How one condo complex installed EV charging for just $405 per parking spot
A condo complex in Northern California has installed charging for all of its 90 housing unit with an after-incentive cost of around $405 per unit – solving one of the only real problems with EV charging.
One of the main benefits of an electric vehicle is in the convenience of owning and charging the car. Instead of having to go out of your way to fuel it, you just park it at home, in the same place it spends at least 8 hours a day, and you leave the house every day with a full charge.
But this benefit only applies to those with a consistent parking space which they can easily install charging at. When talking about owners who live in apartment buildings, it can sometimes get more complicated.
While certain states have passed “right to charge” laws to give apartment-dwellers a solution for home charging, apartment charging is nevertheless a bit of a patchwork solution so far.
And so, when we heard about a condo complex that installed EV chargers for all of its units, and at an incredibly low cost of just $405 per space in one of the highest cost-of-living areas in the country, we had to find out more.
The condo complex is Woodland Creek, with 90 units in East Palo Alto, CA, in the heart of SIlicon Valley, the epicenter of electric vehicle adoption in the US.
The project was installed by Pando Electric, an EV charging company that focuses on multifamily and commercial buildings. We spoke with its CEO and founder, Aaron Li, for some insights into the project.
Pando says this is the largest “100% coverage” project in North America, but that it’s not stopping there. It’s the largest project the company has installed yet, but that record won’t stay for long.
It differs from others in that most multifamily projects will cover some percentage of available spaces, but this one decided to add outlets for every single parking spot on the property – 90 spots, each for one unit, and 2 handicap parking spots.
The chargers are small boxes, equipped with connectivity and a NEMA 14-50 outlet. Each charger doesn’t have a cable connected – that’s for the owner of the car to provide, in the form of a mobile charging connector. Most EVs either come with one of these cables, or one can be purchased separately for a few hundred dollars.
Pando says the benefit of going this route is that in a world with a wide variety of electric cars, OEM-supplied equipment will always be the most reliable, and will often come with a warranty from the vehicle manufacturer.
It also means that each owner is responsible for their own cable, which means you don’t need to have one maintenance guy on the property responsible for keeping all 90 units up and running, or people mistreating attached cables, because each person will take ownership over their own equipment and take better care of it (there’s a similar provision in the new NACS/J3400 spec that should help with public charging). And that there will be no need to update systems if charging standard change – as we’re seeing currently as the industry transitions to NACS.
Instead of adding dedicated service to each spot, Pando’s system shares electricity between all the outlets on the property. In this way, it can use 300 amps of three-phase commercial service to charge all 90 cars overnight – albeit not as quickly as if each vehicle had its own dedicated 7-10kW level 2 charger. And it said installation costs went down by 80% when connecting to communal electricity rather than adding service to each individual unit.
It accomplishes this by implementing a queue through Pando’s charging app. When a car wants to charge, you plug in, initiate a charging session through the app (or through a “tap-to-charge” NFC system), and get added to a queue. If you have a particular need for immediate charging, you can jump to the front of the queue and pay a premium (of around 20%) for faster charging. Charging costs the same amount as electricity would normally cost in the area, and your electricity usage is monitored through the Pando app.
For most owners, this queue won’t really make a difference – most people are driving some ~40 miles per day and would only need an hour or two of charging per night anyway. So the effect is the same: you get home, you plug in, and you wake up to a full charge.
And having centralized control over charging does open up possibilities for grid services. We’ve seen services like virtual power plants that are able to leverage grid-connected storage to feed the grid on demand, and Pando would like to move in that direction eventually – but its current NEMA 14-50 solution is not bidirectional-capable.
However, dynamic load management is still useful, as the system can try to deliver maximum power at times of lower demand, then scale back when demand (and prices, and grid stress) are high. Some utilities have started offering incentives for users to cut back usage at certain times (or asked everyone to cut back on usage to avoid blackouts), so a centralized system can help to manage power automatically in these situations without having to get every resident onboard.
The most impressive part about the project is the price that Pando was able to achieve. It did take advantage of a hefty utility credit from Peninsula Clean Energy, the local electric utility co-operative, which covered $2,000 per unit installed.
After that incentive, the all-in cost including the charging units themselves (~$500 each), project design, installation, conduit, permitting, labor, etc, was only $405 per unit. This is less than a month’s worth of HOA fees at the condo complex, where units cost between $500k-$1m. So, a drop in the bucket, really, in order to add new capability to every unit (and thus, better resale value, especially given the popularity of EVs in the area).
Typically, adding traditional level 2 charging can cost a lot more than that for an apartment complex, especially if there’s a need to pull more capacity from the utility (which takes more time, too, adding further to project costs). So this load-sharing method results in great benefits on cost.
