EV charging for a van fleet at a depot

A van parked from six in the evening until seven the next morning has thirteen hours available. Filling it does not require a fast charger. It requires a bay it can sit on.

This inverts the instinct. Depots that buy fast chargers usually buy too few of them, and end up shuffling vehicles between bays at the end of a shift.

• Every vehicle gets its own bay and nobody moves anything
• The total site draw is far lower, so the existing supply often suffices
• Charging spreads into the cheapest hours of the tariff
• Fast charging is kept for the vehicles that genuinely turn round mid-shift

Getting cable across a working yard is the expensive, disruptive part. Trenching, ducting, reinstatement and protection from manoeuvring vehicles add up quickly.

So it gets sized once, for the fleet you expect to have, with bays added in phases as vehicles convert. Doing the groundworks twice is the mistake to avoid.

Depot charging usually needs to be attributable: which vehicle, which driver, how much. RFID or app access handles that and produces reporting you can put against a cost centre.

Drivers charging at home on company business raises a separate reimbursement question, which the same platforms increasingly handle.

Load management usually removes the need for an upgrade. Where it genuinely does not, the network operator application is part of the job and the timescale needs to be known before anyone plans around it.