The previous council was proactively looking into a managed EV system to help ensure trouble-free electrical supply and reduced risk for the complex.
Updated February 2026: The current council has engaged A&R Electric to prepare both an Electrical Planning Report and an EV Ready Report. Preparing the two at the same time provides a significant saving over individual reports, and comes with the potential for a provincial rebate to cover part of the cost.
In 2022, council brought in an expert from Division 16 Technologies to give an overview of what’s involved just prior to seeing almost the whole council removed for having the gall to follow through on maintenance needs. Since taking over, the new council has done absolutely nothing on this, putting everyone at risk.
Having a proper EV balancing system is essential for a strata, and especially for one as large as ours. As the number of people with electric vehicles grows, the demand on our power grid increases dramatically. Some units already experienced power brown-outs in the summer.
Brown-outs happen when there isn’t enough power in the building for every unit to meet demands. The total voltage for each unit in the building then drops below the required voltage, causing disruptions.
Average voltage in our area ranges between 119 volts and 122 volts. When voltage drops below 110 it causes brown-outs.
These low-power situations can be fatal for complex electronics such as entertainment systems. Computers are usually able to shut down in time, but they too can be negatively impacted. In the summer, when units were running AC along with stoves and utilities and hair dryers and EV chargers, we had numerous brown-outs take place. Imagine how much worse this will get in future summers, when more and more people have electric vehicles!
An EV management system is a pretty straight-forward system that governs how the electrical demand is distributed. EV chargers don’t need to run at full power to properly charge the vehicle overnight. The system watches the demand for each building in real time and assigns the amount of energy supplied to the EV chargers so that power disruptions are avoided. Instead, it simply slows down the EV charging until the demand is reduced.
When stratas like ours don’t look after this kind of management, they can suffer devastating consequences. In a worst-case scenario, or if brown-outs happen often enough, this can even blow the transformer on the street.
Transformer fires are quite common in these cases. Then the complex has no power at all until the transformer is repaired, and if it is found that mismanagement (such as not acting on an EV plan) caused the transformer to blow, the complex is charged for the cost of repairs, which can be a quarter million dollars or more.
Aware of the dangers, the BC government last May mandated that all stratas in Greater Vancouver MUST have an Electrical Planning Report (referred to as an EPR) in place by 2026. The cost of the plan is typically an affordable $5000.
We need an Electrical Planning Report and we need it now. And we need action from council to implement a load balancing system before our entire complex has to pay the price of mismanagement.
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