Workplace EV charging: what it costs and what slows it down
The electrical work is rarely the constraint. Supply capacity and the Northern Powergrid application are what set the timeline.
Businesses budgeting for workplace charging usually budget for the chargers. The chargers are the cheapest part of a large scheme and often the least important decision.
What actually costs money
A single 7kW unit close to the distribution board is a straightforward job at £900 to £1,600. Costs climb with distance: cable routes across a car park mean excavation, ducting and reinstatement, and groundwork can easily exceed the hardware cost.
The step change comes when the site’s incoming supply cannot carry the load. A supply upgrade through the Distribution Network Operator can cost anywhere from £5,000 to £50,000 and take months, and it is entirely outside your installer’s control.
Load management usually beats an upgrade
Most sites do not need every bay charging at full output simultaneously. Dynamic load management shares the available capacity across the units and throttles them against the building’s actual demand. For a workplace where cars sit for eight hours, that is almost always sufficient, and it is far cheaper than reinforcing the supply.
An installer who proposes an upgrade before proposing load management is not necessarily wrong, but they should be able to explain why the cheaper option does not work for your site.
The application
Across most of West Yorkshire the network operator is Northern Powergrid. Anything above 3.68kW per phase requires notification; larger schemes require an application and approval before work begins. Installers who deal with them weekly get cleaner submissions and fewer rounds of questions, and that is worth more than a few hundred pounds of price difference.
Grants
Grant schemes for workplace and fleet charging change regularly, and eligibility usually requires an authorised installer. Check the current position at the time you buy rather than relying on figures in an article, including this one.
Running it
Decide early whether you are giving charging away, recovering cost, or selling it, because that decides whether you need a back-office platform and whether the units need to be network-capable. Retrofitting that decision is more expensive than making it.