thing I takeaway is that, for now, we're not getting any sort of signs that this will translate into an increase in the insurance cost. Right?
Tricia: AS of right now we are absolutely not.
Rod: Right. So you just want to make sure you flag it so they don't have an excuse to deny a claim, if in fact there's going to be a claim, and of course as with any piece of equipment, proper maintenance, proper following the manufacturer's recommendation, making sure you're inspecting it, repairing it, maintaining it, all of that reduces the risk, but you may want to flag this with your insurance provider. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tricia. You can stay or you can go. It's up to you.
Now, I'm going to turn to you, Aji. So you're from FirstService Residential. You're a manager. You're also a board member and I know you have a lot of experience with new builds, you can talk about that a bit, but most importantly I think if you could maybe give us the manager's perspective, as with any change that a condo corp is facing, what is in stock for you guys?
Aji: Sure. Thank you, Rod. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak at this afternoon's webinar. As Rod mentioned I work for FirstService Residential, an property management firm. I just started on the property management side and currently doing consulting, working with developers on new projects. But with respect to the manager's lens on EV chargers, I wanted to make sure that I kind of provide a pathway for boards to follow. David and Philip have already provided some great information so thank you for this slide. We'll stay on here for a second. When I was thinking about what I wanted to speak about I kind of put the topics into four buckets. You've got your power. You've got your permission. You've got your processes. You've got your product. So any manager or any board contemplating this will want to take a look and maybe this is a good kind of map to help you organize, either information you're gathering or your next steps. The power side, I'm not going to get into too much detail, but it is determining whether you have the capability to support the chargers. You're going to look from your transformer, on the load, the panel box, submeters, etcetera. I will qualify that as property managers our experience has been more geared towards unitized parking. So that's the first thing. With the boards that I have been in direct contact with, they have also been scaling more towards having owners who have deeded spots install the chargers in their spots, as opposed to putting them in visitors or putting them in any other type of common elements. The area that I focused on is Downtown Toronto and the GTA and even in the pre-meeting we had for this webinar we did find that there are differences with respect to where you are within the Province of Ontario. I believe Ottawa might be a little bit further ahead. Toronto does seem to be lagging. At the moment I am attributing that to the fact that a lot of people who live Downtown Toronto, certainly in the core, a lot of them actually don't have cars. A lot of people who live in the condos are looking at transit scores in terms of where they decide to live. The impetuous or the push for EV chargers, don't get me wrong, it started. We actually have some build up clients who are automatically installing them as they sell new condo build units. But I do believe we are a little bit behind compared to just the Province and maybe even across Canada. If you could go back one slide. Thank you.
So the permission side, David provided a great overview on the legal side. Because the focus for managers at the moment, certainly within our experience and direct contact with our current clientele, they have been leaning more towards the section 98 agreement because it is an alteration to the common element that's adjacent or abutting to their deeded legal spot.
With respect to the process, it will depend on who you're going to hire. Your contractors, your engineers. It will cover what the installation process is that Philip covered very well. There was a question about utilities submetering. For retrofit it might be difficult so the whole concept of having the condo pay the bulk, and then some kind of charge back made to each resident owner, makes sense in terms of that model. My current experience working with developer clients who are building new condos, they're actually thinking ahead already and they're installing some meters directly in unitized parking spots.
The product side, the last one here, just regarding the branded. Again, what Philip, I apologize if I'm getting the names mixed up, but the whole level 2 charger, that always comes up as a question. The second question we get a lot is, should I get a Tesla charger or a universal charger? So clearly as property management we're trying to think forward. We are trying, to the best of our ability, to educate. I don't want to say persuade or dissuade, however, if you have a Tesla driver now who really wants a Tesla charger, there's nothing really stopping us from having them put in a Tesla charger in their deeded spot because that is their legal spot. We are trying to educate them based on resale value down the road. That whoever buys this spot, buys their condo, buys their parking may not have a Tesla. So they need to think ahead and be smart and say, "If I install a Tesla charger now, it might be completely useless to the next owner." So there are things to consider there.
