In a win for owners (and potentially renters) of strata apartments, the NSW parliament last week finally passed a further set of amendments to their Strata Schemes Management Act.

First put to the NSW parliament in 2025, the parts of the new amendments relating to EV charging effectively add up to a ‘right to charge’, in that where an owner applies to install an EV charging station on the owner’s lot, Strata Committees cannot “unreasonably object to the installation of the electric vehicle charging station.”

This includes where the installation also requires changes to, or work to be carried out on, the common property of the strata scheme.

It does not, however, offer carte blanche to any EV charging solution that the owner may want to install (despite some scare-mongering on behalf of some bodies and businesses who have promulgated ideas such as the deemed approval will ‘threaten building supply capacity’ and/or pose a major fire risk).

The answers to both scare campaigns are in fact spelt out in the NSW Government website devoted to the changes.

In relation to overloading the building supply after the first few chargers are installed, the owners corporation is the body that selects which EV charging option suits a particular building, not the owner applying for a charger installation.

Consequently, any approval for individual EV chargers must take into account the ultimate load of a building wide charging roll-out, and consequently select (at the outset) a scalable demand-management solution. (Effectively making the apartment complex ‘EV Ready’).

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