At the NEMA Annual Meeting, David Bauders, CEO of Trade Hounds, sat down with Anna Cenciarelli, Product Manager Team Lead at Siemens, to talk about one of the biggest challenges facing the electrical industry today: bringing EV charging and solar infrastructure into multifamily housing.
As demand for electrification grows, contractors, developers, and property owners are rethinking how buildings are designed and powered. But integrating EV charging into multi-unit dwellings hasn’t been easy—often requiring complex wiring, added costs, and workarounds that don’t scale.
In this conversation, Anna breaks down how modular metering solutions like Siemens Power Mod™ and Inhab Power Mod™ are helping simplify that process—making it easier to plan for EV charging and solar from day one, while also creating new opportunities for contractors and developers.
I'm the product manager for Siemens Power Mod™, which is our modular metering product line. So our modular metering product line basically means it's a bunch of modular products. We have actually over 3,000 different modules in that portfolio, and they can come together from anywhere from two units to a few hundred units to serve a variety of different applications.
So anything from strip malls up to high-rise apartment complexes. We just recently launched our in-house Power Mod line. This integrates EV charging and solar and puts that kind of at the forefront, and really serves an under-family, underserved market in multifamily for EV charging.
The Inhab Power Mod™ is going to be best suited for garden-style apartments and better suited for new construction. As you're going through that development phase and you want to kind of plan in solar or EV charging up front, Inhab Power Mod™ allows every single tenant to have an EV charger or solar right at their meter.
So, if they're planning that development stage, the Inhab Power Mod™ will actually take the same space as the standard Power Mod™, but gives them that flexibility to let tenants choose if they want to add an EV charger and have that charge directly to their meter.
Siemens Power Mod™ can be installed up to 40% faster than our competitor products or similar products on the market. So, it saves money up front in that installation phase. We have a patented system called Quick System that brings the modules together super quick. When it comes to Inhab Power Mod™, there is a cost associated upfront when you're talking about trying to add solar infrastructure or EV charging infrastructure in multifamily.
But multifamily is an underserved market when it comes to EV charging and solar infrastructure. I recently saw some statistics that around 30% of the US population lives in multi-unit dwellings, but less than half of them have access to EV charging at home. We're really trying to target that market and make it more accessible.
So yes, there will be an upfront cost, but from a developer or property owner standpoint, that does give you the capability to market that you have EV charging and that your tenants can charge at home. It just gives them a little bit more flexibility. They can get home from work, plug in their car, and not have to worry about leaving home to get their car charged up.
More and more, I've been seeing buildings that are trying to integrate EV charging into multifamily, but today there's really not great technology out there to allow them to do it. So oftentimes you see these diagrams that have a safety switch for every single tenant. It gets really complicated really fast and very costly very fast because of the wiring.
So this Inhab Power Mod™, if they know that is a solution available out there, they can plan it from the beginning. Like I mentioned, there's going to be a little bit of cost upfront associated, but by knowing that our product is out on the market, you actually would save money comparable to the solutions that are available outside of Inhab Power Mod™.
We have this Inhab Power Mod™ under the Inhab umbrella, which is the Intelligent Habitat portfolio for Siemens. We place it there because our in-home portfolio really plays into smart home and energy monitoring and our energy control. But there's also the importance of infrastructure — making those investments upfront so that you don't have to come down and do the teardown later to be able to add infrastructure for EV charging.
We have it under that umbrella so that you can kind of lay the foundation with Inhab Power Mod™, and then you can come behind with the Energy Monitor at the load center in every tenant, and they can be able to monitor how much they're consuming. You could put Controllable Circuit Breakers in the load centers to be able to actually control the power consumption. So it all kind of fits together as puzzle pieces, but Inhab Power Mod™ is the infrastructure behind Inhab.
I think education—educating that this is a potential solution out there. Also overcoming that initial cost. There's always going to be costs, and I think that's why maybe EV charging infrastructure and solar infrastructure is not really included in multifamily at this moment. But educating all stakeholders—developers, property managers, the tenants—really educating them on the advantages of having EV charging or solar flexible options out there from the beginning.
As electrification continues to accelerate, multifamily housing is becoming one of the most important areas of focus for the electrical industry. But as Anna highlights, the challenge isn’t just demand—it’s making sure the right infrastructure is in place from the start.
Solutions like Siemens Power Mod™ show how planning ahead can simplify installation, reduce long-term costs, and make EV charging and solar more accessible across multifamily properties.
Want to learn more? Watch the full interview with Anna Cenciarelli.