Rod: I'm going to nudge you forward because you're taking up Graeme's time and he doesn't know that.
Aji: Absolutely.
Rod: Just so, rapidly.
Aji: Yeah, if you can go to the next slide.
Rod: Yeah, this one is where I wanted to bring you. Exactly.
Aji: So I'm just going to go quickly through these bullet points. Visitor parking is always contemplated regarding if we should put EV chargers there. The next question boards ask is, how do we monitor it? How do we prevent people from abusing it? The minute they go down that rabbit hole they then revert back to, "But if we can allow people to put it directly in their parking spots wouldn't that be better?" So like I said, the boards will certainly, within GTA, tend to be scaling that direction. I will say this. If you're a condo corp member or you live in a condo with commercial parking, what I am finding is the commercial parking operators are more quick to install EV chargers in their commercial parking spots. So that might be an option where you can offer the unitized parking spots to get a charger and then any visitors can park in the commercial side and charge their cars that way. Owner parking limits, we talked about already. Trickle chargers can be another sensitive topic. Certainly in the condo that I currently live in. I've seen two Tesla's already plugged into the wall plug. Just a regular wall plug in the parking garage because they're using a trickle chargers. So that's another consideration that boards will want to take care of. We talked about the installation. The electricity costs. The incentive to rebates and grants we talked about. The last thing I think I'm just going to leave is just regarding unitized parking. So where I live there's actually wording in our condo declaration to allow a spot. For example, out of 300 unitized parking spots only 30 have been prewired for electrical chargers. So the electric charge stations will kind of become on a first come first serve basis. The concept of the unitized parking spot is similar to swapping with someone who requires a handicap or accessible wheelchair parking spot. So let's suppose I have one of those spots that's prewired and someone who already drives a Tesla says, "I need this spot to put a charger in." Conceivably my condo board of directors can force me to swap with that Tesla driver because they already have an electric vehicle and I do not. So that is again something that you will need to talk with your legal counsel about and also review your condominium documents.
Rod: Perfect. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I got to tell you that the unitized parking swap is something that I was not familiar with and so you have to have a look at your declaration, in any event, to figure out what we have here. Do we have unitized parking or are we assigning comment element parking? That's the first question and then, apparently, you need to drill further down. If you have unitized parking you need to ask yourself this question, would we be able to swap some parking, for instance, to sort of centralize the service in an area as opposed to having just sort of draw a line all over the parking garage? Okay, so very good.
I'm going to turn to you, George. Thank you so much, Aji. George, your condominium experience, keeping in mind that we're kind of behind schedule but I want you to give us sort of the practical steps that you've taken and how you've turned this beautiful building, or how you're turning it, into the future, into the Jetsons. So go ahead.
George: Haha. Great. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. What I'm going to do is just go over an accounting of our experience and, most importantly, how we sold it to our community. Our EV committee worked very hard together, with our board, and I believe we've come up with a solution that meets both the needs of the majority of the residents and for the future of EV charging in Canada. This power presentation was presented on May 5 to our community and it was integral to marketing the idea of EV chargers to our community. So in this outline, the idea that this presentation today is to go over this outline very briefly, I'm not going to go into all the details. But showing you the important factors as to how we convinced our fellow residents to move forward with EV charging. So we can go onto the next slide.
The objectives at the beginning of the investigation. In 2018 we formed an EV committee because there was some questions about it our AGM. We paid for and we did an study through Envari to evaluate our power reserves and we found that we had very adequate power reserve in our building to provide electricity to each parking space. This reserve power would be further enhanced with smart technologies so we certainly looked at load sharing and load shedding and we considered that in our decision. When we were talking to our residents we needed to explain why this is such a big deal for a multi-unit residence building because it's a lot different from doing this in your house. So we did an initial survey and of those who responded 80% showed interest and that was before they even realized what the costs were going to be. So clearly we felt that we could move forward. It took us a while to move forward but finally this year we started looking around at different people who could do it and we found some various options.
