The EV capacity trap: Why ‘number of plugs’ is failing fleet managers
Chris Chevalier-Moniz, CEO of Volta Charge Points, looks at why businesses need to look beyond plug count when specifying EV charging infrastructure.
The EV capacity trap: Why ‘number of plugs’ is failing fleet managers
Chris Chevalier-Moniz, CEO of Volta Charge Points, looks at why businesses need to look beyond plug count when specifying EV charging infrastructure.
Three months on from the Department for Transport’s EV charger metric shift, commercial buyers need to be aware that EV charging projects should start with a usage audit, not a plug count.
For fleet managers, commercial landlords, hotels, retail parks and workplaces, better specification means mapping who will charge, how long vehicles stay, when demand peaks and whether the site has enough power to support the planned infrastructure.
Confusion between charging devices, EV chargers and connectors continues to cause operational bottlenecks for site operators. Several plugs onsite does not always mean several vehicles can charge at once, which means a site can look well-equipped on paper while still creating queues, fleet delays and customer complaints in practice.
But businesses can avoid poor specification decisions by planning around usable charging capacity, charging windows, load management, site access and future demand.
Build a usage audit into procurement
Businesses must stop choosing hardware based on an arbitrary target of plug numbers. Instead, procurement teams should mandate a rigorous usage audit before comparing quotes. You need to map who will be charging, exact arrival windows, and how many miles need replacing.
A depot where 20 3.5-tonne vans return in the evening has a completely different operational profile from an office car park where vehicles sit for eight hours, so it’s important to specify for real-world usage patterns, not an idealised spreadsheet.
Plan around charging windows
Fleet operators need to think in operational charging windows, not visible connectors. The critical metric is whether your infrastructure can deliver the required kilowatt-hours (kWh) within a vehicle’s natural dwell time.
If your company cars or delivery vans have a tight three-hour turnaround between shifts, the specification must guarantee dedicated, unshared power to those bays, rather than relying on standard plugs that split capacity and leave vehicles half-charged.
Several plugs onsite does not always mean several vehicles can charge at once. A site can look well-equipped on paper while still creating queues, fleet delays and customer complaints in practice
Chris Chevalier-Moniz, CEO, Volta Charge Points
Check site power before agreeing to charger numbers
Available site power is the ultimate constraint, yet it’s often overlooked until the chargers are already bolted down. Before agreeing to charger numbers, businesses must conduct a grid capacity assessment.
If your peak charging demand exceeds your unallocated supply, you risk overloading the site’s power supply or facing very high costs to upgrade the grid connection.
Your specification should explicitly include dynamic load management from day one to intelligently balance power across active bays without compromising fleet schedules.
Segment your user groups to protect ROI
A major specification error is treating every EV driver the same. Staff, fleet drivers, tenants and visitors have entirely different behaviours and priorities. Installing identical chargers across a whole site leads to underused equipment in one zone and gridlocked queues in another.
Landlords and managers must separate these user groups during the planning stage, allocating rapid or ultra-rapid options for quick turnaround fleet vehicles and cost effective standard charging for long-stay visitors.
Factor in access, uptime and bay management
An EV charger is only an asset when it is operational and accessible, so specification should go beyond the hardware and reflect how the site will work day to day.
This means building robust Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for uptime, proactive maintenance schedules and clear bay management strategies into your initial plan.
If a bay is blocked by an internal combustion vehicle or a charger goes offline without an automated alert, your real-world capacity plummets.
Engineer for future expansion from day one
Specifying infrastructure solely around today’s fleet size or current customer demand can lead to early and expensive retrofitting costs, so future scalability should be built into the specification from the start.
This means laying extra ducting, upgrading passive wiring infrastructure and choosing modular charging units during the initial civil works, allowing businesses to scale up the number of active plugs as EV adoption grows while protecting their initial capital expenditure.
