Apartment Block EV Charging Feasibility

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Mina and Evergreen Smart Power want to make home electric vehicle charging as widely available as possible to encourage uptake of zero-emission vehicles.Home charging is much the best way to keep an electric car topped up - it's cheap, it's clean, it's convenient - but this means that today it is overwhelmingly homeowners with off-street parking who are considering purchasing an EV.On-street charging for those with terraced housing has been a major focus of research over the last few years with new business models gradually emerging, but there has been comparatively little attention paid to apartment blocks - and with 9 million people living in flats in the UK this is a demographic we cannot ignore.Charging in an apartment block is full of challenges: residents do not own their parking space, and even if an EV charger is installed (an expensive process today) it is the building management who pay for its electricity and recharging the cost of electricity is a logistical challenge most are shying away from.Also, many (~40%) of residents are tenants, and naturally have no interest in funding an expensive chargepoint asset for a car park they may only spend a short period of time using. Landlords are similarly reluctant to fund the asset while there is no great demand because tenants do not have EVs: it is a chicken-and-egg problem.Mina and Evergreen Smart Power are developing a revolutionary new business which will enable people to rent a chargepoint for their parking space for as long as they need it, providing them with access to cheaper, more convenient charging than public infrastructure, automatically performing smart charging to balance the wider network and use renewable energy as much as possible, and handling all the payments and settlement with the building manager.We believe this can be done, and done soon, but it requires further modelling, evaluation, and prototyping to persuade funders and facilities managers that there is a sustainable business case that meets each party's needs and will work in the long-term.The objective of this feasibility study is to build the business case and prototype the necessary smart hardware and software integrations to persuade buildings to invest in this technology and remove one of the barriers preventing their residents from considering an EV.