Property
EV charging is a governance problem before it is an electrical one
The hardest part of getting chargers into apartment buildings is rarely the hardware. It is deciding who pays, who decides and who carries the risk.
20 January 2026 · 5 min read
Electric vehicle uptake in Australia is now well past the point where strata buildings can treat it as somebody else's issue. Owners are arriving with cars that need charging and buildings that were never designed for it.
The technical answers largely exist. Load management, shared infrastructure, metering and billing are all solved problems in 2026. What is not solved is the decision-making: which committee approves what, how the cost is apportioned, what happens to the infrastructure when an owner sells, and how a building avoids a first-come-first-served scramble that leaves later owners stranded.
Buildings that plan the whole site once, rather than approving individual installations one at a time, end up with fewer disputes and lower cost per space. That planning is a governance exercise.
Policy has a role here too. Consistency across jurisdictions would remove a lot of avoidable friction for owners, managers and installers.