California Mandates DC Fast Charging Interoperability by 2027

The utility cost-recovery mechanism for retrofit expenses is the detail that makes this workable. Utilities that manage charging infrastructure can include qualifying retrofit costs in their rate cases, which spreads the cost across ratepayers rather than requiring upfront capital from station operators. Without that provision, some operators would just let funding eligibility lapse rather than retrofit.

I'm in Oregon, not California, but every multifamily EV conversation I have eventually references whatever CPUC just did, because the rest of the West Coast tends to follow a year or two behind. The utility cost-recovery mechanism KilowattKarl flagged is the part I'd actually want copied here before anything else in this rule. We're three bids deep into adding L2 for a 12-unit building and every single quote has the same problem: whoever installs it eats the full capital cost up front with no clear path to recover it through anything but raising rent, which nobody wants to be the landlord doing for an "EV amenity fee." A rate-case mechanism that spreads retrofit cost across ratepayers instead of dumping it on whoever happens to own the building is the kind of policy detail that actually changes whether multi-unit charging gets built, not just whether it gets mandated.