By Chris McKenty

As electric vehicle adoption continues to accelerate across Canada, parking owners and operators are confronting a familiar but increasingly urgent question: how to expand charging infrastructure in a way that aligns with both operational realities and financial constraints.

For Canadian parking facilities, this challenge carries additional layers of complexity. Climate, geography, and infrastructure all play a role. Cold weather can affect battery performance and increase demand for reliable charging access. Many facilities are spread across large campuses or decentralized urban environments. And in some regions, electrical infrastructure is either constrained or costly to upgrade. At the same time, federal and provincial policies are pushing toward higher EV adoption rates, creating a clear expectation that parking facilities will evolve to support electrification.

What makes the situation more nuanced is where charging demand is emerging. While early EV infrastructure investments often focused on high-turnover locations, much of today’s demand is concentrated in long-dwell environments. Airports, university campuses, healthcare networks, government complexes, transit park-and-ride facilities, and commercial office developments all share a common trait: vehicles remain parked for extended periods, often measured in hours or days rather than minutes.

Historically, expanding EV charging capacity in large parking facilities has followed a predictable, but expensive, path. Operators have relied on new electrical service, panel upgrades, trenching, and coordination with local utilities to deliver the power required for traditional charging systems. While this approach can support high-powered charging, it often comes with significant drawbacks. Capital costs can escalate quickly. Construction timelines can stretch over months or even years. And in active facilities, particularly airports or hospitals, construction can disrupt daily operations and create logistical challenges for both staff and customers.

In Canada, these challenges are often amplified. Construction seasons can be shortened by weather conditions. Utility coordination can take longer in areas with limited grid capacity. And costs associated with labor and materials can be higher, particularly in remote or rapidly growing areas. As a result, many parking owners and operators have taken a measured approach, installing small clusters of chargers in premium or highly visible areas while deferring broader deployment.

While understandable, this strategy creates its own limitations. It concentrates charging access in a limited number of spaces, often leading to underutilization in some areas and unmet demand in others. More importantly, it doesn’t scale in a way that prepares facilities for the widespread adoption of EVs that is expected over the coming decade.

A New Approach

A different approach that optimizes existing assets is now gaining traction. Over the past decade or two, most parking facilities across Canada have completed LED lighting retrofits. These upgrades were driven by energy efficiency goals, sustainability mandates, and incentive programs offered by utilities and government agencies. By replacing traditional lighting with LED systems, facilities significantly reduced their energy consumption while improving illumination. In many cases, this created unused electrical capacity within existing lighting circuits that remain untapped.

Additionally, parkades across Canada have another hidden EV charging asset in their widespread 120V block heater infrastructure, with outlets located exactly where vehicles dwell for days at a time. When paired with smart 120V chargers, they can be transformed into a scalable, low-cost charging solution.

All of this unused capacity represents a meaningful opportunity for parking operators. By leveraging available power from lighting and block heater infrastructure, facilities can begin to deploy EV charging in a more distributed and cost-effective manner. Instead of concentrating chargers in a single location that requires significant electrical upgrades, operators can extend charging access across a broader portion of the facility. This distributed model aligns more naturally with how vehicles are parked, particularly in large garages or surface lots where demand is spread out rather than centralized.

When combined with intelligent load management, this approach becomes even more powerful. Advanced software can dynamically allocate available power across multiple charging points, adjusting in real time based on demand, dwell time, and system capacity. Rather than delivering high power to a small number of vehicles, the system prioritizes providing consistent, lower-power charging to a larger number of users.

This reflects a more practical understanding of driver’s behavior in long-dwell environments. A traveler leaving a vehicle at an airport for several days doesn’t need rapid charging. A commuter parking for a full workday has hours to recharge. A patient or visitor at a healthcare facility may be parked for an extended period. In each of these scenarios, access to charging is more important than speed. The ability to plug in and receive a reliable charge over time meets the need without requiring high-powered infrastructure.

For Canadian owners and operators, this model offers several important advantages. First, it reduces the need for major construction. By utilizing existing electrical infrastructure, facilities can avoid trenching, panel upgrades, and other disruptive work. This is particularly valuable in regions where weather limits construction windows or where facilities must remain fully operational year-round.

Second, it allows for more flexible and scalable deployment. Operators can begin with a smaller number of charging points and expand incrementally as demand grows. This reduces upfront capital investment and aligns spending more closely with actual usage patterns. It also enables operators to adapt as technology evolves, rather than committing to a fixed infrastructure plan that may become outdated.

Third, it minimizes reliance on utility upgrades. In many parts of Canada, securing additional electrical capacity can be a lengthy and uncertain process. By working within existing capacity, operators can move more quickly and maintain greater control over project timelines.

Fourth, it supports a more equitable distribution of charging access. Rather than limiting charging to a handful of premium spaces, a distributed approach allows more users to benefit from the infrastructure. This can improve customer satisfaction, support sustainability goals, and enhance the overall value of the parking asset.

Integration is Key

Of course, deploying EV charging at scale is not just a technical challenge. It’s also an operational one. As charging becomes an integral part of the parking experience, it must be managed alongside other core functions such as payment, permitting, and enforcement. Canadian operators are increasingly adopting integrated platforms that bring these elements together, allowing for a more seamless and efficient operation.

Integration enables a range of benefits. Payment systems can be unified, allowing users to pay for parking and charging in a single transaction. Data can be centralized, providing operators with insights into usage patterns, revenue, and system performance. Enforcement can be streamlined, ensuring that charging spaces are used appropriately. And customer experience can be enhanced, with clearer communication and more consistent service delivery.

This integration is particularly important in complex environments like airports, campuses, and healthcare networks, where multiple user groups and parking programs must be managed simultaneously. By incorporating EV charging into the broader parking ecosystem, operators can avoid creating silos and ensure that charging supports, rather than complicates, overall operations.

The conversation around EV charging in Canada is evolving. The question is no longer simply how to add more chargers, but how to do so in a way that is economically sustainable, operationally practical, and aligned with how parking facilities are actually used. >

For many operators, the answer lies in rethinking the problem. Instead of viewing EV charging as a capital-intensive expansion project, it can be approached as an opportunity to unlock additional value from existing infrastructure. By leveraging unused electrical capacity, adopting distributed deployment models, and prioritizing access over peak speed, parking organizations can begin to scale charging in a way that meets current needs while preparing for future demand.

As EV adoption continues to grow and expectations shift, Canadian parking owners and operators are well positioned to lead this transition. With a focus on practicality, efficiency, and integration, they can deliver charging solutions that not only support electrification but also enhance the performance and resilience of their parking assets.

In a landscape defined by change, this approach offers a clear and adaptable path forward that reflects both the realities of the Canadian market and the opportunities that lie ahead.

About the author: Chris McKenty is Senior Vice President of Zevtron, an innovative EV charging company that has introduced numerous EV charging breakthroughs, including pedestal-based charging permitting parking owners and operators to power EV charging from lighting fixtures. He can be reached at cmckenty@zevtron.com.