Commercial EV charging for businesses and fleets

Commercial charging is an electrical infrastructure project first and a chargepoint purchase second. The hardware is the easy part. What determines your cost, your programme and whether the scheme actually works on day one is the supply at your building, the distance from the board to the parking bays, and how honestly the design accounts for how your vehicles are used.

We start every project with a survey of your incoming supply. That means reading the main fuse rating, checking spare ways on the distribution board, and taking a view on your existing maximum demand. A typical three-phase 100A supply has room for a surprising number of 7kW sockets once load management is in place, and almost none if every unit is allowed to draw full power at the same time. Getting that judgement right is what keeps a scheme out of a DNO application.

Dwell time drives charger power more than vehicle size does. A car park where staff arrive at eight and leave at five has nine hours of dwell, so 7kW AC adds around 200 miles across a working day and there is rarely a case for anything faster. A logistics depot where vans return at six in the evening and leave at five in the morning is similar. Trouble starts where dwell is short: shift-change fleets, coach layovers and eHGV turnarounds need DC, and DC is where the cost curve steepens.

We also plan for the sockets you do not need yet. Trenching a duct once and pulling additional cores while the ground is open costs a fraction of returning in two years. Most of our workplace schemes install half the sockets and cable for all of them, which is the cheapest form of future-proofing available.

The Workplace Charging Scheme remains the largest lever for offices and business parks, covering up to 75% of purchase and installation costs to a cap of £500 per socket, for up to 40 sockets, and closing on 31 March 2027. OZEV has said 2026/27 is the final year of the scheme. Depot operators should be looking at the Depot Charging Scheme instead, which works on a much larger percentage of eligible capital cost. The two are scoped differently and cannot be stacked on the same sockets, so the choice needs making before you order hardware.

If any of your sockets will be used by the public, the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 apply: contactless payment on units of 8kW and above, a 99% reliability standard across your rapid network, transparent pricing in pence per kWh, and a 24/7 free helpline. We specify to that standard by default because retrofitting compliance is considerably more expensive than building it in.

Checked September 2026

Back-office software is the part businesses under-specify most often. Access control, per-driver billing, HMRC-friendly reimbursement reporting and fault alerting all live there. If you run vans that go home with drivers, that reporting is what makes the Advisory Electricity Rate work cleanly at year end.