Abstract We consider mechanisms for the online allocation of perishable resources such as energy or computational power. The main application is electric vehicle charging where agents arrive and leave over time. Unlike previous work, we consider mechanisms without money, and a range of objectives including fairness and efficiency. In doing so, we extend the concept of envy-freeness to online settings. Furthermore, we explore the trade-offs between different objectives and analyse their theoretical properties both in online and offline settings. We then introduce novel online scheduling algorithms and compare them in terms of both their theoretical properties and empirical performance