Residents able to book through the 360 EV Share app for around $20 per hour

EV charging for body corporates and shared premium chargers booked via an app for unit or office blocks are being trialled in Sydney and Melbourne.

Origin is rolling out a unique electric vehicle solution for apartment blocks. It is also offering an EV fleet management system for businesses.

In private dwellings, body corporates face major obstacles retrofitting EV charging solutions in their car parks. They can be difficult to wire and there are concerns about power overloads. However Origin is wanting to overcome these issues.

Origin general manager e-mobility, Chau Le, said the energy company was offering two services, the first being EV car sharing. Origin would install a premium EV, currently a Tesla Model 3, in a designated space on the property, along with charging facilities. Residents could book through the 360 EV Share app for around $20 per hour including insurance, with discounts for whole-day use and at weekends.

To ensure the car remained charged, drivers would need to attach the charging cable after use to end their booking time.

“This is an exclusive car sharing service for residents of apartment buildings, or tenants of commercial buildings to share and access on an exclusive basis,” Ms Le said.

The program is in an early pilot stage with three EVs, at Home apartments in Southbank in Melbourne, at Origin’s Exhibition Street office and at Tower One in Barangaroo in Sydney. Origin expected the program to become popular quickly.

The second service was an assessment report about installing EV charging for body corporates. Origin’s solution would allow individual residents to easily add a wall charger once the backbone infrastructure was in place. The company would typically install single phase 7.2 kilowatt and three-phase 22kW wall chargers.

Chau Le, Origin general manager, e-mobility.

“We provide embedded networks to apartment buildings and increasingly we are providing an EV charging solution to these apartment buildings, as well as EV car share.”

Ms Le said the initial assessment phase included whether the site’s power supply would cope with the extra power drawn for EV charging. This applied to retrofitting and to greenfield sites.

“We’ll put in place a load management system. If there are 30 residents looking to charge their vehicles all at once, the load management system will make sure that it doesn’t trip the rest of the building’s power connection.

“If that doesn’t work, then it’s working with the distribution networks to upgrade the capacity and the connection to the networks.”

Ms Le said residents didn’t have to be Origin customers to access the two solutions. Origin would maintain the EVs and was “brand agnostic”, even though the initial EV share scheme used Teslas.

Ms Le couldn’t give the cost to body corporates of installing an EV charging solution.

Origin also had developed an EV fleet management system to help businesses transition to electric. “We provide the consultation, the analysis, the procurement of the vehicles provided on a fully maintained operating lease. We combine that with a charging solution, energy management solution, data reporting and insights. It’s a fully managed service.

“Businesses have really been attracted to it because they’re interested in going green but they just don’t know how. We run drive days and webinars to educate the whole organisation on the benefits of going to EVs.”