From Fleets to Apartments: Ensuring No EV Customer Is Left Behind

Small EV customers, including multi-family housing residents and small fleet operators, face significant barriers to grid connection, such as unpredictable costs, long timelines, and a lack of technical expertise. To address this, RMI and its partners developed a roadmap focusing on four key areas: enhancing customer educational resources, increasing utility process transparency, collaborating with local governments and industry to streamline permitting and workforce development, and maintaining post-energization customer relationships.

• Small EV customers, such as apartment building owners, renters, and local delivery fleets, experience disproportionate challenges in connecting to the electric grid, which can lead to project abandonment despite local policy or tenant demand.
• A primary conflict in EV infrastructure deployment is the mismatch between the speed of purchasing vehicles and chargers versus the longer lead times required by utilities for grid connections and upgrades.
• Project costs for small customers are often unpredictable and can escalate due to requirements for new transformers, panel upgrades, civil construction, and trenching, compounded by a lack of in-house expertise and funding.
• Streamlining the connection process requires collaboration between utilities and local governments to standardize permit requirements, train building inspectors, and develop pre-approved easement language to avoid legal delays.
• To support the necessary labor force for EV infrastructure, the roadmap suggests partnering with vocational schools and community colleges to sponsor Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program (EVITP) certifications.

APA

RMI (2025). From Fleets to Apartments: Ensuring No EV Customer Is Left Behind. https://rmi.org/resources/from-fleets-to-apartments-ensuring-no-ev-customer-is-left-behind/

Chicago

RMI. From Fleets to Apartments: Ensuring No EV Customer Is Left Behind. 2025. https://rmi.org/resources/from-fleets-to-apartments-ensuring-no-ev-customer-is-left-behind/.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=RMI |title=From Fleets to Apartments: Ensuring No EV Customer Is Left Behind |date=15 September 2025 |url=https://rmi.org/resources/from-fleets-to-apartments-ensuring-no-ev-customer-is-left-behind/ |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{rmi2025from, author = {{RMI}}, title = {{From Fleets to Apartments: Ensuring No EV Customer Is Left Behind}}, institution = {RMI}, year = {2025}, month = sep, url = {https://rmi.org/resources/from-fleets-to-apartments-ensuring-no-ev-customer-is-left-behind/}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }