Summary
Starting in 2026, California will require all new residential units with parking spaces to be EV charger-ready, significantly increasing access to electric vehicle charging.
Multi-family developments must equip at least one EV-ready spot per unit, while hotels, commercial lots, and parking renovations will also face new EV charging mandates.
Advocacy groups praise the policy, emphasizing its balanced approach to affordability and infrastructure needs.
The initiative aligns with California’s 2035 ban on new gas-powered car sales, aiming to address key barriers to EV adoption and support the state’s transition to electrification.
Unfortunately every apartment I have lived in with charging adds a massive markup to the electricity coming out of the chargers. At one place we were paying $150/month for a space with an EV charger and the electricity coming from the charger was still billed at around 10x the base rate. It was far cheaper to fill our plugin hybrid with gas than to use the charger in our parking space.
I’m sure the same will apply here. It doesn’t help anyone if the complex is allowed to gouge the tenants on the electricity usage.
In theory chargers being more readily available will help with this. If they mark up the electricity 10x and all the tenants just charge at work instead, there’s a motive to make the price more competitive. In practice we might just end up with more AI price fixing and consumers with no recourse.
Ironically, the chargers at my office ALSO charge a big markup.
Competition is good, but landlords at offices and apartment buildings have a somewhat captive customer base who will often pay exorbitant prices for convenience.
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Frankly incredible that the NEC isn’t requiring this in all new editions yet. Absurdly short sighted. Like, it’s just 1 circuit to a garage if a garage is present. All the yokel states can refuse to adopt that section if they want, whatever.
Run two, for a future battery.
An ESS is a bit of a different animal though. They are generally wired directly to the meter’s output, before any circuits and may even come with their panel that would then control all the circuits in the house.
So run the wiring. It will cost nearly nothing to do that while also pre-wiring for EV charging vs doing it later for $$.
This is fantastic. It’s not super expensive either. Just an extra 240 volt 50 amp cable with a 14-50 outlet. If done at the build stage it’s a few hundred bucks.
It’s even cheaper than that. The minimum according to the article is 240v/20a. That smaller than a dryer outlet. You could literally use standard 12 gauge wire to it, just like you would to a dishwasher
Now if only PGE would stop charging 60 cents / KwH
Nothing ever added to building code is inexpensive. It’s always many times the cost of the simplest way of doing it because it has to be done to code.
The rampant expansion of building code is a major reason for the expense of housing.
Downvote away but you know it’s true.
Lmao. If you ever worked in construction you’d know that 1. code compliance is not that hard 2. you do not want the random contractor chucklefucks making it up on the fly without a sanity check from the inspector. Be glad your house doesn’t burn down because knob and tube isn’t code compliant.
You know why we have 99% of the regulations we do? Because without them houses we’re catching fire and killing everyone inside, or collapsing in a stiff breeze killing everyone inside.
Generally regulations exist because uncountable numbers of people died first.
While I agree, there is a line where the addition of more safety features just adds up little by little over the years and makes houses unnaffordable.
And at some point people dying on the streets from being homeless will surpass how many lives are being saved by said safety features.
Now, if we have reached that point yet I cannot say but the line is there and it will be crossed at some point if we haven’t yet.
Sure, but then at some point it became a nightmare of expensive stupid things like running conduit for every electrical line line in a wall or ceiling (Chicago) that some bureaucrat put in to justify a pay raise. It’s raised the cost of building a house several times faster than inflation, and a major reason there’s a housing shortage.
You can’t install an electrical outlet if it’s not to code now. The “code” for electric circuits has been set for decades, and when updated, affects them all.
Requiring another circuit on a building with dozens/hundreds of circuits already doesnt add any extra burden, especially at the build stage like the commentor above said. Adding electrical when the walls are open is easy as shit.
Making up a regulation boogeyman about mundane, everyday building projects doesnt actually make them difficult, no matter how much you want to pretend they are.
Now if only we could build way more new residential units in CA.
I was going to say. I’m sure this will be great… for all 25 new homes built in CA that year!
Great to see this. In 10 years ice cars will not be sold so this needs to happen now.
This is great. Now do battery storage.
That would be hella expensive
Which is exactly why we’d expect it lmao.
Not to be battery-ready. I’m not suggesting batteries get installed.
Most modular home battery banks can take EV chargers as an input. I know Ecoflow can, and I expect Anker solix can too. These circuits could charge battery banks instead, which the cars could plug into.
Sounds like they are getting battery storage ready.
It doesn’t cost much to run another conduit and breaker to support a battery that the electric company will allow you to discharge to the grid for $$.
I’d rather add the support for it.
At the scale of the electrical inputs for medium-large scale apartment buildings, the cost to be battery-ready isn’t measured in dollars but in cubic feet you’re reserving for the purpose. The breakers and line (and sometimes full transformer banks) already have to exist to distribute grid to the sometimes hundreds of units of apartment, so converting a standard demarc to one which would support a battery array wouldn’t be more than installing the shunts and electronic controls. 1 afternoon for a 2-3 man team and maybe a bucket truck if you’re feeling fancy.
The problem is that every square foot of floorspace is planned for in these complexes, and there’s a zero percent chance that any builder is going to allocate the raw square/cubic feet to grid storage without the grid operator or city paying cash for it, and maybe not even then.
Now, if you want to try to legislate that all parking must be built on top of batteries or something, that might be workable, but I would consider putting it in the buildings themselves to be untenable.
A lot of parking is in a garage. If each garage space already supports EV charging, it’s not a lot more to support a battery too. Paired with the right tech you can limit the amount of current feeding all these things.
Batteries take up about 5’x4’x8”. The biggest obstacle is routing individually metered power to garage space.
Keep in mind that natural gas piping may not be needed, freeing up a decent amount of space, cost, and complexity.
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