So going onto the next slide, the Enercan. Again, I'm not going to go over this. We've already gone over much of this. But we really wanted to stress to our residents that this particular grant is focused on getting as many EV chargers to as many people as possible. Enercan believes that the way of the future is for people to charge at home and use the equivalent of the gas station only when travelling beyond the range of your car. It's just a different paradigm when you're thinking about how to do this and that's why it's important. I won't go over all the context here because I think you can figure that out in the future.
Going onto the next slide, the industry solutions, etcetera. Again, we went over this quite carefully with our residents to help them understand what the technology is. Really this is about being straightforward and clear to our residents. Why it was helpful for them to move forward and if they wanted to do so.
Finally, onto the next slide, we looked at the selection criteria that our EV committee decided. We looked at overall costs. We ended up going with metroEV. Their overall solution was the least expensive when considering the cost of infrastructure, the installation and the chargers. As far as ease of expansion, with this plan all parking spaces would be within a 100 feet of a distribution panel, and this is important in considering the cost of a charger, because if you get beyond 100 feet the cost can go up considerably. We are lucky that we have a fairly small footprint but we go deep. We have 4 levels of parking. Minimization of monthly fees. This got to be an important consideration for us. The majority of our people are driving probably about 1,500 kilometers a month and many of the fees to have them bill us ended up being more expensive than the energy that we would be consuming. So we decided to go with metroEV mostly because of this. There's a 24% cost of consumption and that sounds like a lot but if you are going 1,500 kilometers a month, and you've had $35.00 worth of consumption, that adds about $8.50 worth of fees to your electricity costs in order to pay the condo back, as we discussed before.
Rod: I was going to say we're kind of running out of time but all of these considerations, the equipment, the billing, you have to turn your minds to that fairly early on in the process. Is there one last slide that you want to squeeze in very rapidly?
George: No. I think that's really, we've done it. Nope. That's the end of it.
Rod: Okay and if you don't mind me sharing this because it's on the slide, just to give you an idea. In your case the common infrastructure is around $90,000.00 but that's going to be significantly decreased if you get the grant, by half I guess.
George: Yup.
Rod: And the charger is about $3,400 and the 24% that you were talking about is that's the fee in addition to the actual consumption that person uses.
George: Yes.
Rod: Okay. Wonderful.
George: And if you're not using it you don't pay for it.
Rod: Right. That's the benefit of not having the flat monthly fee because snowbirds obviously may be unhappy that they have to pay a monthly fee if they're nowhere near the charger.
George: Exactly.
Rod: Okay. Wonderful. I'm sorry to rush you, George. I think this should have been a 2 hour episode and I see all the questions that we're not going to answer. My ratings are going to tank, I think. But we absolutely need to squeeze in something about vaccination in condos, because last time we spoke the regulation wasn't out, and we need to kind of very briefly squeeze that in. One question that came up very often about EV is whether or not you can use a reserve fund. That would take a good 15 minutes to really elaborate on that. The short answer is that most lawyers will tell you that you cannot use your reserve fund to pay for this initiative. That may change down the line but more creative advisors may tell you that have a look at your reserve fund and see if there's a way to sort of link that to work that you have already budgeted for. So unfortunately I'm kind of brushing it. I'm really glossing over it. It's a fairly complicated question. You want to make sure you speak to your advisors. Graeme, you have 2 minutes to tell us whether or not, and I'm changing the topic, whether or not condos must require proof of vaccination to allow owners to go to their gyms.