And by covering every unit, residents won’t need to worry about sharing chargers, or needing to wait for upgrades if all of a sudden there are more EVs than there are spots. It future-proofs the complex so that even if everyone gets an EV (it is Silicon Valley, after all), there will still be places for them all to charge.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve long said that the only real problem with EVs is charging for people who don’t have access to their own garage. Whether this be apartment-dwellers, street-parkers or the like, the electric car charging experience is often less-than-ideal outside of single family homes, at least in North America.
There are workarounds available, like charging at work, or using Superchargers in “third places” where you often spend time, but these still aren’t optimal. The best bet is just to charge your car wherever it spends most of its time, which is your home. When you do that, EVs outshine everything in convenience.
So there’s a need for solutions in this space, and Pando’s seems like a pretty good one. There are other companies doing installations for multifamily dwellings, but we haven’t heard of one that was this cheap before. It really makes it seem economical to install these units for every single parking spot, instead of fussing about with some smaller percentage of units and having to do additional upgrades later.
The one problem with it that I see is that it’s attached to an app. While Pando says that it’s worked to ensure the app is reliable even if the system goes down (e.g., it communicates locally instead of needing to connect to the internet at all times), an app is just an unnecessary step after plugging in that I’d like to see removed.
Pando says that it’s working on bringing a “plug-and-charge-like experience” to using its chargers – which I’d imagine would be possible by doing local bluetooth communication with a phone when a charging session is started, much like the phone-as-key system on Teslas and some other EVs these days. You’d still need an app, you just wouldn’t need to open it every time, which would be good enough in my opinion.
But overall, I’m quite excited about this project, because it solves a big problem, and I cant wait to see more multifamily communities install something like this. And, frankly, we also need legislation/building codes to hop in and require this sort of thing, so it becomes the rule rather than the exception and apartment dwellers can feel secure that they’ll be able to find a place to charge – and if install costs can get as low as $405/unit, that makes a regulatory answer much more possible.
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Ford is jumping into the battery energy storage business, betting that booming demand from data centers and the electric grid can absorb the EV battery capacity it says it’s not using.
To achieve this, Ford plans to repurpose its existing EV battery manufacturing capacity in Glendale, Kentucky, into a dedicated hub for manufacturing battery energy storage systems.
Ford pivots from EVs to battery storage for data centers
Ford says it will invest about $2 billion over the next two years to scale the new business. The Kentucky site will be converted to build advanced battery energy storage systems larger than 5 megawatt-hours, including LFP prismatic cells, BESS modules, and 20-foot DC container systems — the kind of hardware increasingly used by data centers, utilities, and large-scale industrial companies.
The company plans to bring initial production online within 18 months, leaning on its manufacturing experience and licensed battery technology. By late 2027, Ford expects the business to deploy at least 20 gigawatt-hours of energy storage annually.
The move follows a joint venture disposition agreement reached last week between Ford, SK On, SK Battery America, and BlueOval SK. Under the agreement, a Ford subsidiary will independently own and operate the Kentucky battery plants, while SK On will fully own and operate the Tennessee battery plant.
Ford is also planning a separate energy storage play in Michigan. At BlueOval Battery Park Michigan in Marshall, the company will produce smaller amp-hour LFP prismatic cells for residential energy storage systems. That plant is on track to begin manufacturing in 2026, and it will also supply batteries for Ford’s upcoming midsize electric truck — the first model built on the company’s new Universal EV Platform.
Electrek’s Take
Overall, the shift reflects Ford’s broader push toward what it calls “higher-return opportunities.” Alongside taking a step backward to add more gas-powered trucks and vans to its US manufacturing footprint, Ford says it will no longer produce some larger EVs, such as the Lightning F-150, where softer demand and higher costs are resulting from the lack of support for EVs by the Trump administration. (Batteries produced at the Glendale plant were for the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. The best-selling electric truck in the US in Q3, before the federal tax credit expired, was the Ford F-150 Lightning, with 10,005 EVs sold, a 39.7% year-over-year increase.)
With tax credits eliminated and regulatory uncertainty, Ford is pivoting to adjacent markets, including grid-scale and residential energy storage, to keep its battery plants running and justify billions in sunk investment.
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Stellantis may have backed away from planned EVs like the all-electric Ram REV and range-topping Dodge Charger Daytona R/T EV, but the company isn’t standing still. A newly awarded patent outlines an innovative, foam-based thermal runaway suppression system that’s built into an EV’s battery pack.
The indisputable fact of the matter is that electric vehicles catch fire far less often — and far less frequently — than their combustion-powered brethren. Still, a number of highly-publicized early Tesla fires and poorly managed recall on the first-gen Chevy Bolt have linked “electric car” and “fire” in the minds of many Americans, and the ones who have been waiting to test the EV waters until a better safety solution came along are going to absolutely love this latest setup from Chrysler parent company Stellantis.
