The benefits of installing electric vehicle charging points on car parks

Electric vehicle (EV) charging is already well established on motorway service stations and increasingly on forecourts. However, car parks and other locations where cars are parked for a longer period (such as camping and caravanning sites) are perfect locations to install EV chargers.

To understand the market, we should first look at the different types of chargers and their different uses. Currently 70% of charging happens at home with 5% at a workplace, 15% on a forecourt and 10% at a destination. It is this ‘destination charging’ that we are interested in here. This could be a supermarket car park, public car park, on street parking or location such as a campsite. The key being the customer is parking here anyway so they can charge while they conduct some other activity.

Each of these different locations require different speeds of chargers from the ultra-fast chargers on forecourts so people can charge and go much like they do on a traditional forecourt, to home which can have the slowest charger as often people charge their vehicles overnight.

A destination charger will need to be somewhere in the middle that can offer a reasonable level of charge over a dwell time of anything from one hour to say four hours.

By offering electric vehicle charging you are offering an additional service so you could offset some of the costs against the additional revenue you could pull in.

The thing to remember with installing EV infrastructure is that every location is different so what works for one might not work for another. That’s why you need a specialist who has encountered and solved a variety of client challenges and can find a solution for you that is tailored to your specific requirements.

Most car parks will have lighting at a minimum. If you already have electricity to your site, the process is usually straightforward. The only ones which might struggle are rural car parks with no electricity currently to their site. However, this is not a deal breaker, it simply means the process is more involved such as liaising with the DNO.

The benefit of EV charging equipment is that it is very high tech and has the capability of remotely logging faults with the equipment operator so regular maintenance is not required. Once the equipment is installed you can by-and-large forget about it.

On rare occasions the installation work may disrupt your day-to-day operations. An example of this might be in a multi-storey car park where complicated containment work may be required to hide the infrastructure. This may need to be done out-of-hours to avoid disruption to your operation.

Adler and Allan can manage the process from developing the strategy, managing the civil and electrical work, supplying the hardware and installing the equipment. This one-stop-shop makes the process easier for you and saves time and money sourcing multiple suppliers.