Graeme: And go. So I'll try to zip through this as quickly as I can. As many of you will know, in mid-September the regulation came out with respect to proof of vaccination requirements. We, in general the condominium community, the consensus seems to be that the regulation does not require condominiums to seek proof of vaccination from any users who want to go to use the gym, or the pool, or what have you. That's because in the regulation it applies specifically to patrons. The consensus in the community, which also seems to be back up by a statement from the Ontario Ministry of Health, seems to be patrons is not an accurate way of describing the residents, or occupants, or owners of condominiums who are using those facilities. Now, does that mean that condos can't ask for proof of vaccination? No, it doesn't. In fact the ability to ask for proof of vaccination, in our view, falls squarely within the corporation's ability and duty to control, manage and administer the common elements and take reasonable steps to ensure the reasonable safety of those who are on the premises. Now, if we are going to be talking about vaccination requests and vaccination policies, we of course need to consider human rights considerations. So, for that, and all of these slides you're seeing, they have links in them with statements from the Ontario Ministry of Health and Human Rights Commission which I recommend everybody check out, but generally the Human Rights Commission has come out and said that requiring proof of vaccination is usually okay and that you have to accommodate those who can't be vaccinated for code related reasons. Like a medical reason. The duty to accommodate does not apply to those who choose not to get vaccinated for personal beliefs. When we talk about accommodations it might be things like making sure that people who are unvaccinated get tested, or maybe setting separate hours for certain facilities during which unvaccinated people can use them. But those seeking an accommodation have to come with a written document, from a doctor, explaining that there is a medical exemption and indicating the timeframe over which it will apply. Of course, this might require a little more care. I'm going very quickly so this is ... ... but, Rod, if you can go to the next slide.
Rod: Yeah. Can you believe that for once the COVID topic is not our most popular seller today. Nobody cares. They want to plug their cars.
Graeme: Yeah. Yeah, you know what? Maybe that's a good thing to talk about something else for once but it wouldn't be a webinar without Graeme's COVID update. So the Ministry of Health has come out also and indicated that very few things will actually qualify as a medical exemption to getting a vaccine. The Ministry of Health accepts true medical exemptions to be quite infrequent and rare and they're going to need to be supported by expert consultation. All of this to say there are some considerations that your condominium is going to need to keep in mind when it comes to determining what they want to do about vaccinations. So it's probably worth turning your mind to a policy and a good policy for vaccinations should consider these things. Rod, I'm happy to go through them but I'm also cognizant that it is 6:00pm and I think I have hit my 2 minutes. So I'm in your hands.
Rod: Okay. So, folks, you can read about this on the Condo Adviser.
Graeme: There you go.
Rod: We have an amazing blog and of course this slide is going to be up and I'm sorry. I tried to put too much, I served too much in my buffet here and there was just too much for the 1 hour. We're going to have a look at the questions we got. We're going to have a look at the chat messages we see to see whether or not we should have a EV part 2 to try to answer these questions. But I think at the end of the day what's important is for you to sit down and do the homework properly. So check what your building can accommodate. Check what your owners want to have in place. Check what your declaration and governing documents have in mind when it comes to this. Retain someone like Envari or there's tons of others that will come forward and help you, walk with you hand in hand, through this process to help you figure out how to sort of implement things. Okay, folks, we're at the end. We passed 6:00. The ratings are tanking. So next webinar is the first Wednesday of the month. It's November 3 it's going to be and the information about it will be posted on Condo Adviser. You'll have to register again. You know the drill and you can find the webinar tab right here, on Condo Adviser, and again you'll have the link to register, you'll have the speakers, you'll have the topics. Keep on eye out for this. That's it, I guess. That's the end of the webinar. The jingle is trying to push me off air. So thanks again, everybody. Thank you to our speakers. We have an amazing set of panels. We have of course Philip Clark from Envari. We have Aji Montenegro from FirstService Residential. We had Tricia Baratta from Gallagher and we had a condo director extraordinaire who went out of his way and to come and share his experience, George Parry. Thank you so much too all of you and thank you to the condominium twins for their time tonight. That's it, folks. We'll post this on the webinar tab. You'll be able to watch it on demand later on. Thanks so much, everybody. We're 2 minutes over time but it's free. Take care.