The Hidden Electrical Challenge Facing Multi-Tenant Buildings — and How Facilities Managers Are Solving It

EV charging is becoming a standard tenant expectation. But for facilities managers and building owners, enabling it across multiple tenants is rarely straightforward. This article looks at the practical challenges — and the approaches that are making them manageable.

Introduction

Electric vehicles are no longer a niche consideration for commercial building managers. Across Australia and New Zealand, tenants are increasingly expecting EV charging as a standard part of their building amenity — and in many cases, it is becoming a factor in lease decisions.

For facilities managers responsible for multi-tenant buildings, this creates practical problems without obvious solutions. The electrical infrastructure in most commercial buildings wasn’t designed for the scale of EV charging demand that tenants now expect — and the organisational complexity of managing charging across multiple independent tenants adds a layer of difficulty that goes well beyond simply installing some chargers.

The problem is not just electrical

When a tenant requests EV charging, the instinct for most building owners is to treat it as an electrical infrastructure question: is there capacity, and what will it cost?

But the real complexity is organisational as much as electrical.

The building owner ends up owning the problem. In the traditional model, the building owner procures and installs EV chargers, manages the hardware, and invoices tenants for usage — becoming the de facto EV charging service provider whether they want to be or not.

Tenants leave. Chargers do not. When a tenant vacates, their chargers stay behind — allocated to parking spaces that may sit unused or need costly reallocation. These may become stranded assets: capital spent that is no longer generating value. In buildings with regular tenant turnover, this is a significant and recurring cost.

One brand does not suit everyone. When the building owner provides chargers, they typically choose a single brand for simplicity. But a corporate tenant occupying offices across multiple cities may already have a preferred charger brand and management software across all their sites. Being forced onto a different system at one building creates friction — and in some cases, is a deal-breaker.

Electrical capacity constrains growth. Even when a building owner wants to install more chargers, the existing electrical supply may not support the additional load without an expensive, disruptive infrastructure upgrade — often disproportionate to the value of the additional charging capacity it enables.

A different model: tenants bring their own

There is an alternative model that sidesteps many of these problems — one where tenants source, install, and manage their own EV charging systems, connected to the building’s electrical supply under rules set by the building owner.

In this model, the building owner’s role shifts from charger provider to electrical infrastructure manager — defining how much power each tenant’s charging system is allowed to use, and ensuring the building’s limits are respected at all times. Tenants get the hardware and software they prefer. When they leave, their chargers leave with them. No stranded assets.

The challenge this introduces is coordination. Most commercial EV charger load management systems manage a single brand within a single electrical system — with no mechanism for coordinating with other independent charger systems on the same electrical supply. Without a coordination layer, there is no reliable way to prevent multiple independent tenant systems from collectively exceeding the building’s supply capacity.

This is a core problem that intelligent load management platforms are designed to solve.

Managing power allocation across tenant charger groups

An intelligent load management platform sits between the building’s electrical metering infrastructure and each tenant’s independent charging system. It monitors total site demand in real time — including non-EV loads like lighting, HVAC, and lifts — and continuously calculates available EV charging capacity. That capacity is then apportioned across tenant charger groups according to rules set by the facilities manager.

For building managers, this means:

• Configurable allocation per tenant. Each tenant’s power allocation can be set independently — based on lease terms, charger installation size, or other criteria — and adjusted at any time without on-site hardware changes.
• Unused capacity shared automatically. When one tenant’s chargers are idle, their unused allocation is made available to other active groups — maximising efficiency without manual intervention.
• Supply limits are protected at all times. The combined demand of all tenant charger groups never exceeds the building’s configured supply limits, regardless of what any individual system does.
• Multiple buildings, one management view. For managers responsible for a portfolio of buildings, a single account can span multiple sites — with site-specific configurations, allocation rules, and reporting for each building in one place.

Tenant energy billing without the guesswork

Billing is one of the most practically difficult aspects of multi-tenant EV charging. In a multi-tenant setup where each tenant operates their own independent charger system, billing data will not be available to the building owner from the tenant’s EV charger systems — making it difficult to recover energy costs accurately.

Intelligent load management platforms address this by maintaining their own energy consumption records for each tenant charger group, independently of whatever data the charger management software holds. Consumption can be reported by hour, day, week, or billing period — giving facilities managers a consistent, auditable record of each tenant’s usage.

Where a building is on a time-of-use tariff, the platform can apply tenant-specific tariff profiles to calculate the actual cost of each tenant’s consumption — based on the tariff rates applicable to the time periods they were charging. This gives facilities managers the information they need to invoice tenants accurately, without manual reconciliation across multiple systems.

Peak demand management and building energy efficiency

Beyond tenant EV charging, building owners face a broader energy cost challenge: peak demand charges.

Most commercial electricity tariffs include a demand charge based on the highest power draw recorded during a billing period. A single period of high simultaneous demand from building loads and tenant EV charging can set the peak demand charge for an entire month — representing a substantial proportion of annual electricity costs.

Intelligent load management platforms reduce peak demand exposure by shifting EV charging load to periods of lower building demand or lower-tariff windows — without affecting tenants’ ability to charge their vehicles.

For building owners with battery storage, the same load management layer can coordinate battery charge and discharge with real-time building demand — discharging during high-demand periods to reduce grid import, and recharging during low-demand or low-tariff windows. This makes battery storage considerably more effective than a standalone system on a fixed schedule, and maximises the return on the battery investment.

The combined effect means building owners can support more EV charging capacity within existing electrical infrastructure — avoiding the cost and disruption of switchboard upgrades or new grid connections.

Demand response: a near-term opportunity

Electricity network operators in Australia and New Zealand are increasingly offering demand response programmes — arrangements where commercial and industrial electricity consumers agree to reduce demand at certain times in exchange for financial incentives or reduced network charges.

For building owners with significant EV charging loads and battery storage, this represents a meaningful opportunity to reduce electricity supply costs. Intelligent load management platforms are well positioned to support participation — automatically applying curtailment limits to site EV charging capacity during demand response events, and coordinating battery discharge to offset the reduction in available grid power.

Better Balancer will deliver demand response integration as a near-term capability, enabling building owners to participate in network programmes directly through the platform as this functionality becomes available across the region.

Practical considerations

A few points worth keeping in mind for facilities managers considering their approach to tenant EV charging.

• Start with your electrical infrastructure. Understand your building’s available capacity, existing metering, and sub-distribution board configuration before making any charger decisions. This gives you a realistic picture of what your building can support today and where headroom exists.
• Define your allocation policy before tenants ask. A clear, documented approach to power allocation and tenant billing avoids ad hoc decisions that are difficult to reverse — and makes it easier to include EV charging terms in lease agreements from the outset.
• Consider the long-term cost of owning charger infrastructure. Maintenance, management, and reallocation costs when tenants change can be significant over time. A model where tenants own their own hardware — operating within building-defined rules — may offer a better long-term outcome.
• Think about reporting from the outset. Tenant energy billing is far easier when the reporting infrastructure is in place before tenants start charging. Retrofitting billing processes across multiple tenants with different charger systems is considerably more difficult.

Closing

EV charging in multi-tenant commercial buildings is genuinely complex — electrically, organisationally, and commercially. But the combination of intelligent load management, flexible tenant allocation, integrated energy reporting, and peak demand optimisation means building owners and facilities managers have more practical tools available today.

The buildings that navigate this transition most effectively will be those that treat it as a managed infrastructure challenge — with clear policies, the right coordination technology, and a model that works for both building owners and their tenants.