ReGenEV — Bringing Charging to Apartment Dwellers in Australia

By Arran Blomfield

ReGenEV has been operating for around a year now, we starting knocking doors down, ringing, emailing, and a slight bit of advertising in the early days. We rang all the established EV companies to build relationships, with not much success. We were lucky enough to obtain a few wall connector installs.

Reza (one of our first customers) works in IT on the Gold Coast, and bought his first Tesla early last year in 2021. He decided to go ahead with a Tesla wall connector for convenience, and also to charge his vehicle at a faster rate. Reza noticed our Facebook advert and booked ReGenEV for the installation. He was extremely pleased with our work, and even went as far as recommending our services to many happy customers since then. We are still in touch today and catch up for regular chats about our Teslas and the wider EV industry.

ReGenEV initially started out catering to residential customers for EV charging requirements with their Tesla wall connectors, but we have quickly become very busy with all manner of EV chargers and other related work, such as residential chargers, commercial EV chargers, and 32 amp sockets where suitable.

We have been approached by number of EV charger suppliers and companies to install and support their products, such as Noodoe, Smappy, EVSE, EVBox, and others. We’ve been assisting businesses with adopting commercial EV charging solutions, in particular solutions from Noodoe EV. We are assisting businesses to adopt simple, automated EV charging experiences with minimal overheads and management requirements. Our most recent commercial client was a residential tower in Main Beach, Golden Sands on the Beach. Barb and Ernie are a lovely couple who manage the building and have very little spare time to add additional billing and management tasks to their daily routine, so having a fully automated EV charging solution that takes care of all of this for them has been a great experience.

Individual tenants may have just bought a Tesla and they have contacted us to install an EV charger within an apartment block. When we met with the manager and BC representatives, they discovered how costly putting in the infrastructure for one charger can be — up to $3000. So far, we have not been able to convince any BCs that are anti-EV. Understandably, they do not want to pay for the infrastructure to support the chargers, and there are concerns about how to pay for the power used at individual parking spots. Add to that a list of rules and regulations and it just gets too hard.

Presently, we are doing a tender for an entire building. This will involve wiring up 3 levels of carpark with switchboards. Then the tenant can put in their own charger at their own expense. A meter installed in switchboard per carpark means that each tenant will pay for their own power.

Addendum by David Waterworth: With more and more apartment dwellers buying electric and more and more apartment owners realising that chargers will add to capital gain and future proof their investment, I am sure Arran will not be short of work.