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Almost every apartment owner who buys an EV hits the same wall: the car park has no power, the switchboard is full, and nobody knows who is allowed to say yes. It is not really an electrical problem. It is a decision problem with an electrical bill attached. Get the decision right, in the right order, and the rest is a job for a contractor — often one substantially paid for by a grant.
New South Wales has the most generous strata EV programme in the country. The EV Ready Buildings Grant is aimed squarely at exactly this problem — the behind-the-meter infrastructure in an existing residential building's car park — and it co-funds both the feasibility study and the installation. If your building has ten or more units and off-street parking, this is the first thing to look at, and the reason to move rather than wait.
Governed by the Strata Schemes Management Act 2015, administered by NSW Fair Trading.
Programmes open, allocate and close, and the terms change between rounds. Check the current position with the administering body before you budget around any of these.
NSW Government
Co-funding for existing residential apartment buildings to install the shared electrical infrastructure that makes EV charging possible — the switchboard work, cabling, metering and load management, rather than the chargers themselves. Covers the feasibility study as well as the build.
Official pageIndividual NSW councils
A number of councils fund shared charging infrastructure in multi-unit buildings, and can often be stacked with the state grant. Check your own council's current round.
Official pageUnit count, parking arrangement and building type decide whether the state grant is open to you. Five minutes here saves a wasted feasibility study.
In Quarter: The resolution, the quotes, the scheme details and the building's own numbers are most of any application — and Quarter already holds all four.
It tells you your spare capacity, what load management buys you, and what the real number is. It is also what the grant application is built on — and is itself fundable.
In Quarter: Quotes, studies, assessments and correspondence attach to the decision that authorised them, so the file an assessor, an owner or a buyer's solicitor asks for is already assembled.
Scope, cost, funding source, and how users will be billed. Owners vote far more readily on a motion that answers the money question than on one that defers it.
In Quarter: Build the motion from the quotes and the budget, send the notice to every owner off the ownership register on the statutory clock, and record the vote as it is cast — a decision carries its majority automatically and emails the outcome to whoever raised it.
Fourteen days for an AGM. Put the resolution in terms that authorise the committee to proceed and to sign, so you are not back at another meeting to approve the contract.
The resolution, the study and the quotes are most of the application. Buildings that have them apply in an afternoon.
Metering, tariff and who invoices. Retrofitting this after people are already charging is the hardest conversation in the project.
In Quarter: Recover the running cost through the same ledger as the levies, so charging is invoiced, collected and reconciled rather than tracked in somebody's spreadsheet.
A single unmanaged charger can consume the spare capacity the shared system needed, and then has to be removed at somebody's expense.
Grant programmes want evidence the building has actually decided. An email from the committee is not that.
It means owners without EVs subsidise owners with them, and it is the fastest way to turn a popular project into a dispute at the next AGM.
Waiting is the expensive option. The cost of getting a building EV-ready barely changes, but the cost of doing it badly — one owner at a time, running an extension of the house supply to one bay — rises with every ad hoc installation you have to undo.
The technical part is the easy part. Quarter handles the part that actually stalls these projects: getting a building to a decision it can evidence.
Scope, quotes, funding source and the terms of use, written as a motion owners can vote on rather than a proposal they have to interpret.
The right meeting, the right notice period, the right resolution type, and a vote that is recorded properly the first time.
Feasibility study, electrical assessment, quotes and correspondence, filed against the decision rather than scattered across three inboxes.
Most applications want the same things: the resolution, the quote, the scheme details and the building's numbers. Quarter already holds all four.
Whether users pay per kWh or by a fixed charge, the money has to be billed, collected and reconciled. That is the part that fails six months in.
General information about New South Wales, not legal or financial advice for your building. Legislation is amended and grant programmes open and close — check the current position with NSW Fair Trading or the administering body before you act on anything here.
Tell us about your building in New South Wales and we will show you exactly how Quarter would run it.
