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.
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.