LAZ Parking’s 50,000-Charger Bet: The Parking Garage Is Becoming an Energy Asset
LAZ Parking is making a very specific wager about where EV charging will win: not on the side of the highway, but where cars already sit for hours — garages, lots, hotels, airports and municipal decks.
In mid-December, LAZ said it made a strategic investment in Epic Charging, a software provider, to accelerate a rollout of 50,000 Level 2 charging stations across LAZ’s portfolio in the U.S. and Canada. That investment builds on a strategic partnership the companies announced earlier, with a goal of electrifying 50,000 parking spaces over the next five years.
For commercial real estate owners and managers, the significance isn’t the number alone. It’s what the deal implies: parking operators — and the properties they manage — are starting to behave like energy operators.
Why this matters to property owners
A lot of charging “demand” in real estate isn’t really about fast charging. It’s about dwell time: residents charging overnight, employees charging during a shift, travelers topping up while they park. That’s the natural terrain for Level 2, which is why federal planners continue to project that the big buildout is not DC fast charging — it’s private and “destination” charging. The Department of Energy, citing NREL, estimates the U.S. will need 28 million charging ports by 2030, and that a meaningful share of Level 2 ports will be at multifamily, workplaces, stores, restaurants and hotels.
LAZ is essentially trying to industrialize that rollout across a massive footprint — and normalize EV charging as a standard parking feature, like gate arms or payment kiosks. In its February announcement, LAZ framed the plan as a national deployment across hotels, commercial and mixed-use sites, surface lots, airports and municipal parking.
The “parking-as-energy-platform” play
Real estate teams usually approach EV charging as an amenity decision: “How many ports do we need, and where do we put them?” LAZ is pushing the market toward a different framing: “How do we monetize the parking field as managed electrical infrastructure?”
Two details in the announcements point to that shift:
Software is the backbone. LAZ and Epic emphasize an open-protocol charge point management system that integrates with LAZ’s parking tech stack — monitoring, payments, analytics and predictive maintenance — with the explicit goal of improving returns from both parking and charging.
Energy orchestration is becoming a product. Epic says it will use LAZ’s investment to accelerate its “Charge OptimAIzer,” which it describes as an AI-powered platform that uses real-time data (including utility pricing signals) to balance loads and reduce costs.
Translated into owner language: the next phase of EV charging isn’t just “install chargers.” It’s manage load, manage pricing, manage uptime, and manage customer experience — at portfolio scale.
Why Level 2 is the practical center of gravity
DC fast charging grabs headlines because it’s visible and dramatic. But most properties don’t need 350-kW dispensers to meet tenant expectations — and many can’t economically justify the make-ready and demand-charge exposure anyway.
Level 2’s value proposition is boring, which is exactly why it scales: it matches the way buildings work. The DOE’s workplace charging handbook notes Level 2 is common for workplace and public facilities and typically requires dedicated circuits sized to the equipment, often around a 40-amp circuit for many installations.
That’s also where load management matters. A garage can add dozens of ports without multiplying electrical service in lockstep — but only if the software and electrical design are built for sharing, throttling and scheduling rather than “everything on, all at once.”
Autel’s role signals the “standardization era”
In June, LAZ said Autel Energy was named a preferred hardware provider for the program, with LAZ, Epic and Autel positioning the combined stack as scalable across use cases from commercial garages to mixed-use.
The most important quote for owners in that release wasn’t about chargers — it was about control. LAZ said the partnership gives clients “flexibility on pricing” and allows EV charging to integrate alongside parking operations.
That’s the direction of travel: owners want EV charging to behave like a managed building system, not a stranded third-party kiosk with limited knobs.
What to ask before you sign an EV charging deal
If you’re a building owner, manager or investor evaluating a garage charging plan, LAZ’s strategy highlights a simple reality: the hard part isn’t buying chargers — it’s designing the operating model. Start with questions like these:
Who controls pricing — and can it change by time of day? (Critical for demand-charge and peak pricing environments.)
Who owns the customer relationship and data? (App, receipts, fleet accounts, tenant billing, marketing rights.)
What uptime standard is contractually required, and who pays when equipment fails? (O&M responsibilities, SLAs, warranties.)
How is load managed — and what happens when the garage expands from 10 ports to 100? (Panel capacity, feeder capacity, software throttling, future conduit.)
Can the system participate in utility programs or demand response without breaking tenant expectations? Epic has highlighted a Chicago multifamily deployment that tied EV charging management to a utility load reduction program while still meeting resident needs.
None of this requires you to become an electrical engineer. But it does require you to treat charging as a business line and a building system — with governance, controls and measurable performance.
The bigger takeaway for CRE
LAZ’s 50,000-port push is a strong signal that the market is moving from “pilot projects” to “repeatable rollouts.” If you own or operate parking-heavy assets — office, multifamily, hospitality, retail, airports, municipal — you should assume EV charging is headed toward the same place as Wi-Fi: first a differentiator, then an expectation, then part of baseline operations.
The winners won’t necessarily be the owners with the most ports. They’ll be the ones who build flexible infrastructure (conduit, panels, networked controls) and scale installs as utilization proves out — while keeping their options open on pricing, data and future grid programs.
