EV charging in apartment buildings: a massive market still taking shape

EV charging in apartment buildings is emerging today as one of the great worksites of electrification in France. Long seen as a marginal topic, it now concerns a considerable volume of residential car parks and represents a key lever for the mass adoption of electric vehicles, particularly in dense urban areas.

The market is accelerating rapidly. To date, nearly 13,000 condominiums are already equipped with an operator solution, and around 25,000 additional condominiums have voted to deploy one. In total, this represents nearly 2.4 million parking spaces — about one third of the indoor parking spaces in France, according to AFOR. These figures reflect a structural shift: the apartment building is becoming an unavoidable pillar of the EV charging ecosystem.

That said, this market is still taking shape and raises major challenges for operators. The first collective installations were often deployed before 2018, at a time when communication protocols such as OCPP were neither standardised nor mandatory. The result is a heterogeneous installed base, made up of multi-brand, multi-protocol charge points that are sometimes difficult to supervise consistently. On top of this come strong power constraints, particularly in older buildings whose electrical reserves were never sized to power dozens of vehicles charging simultaneously every evening.

The challenges are not only technical. Operating models are multiplying — right-to-plug, operator solutions, shared charge points — with complex operational stakes: managing access and badges, tracking individual consumption, billing thousands of residents, issuing expense reports for employees charging a company vehicle at home, not to mention maintenance and troubleshooting.

At the heart of these challenges, supervision stands out as an essential building block. It is the point of convergence between existing infrastructure, energy constraints, business models and everyday usage. In a market set to evolve rapidly, the ability to supervise, steer and evolve charging in apartment buildings will directly determine operators’ success and the quality of service offered to residents.

A historically heterogeneous installed base

Many of the first charging installations in apartment buildings were deployed before 2018, at a time when the EV charging market was still in its experimental phase. Communication standards were not stabilised, protocol implementations varied greatly from one manufacturer to another, and supervision was not systematically conceived as a central building block of the project.

The result today is a particularly heterogeneous installed base. Many condominiums are equipped with multi-brand charge points, with OCPP protocol versions that are sometimes absent, partial or non-compliant with current standards. Some installations still rely on proprietary solutions, making it complex for operators to take over and run the installed base they are called on to keep running.

This heterogeneity raises several concrete challenges. Consistent supervision of all charge points becomes difficult, even impossible, without a strong ability to adapt to the specifics of each piece of equipment. Maintenance and troubleshooting operations are made heavier, functional evolutions are limited, and migrations to new operating models are often perceived as risky or costly.

In this context, the challenge is not to systematically replace existing infrastructure, but to evolve it without service interruption. The ability to take over already-installed charge points, to work with heterogeneous implementations and to ensure long-term compatibility becomes a key success factor for operators.

This is precisely where multi-protocol supervision comes into its own. By acting as an abstraction layer between field equipment and usage, it makes it possible to rationalise operations, secure migrations and gradually support the maturing of charging infrastructure in apartment buildings.

Power constraints in residential buildings

One of the main obstacles to the mass deployment of charging in apartment buildings lies in electrical power constraints, particularly in older buildings. Designed, in some cases, long before the emergence of the electric vehicle, these buildings were not sized to host infrastructure capable of powering dozens of vehicles simultaneously every evening.

In many condominiums, the power available on the main low-voltage distribution board is limited and already heavily used by classic residential needs. Adding charge points, without specific steering, can quickly create overload risks or require heavy works to reinforce the electrical risers — often costly works that neither the grid operator nor the operators take on.

This issue is all the more critical because charging usage in apartment buildings is highly synchronised. Residents mostly plug in their vehicles at the end of the day, generating consumption peaks concentrated within short time windows. Without a regulation mechanism, the rise in the number of electric vehicles quickly becomes incompatible with electrical capacity.

In this context, power management can no longer be approached statically. It requires a dynamic approach able to arbitrate, in real time, the distribution of energy between the different charge points, based on available capacity and usage priorities. Mastering power thus becomes an essential prerequisite to making charging in apartment buildings viable over the long term, without imposing disproportionate investments or degrading quality of service for residents.

Reconciling multiple operating models

Charging in apartment buildings does not rely on a single model. On the contrary, a single operator may have to run, within one and the same installed base, infrastructure of very different kinds. This diversity of configurations is one of the market’s main operational challenges.

In some condominiums, charging relies on shared charge points made available to all residents. This infrastructure requires fine-grained management of access, priorities and usage to guarantee fairness between users and avoid usage conflicts, while ensuring maximum availability of charge points.

In other cases, charge points are connected to the building’s common services. This model involves specific requirements for energy tracking: consumption must be read automatically, attributed to each user and rebilled reliably to enable reimbursement of the electricity consumed to the condominium owners’ association. The accuracy and automation of meter readings then become essential to guarantee the transparency and acceptability of the system.

Finally, some condominiums opt for dedicated electrical infrastructure, with delivery points specific to charging. This model offers greater energy independence, but introduces other challenges, notably regarding power steering, contracting and direct billing of end users.

For operators, the complexity lies not only in the coexistence of these models, but in the ability to manage them simultaneously within a single supervision platform. Operational teams must be able to easily configure the infrastructure, define billing rules, manage access and administer several thousand customers, while offering distinct offers adapted to each configuration, without friction or administrative overload.

In this context, supervision becomes a genuine industrial tool. It must absorb the diversity of operating models, automate critical processes and offer a smooth experience to both operators and condominium owners. Only on this condition will charging in apartment buildings be able to continue deploying at scale, without complicating operations or degrading quality of service.

Billing, rebilling and expense reports

In apartment buildings, charging billing must be precise, automated and transparent to be accepted over the long term. Depending on the configuration, charge points may be connected to common services or to dedicated infrastructure, which requires reliable tracking of consumption by user.

Supervision must make it possible to link each charging session to a resident or a vehicle, automate rebilling — notably to the condominium owners’ association — and generate usable reports. In some cases, it must also facilitate the issuing of expense reports for employees charging a company vehicle at home.

At scale, these mechanisms must remain simple to operate. The ability to manage several thousand users, distinct pricing rules and industrialised billing processes is a key challenge for operators working in apartment buildings.

A building block for reliability and scalability

Charging in apartment buildings is emerging as a key market for electrification, but also as one of the hardest to operate. Heterogeneous infrastructure, power constraints, diversity of operating models, billing requirements and high expectations from condominium owners: these challenges are structural and call for industrial responses.

In this context, supervision plays a central role. It makes it possible not only to steer charging and energy day to day, but also to secure operations over the long term. By offering real-time visibility into the status of charge points, it facilitates preventive maintenance, speeds up incident diagnosis and reduces on-site interventions — which are particularly sensitive in a residential environment.

More than a technical tool, supervision thus becomes a lever for reliability, scalability and quality of service. It determines operators’ ability to support the rise of electric vehicles in apartment buildings, while guaranteeing a simple, sustainable and acceptable experience for all residents.