Price the charger and you get a small number. Price what it takes to power the charger in a shared building, and you get a capital project.
Infrastructure upgrades
If the building's electrical service cannot carry the new load, it has to grow — and growing service is heavy work. A larger transformer, an upgraded main, new feeders. This is the single largest line item, it benefits the whole building, and it is the reason a charging project becomes a capital one. You are not adding a device; you are increasing the building's capacity to carry power.
Distribution equipment
Between the service and the charger sits everything that moves and controls the power: panels, subpanels, breakers, conduit runs, metering, and the load-management hardware that lets many chargers share capacity safely. In a garage where these paths do not yet exist, building them is a significant share of the cost — and it is permanent building infrastructure, not equipment a resident takes with them.
Engineering, permits, and construction
- Engineering. Load studies, electrical drawings, and a design stamped by a licensed engineer. Required before anyone can pull a permit, and the basis everything else is built on.
- Permits. Electrical and sometimes structural permits, inspections, and utility coordination. Each carries fees and time.
- Construction. Licensed electricians, core drilling, conduit, trenching, fireproofing, and the labor of working inside an occupied building. This is skilled trade work priced accordingly.
A board approved a charging budget assuming the chargers were the expense. The final breakdown surprised them: the chargers were under a tenth of the total. The rest was service capacity, distribution, engineering, and the construction to install it — the building, not the devices.
Futureproofing
The cheapest version of this project serves today's requests and forces a second project in two years. The wiser version spends a little more now — larger conduit, room in the panel, a service sized for growth — so the next wave of EVs plugs into capacity that is already there. Futureproofing is not gold-plating. It is the difference between paying for construction once or paying for it repeatedly.
Buildings are often funding infrastructure, not simply buying chargers.