The reality of workplace charging and ‘going electric’

Build it and they will come. That’s how one electric vehicle charging provider put it to me when we discussed workplace charging.

In his experience, once employees see one person charging their electric car at work more will follow. And so the need for more charging points arises.

It’s a scenario we’re familiar with at Fleet News. We started with two standard charging sockets in our office car park, then we added a rapid charger. Now fleet and facilities manager Debbie Floyde plans to put an entire row of pay-as-you-go rapid chargers in.

I say ‘plans to’ because, at the moment, there’s a delay.

Is it applying for the Government grant that’s holding things up? No, says Debbie, that was easy. She filled in a form on the Government website and the next day there was a voucher in her inbox.

And thanks to advice from her charging provider she was able to benefit from the new grant level of up to £500 per socket (announced in the Government’s Road to Strategy Zero in July, up from £300 per socket).

So the charging provider has been easy to work with then?

Yes, Debbie thinks they’ve been great. They offered the best price and, so far, the service to match.

Why the delay then?

Well, she’s been playing email ping-pong with the landlord, who, understandably, wants to know how much of a drain these charging points will be on the building’s power supply.

We’ve had the site survey but there are still some unanswered questions.

This is the reality businesses face when they ‘go electric’. Now don’t get me started on ‘charging in the wild’ (aka public charging). Or the difficulties fleets have experienced ordering some EV and hybrid models this year. Or the BIK rates...

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