EV charging on a leased depot: who owns what?

Chargers unbolt. Conduit does not. The expensive half of a depot project is the part that stays in the ground: the trench, the conduit, the pull boxes, the pads and the distribution gear. That work has a service life measured against the building, not against your tenancy, and it is worthless to you the day you hand the keys back. Meanwhile the part you could theoretically take with you — the charging units themselves — is the cheaper half, and moving used chargers to a new yard means new mounting, new conduit and new commissioning anyway. So the honest way to look at a leased depot is that most of your spend is an improvement to somebody else's property. That is not a reason to abandon the project. It is a reason to price it against the remaining term and to write down who ends up with the asset.

Equipment permanently attached to real property can become a fixture, which is to say part of the building, which is to say the landlord's — regardless of who wrote the cheque. Commercial leases usually carve out trade fixtures, meaning equipment the tenant installs to carry on its business, and a depot charger is a reasonable candidate for that carve-out. Reasonable is not the same as agreed. Fixture and surrender law is state law, the tests are fact-specific, and the lease language overrides the default in most of the ways that matter. Get a schedule attached to the lease that names the charging equipment, says it remains the tenant's personal property, and says the tenant may remove it at expiry. Then get your own counsel to read it, because this paragraph is a description of a problem, not legal advice.

Whose name is on the meter decides who is the utility's customer, and the utility's customer is the one who can apply to programs, sign a rate schedule, receive the demand charges and negotiate a service upgrade. If the yard sits behind a landlord's house meter and the landlord sub-bills you, then you are not the utility's customer and several doors are shut: many utility make-ready and fleet programs contract with the account holder, and a rate schedule that would suit an overnight charging profile is not yours to elect. A separate service and a separate meter for the charging load is usually worth the extra service cost on a depot of any size, and it also makes the energy cost of the fleet legible instead of buried in rent. If a separate service is not practical, put in writing how the sub-billing works, what rate it uses and who absorbs a demand charge set by charging.

Most commercial leases contain a surrender clause requiring the tenant to return the premises in its original condition, ordinary wear excepted, and to remove alterations if the landlord asks. Applied literally to a charging install, that can mean pulling pedestals, cutting out pads, abandoning or extracting conduit and repaving. It is a real number and it arrives at the worst moment, when you are already paying for the new yard. Three fixes, in order of preference: get the landlord to waive removal for the charging infrastructure and accept it in place, get the removal obligation limited to above-grade equipment only so the trench and conduit stay, or price the restoration now and reserve for it. What you must not do is leave the clause silent and hope.

A TI allowance is landlord money spent on the landlord's building, usually recovered through rent over the term, and it typically funds improvements the landlord is content to own. That makes it a natural fit for exactly the part of a charging project you would rather not fund — the make-ready, the trench, the conduit, the pads, the service work — and a poor fit for the chargers themselves, which you may want to own, remove and depreciate. The practical structure that works is: allowance funds the infrastructure, tenant funds the equipment, and the schedule of trade fixtures covers the equipment. Ask early, because an allowance is far easier to negotiate at renewal or at signing than it is mid-term. Which party gets to depreciate what is a real question with a real answer, and it is one for your tax preparer, not for a web page.

There is no single right answer here; there is a right answer for your remaining term, your capital position and how likely you are to renew. What follows is the shape of the four arrangements you will actually be offered.

Depot Level 2 runs roughly $3,500 to $15,000 per port installed nationally, with the spread driven mostly by trench length and how much spare service capacity the yard already has. On a leased site the useful way to read that number is per remaining lease year, because that is the window you get to amortise it over. A sixteen-port build at the middle of the range on a four-year remaining term is a very different decision from the same build on a fifteen-year term with two five-year options.

On an owned yard the standard advice is to build the make-ready once for the full eventual port count and populate the ports over time, because reopening a yard costs more than the conduit you deferred, and the documented saving from doing it once runs 40 to 60 percent per port against retrofitting. On a short remaining term that advice inverts: oversized conduit you never populate is a gift to your landlord. The way to keep both is to make the oversizing somebody else's investment. Ask the landlord to fund the full-build make-ready as an improvement to the property — it genuinely is one, and it makes the yard more lettable — while you fund only the equipment you will use. If the landlord declines, build the make-ready for the ports you will actually energise before expiry and accept that a renewal means a second trench.

There is no federal tax credit to fold into this decision. The Section 30C credit terminated for property placed in service after June 30, 2026 under Public Law 119-21, and its business provision went with it, so a proposal that shows a federal credit line is wrong and needs correcting before you sign. What remains is the utility layer, and that layer is exactly where the account-holder question bites: utility make-ready and fleet programs generally contract with the customer of record, and several require the applicant to have site control. A tenant on a short term with no separate meter is the hardest version of that applicant to be. If a utility program is material to the business case, resolve the account and the site-control letter before you apply, not after.

Six items, and they fit on one page. One: a schedule naming the charging equipment as the tenant's trade fixtures with a right of removal. Two: landlord consent to the alteration, given once and covering the full eventual port count rather than the first phase. Three: a surrender clause that waives removal of below-grade infrastructure. Four: the utility arrangement — separate service and meter, or a named sub-billing method and rate. Five: a site-control letter the landlord agrees to sign for utility and incentive applications. Six: what happens on renewal, holdover and early termination, because the chargers outlive at least one of those events. Take this list to the landlord before you take a design to an installer. It is cheaper to lose the argument in the first week than in the fourth year.