MoparInsiders is reporting on a new Stellantis patent awarded on a proactive battery safety system that’s designed to stop thermal runaway (read: fire) before it can cascade through an entire EV battery pack.
Rather than relying solely on passive barriers or post-event containment, Stellantis’ freshly patented system uses strategically placed foam channels and deployment mechanisms that can flood the affected cells with high insulation foam when abnormal heat is detected in a cell, isolating the problem area and dramatically slowing (if not outright stopping) the chain reaction that leads to catastrophic battery failure.
The patent describes an electric car battery that, on the outside, will look familiar to EV enthusiasts, but there are some key differences “layered in” around the familiar bits. These include:
- A bladder filled with a fire-retardant chemical; located close to the battery cells, typically between the cells and the top of the pack. It’s made from a flexible polymer, so it can be punctured when needed
- Two sets of blades; the first aimed at the bladder, ready to pierce it and release the fire-retardant chemical while the second targets specific points on the coolant inlet line, outlet line, or heat sinks to rupture them and release cooling foam directly where it’s needed
- Special coolant line sections; designed with small sealed apertures that closed off with a soft plug material that’s easy for the blades to pierce but strong enough to maintain pressure during normal operation
- Actuation devices tied to a controller; that push the blades into the bladder and coolant components when a thermal event is detected
Special coolant lines
The system relies on a suite of existing temperature sensors throughout the battery pack, and seems like a viable enough solution to a problem that, while rare, certainly exists — and which looms large over America’s Early Majority tech adopters.
As for me, I think Stellantis should focus on bringing more compelling products to market and stop looking for ways to blame the customer, market, and government for its inability to sell Jeep products that, apparently, have enough markup to cover nearly $30,000 in discounts to help dealers move their metal. I look forward to hearing about your take in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: US Patent Office, via MoparInsiders.
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It’s official. The all-electric pickup is dead, but Ford is promising the F-150 Lightning EREV will be “every bit as revolutionary” as it shakes up EV plans once again.
Ford reveals next-gen F-150 Lightning EREV
Ford confirmed production of the current F-150 Lightning has ended as part of its updated Ford+ plan, which the company revealed on Monday.
The changes come as part of a broader shift from larger EVs, like the Lightning, to smaller, more affordable models.
While Ford still plans to launch lower-cost EVs based on its Universal EV Platform, the company is expanding its hybrid and extended range electric vehicle (EREV) lineup. By 2030, Ford expects 50% of its global volume to be hybrids, EREVs, and EVs, up from 17% in 2025.
As part of its new plans, Ford said the next-generation F-150 Lightning will switch to an EREV powertrain. It will be assembled at the Rouge EV Center in Dearborn, Michigan, replacing the current all-electric pickup.
With production of the current-generation Lightning now concluded, Ford is sending workers from the Rouge EV Center to its Dearborn Truck Plant as it doubles down on gas and hybrids.
During its Q3 earnings call last month, Ford said the electric pickup would remain paused following a fire at Novelis’ plant in New York that disrupted aluminum supply.
The F-150 Lightning is a “groundbreaking” vehicle, according to Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital, and design officer, that showed an electric pickup can be a great F-Series.
Field claims the “next-generation Lightning EREV is every bit as revolutionary.” It will still offer 100% electric power delivery, sub-5-second acceleration, an estimated combined range of 700+ miles, and it “tows like a locomotive.”
Ford also plans to replace its electric commercial van for North America with affordable gas- and hybrid-powered versions. It will be assembled at Ford’s Ohio Assembly Plant.
The move comes as part of Ford’s plans to launch five new affordable vehicles by the end of the decade, four of which will be assembled in the US. Ford also plans to offer gas, hybrid, and EREV options across nearly every vehicle in its lineup by then.
The first vehicle based on Ford’s new Universal EV Platform will be a midsize electric pickup, starting at around $30,000. It’s expected to be about the size of the Ranger or Maverick.
The news comes after SK On announced last week that it planned to end its joint venture with Ford to build EV batteries at three US gigafactories.
Ford is now planning to use the wholly owned EV battery plants in Kentucky and Michigan to launch a new battery energy storage business. The company plans to begin shipping BESS systems in 2027, with an annual capacity of 20 GWh.
“The operating reality has changed, and we are redeploying capital into higher-return growth opportunities: Ford Pro, our market-leading trucks and vans, hybrids, and high-margin opportunities like our new battery energy storage business,” CEO Jim Farley said on Monday.
The changes are designed to improve profitability and returns. Ford’s EV business, Model e, is now expected to reach profitability by 2029 with improvements in 2026.
Model e lost another $1.4 billion in Q3, bringing the total to $3.6 billion through September. Around $3 billion was due to its current EVs, while the other $600 million was spent on its next-gen models.
Although sales of the F-150 Lightning dropped 60.8% last month following the expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, Ford’s electric pickup remained the best-selling pickup in the US through September.
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