EV Charging for Fleets
Fleet charging is the one commercial case where the electricity bill is a line item somebody watches. A depot running twenty electric vans overnight is buying a serious amount of energy, and the difference between charging it on a smart tariff at the right hours and charging it whenever vehicles happen to plug in is measured in thousands of pounds a year. The hardware matters less than the control over it.
We supply depot and fleet charging from £469 per charger, all eligible for the Workplace Charging Scheme at up to £350 per socket, with free UK delivery and trade pricing on volume orders.
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Depot charging: the shape of the problem
Vehicles return between 4pm and 7pm, sit until 6am, and must all be full by then. That looks like generous dwell time, and it is — but only if the supply can carry every vehicle at once. It usually cannot, and it does not need to. Charging twenty vans at 7kW simultaneously is 140kW; sequencing them across a twelve-hour window at a controlled rate might need a third of that. This is what makes load management the most important purchase on a fleet site — more important than the chargers themselves, because it determines how many vehicles you can serve on the supply you already have.
Do fleets need 22kW?
Usually not for overnight depot charging — 7kW over twelve hours is more energy than most vans use in a shift, and it is gentler on both the supply and the battery. 22kW matters in two cases: multi-shift operations where vehicles turn round during the day, and mixed fleets where a smaller number of high-mileage vehicles need topping up between runs. A common pattern is a bank of 7kW sockets for the overnight fleet plus one or two 22kW or rapid DC bays for exceptions. Read our guide to three-phase power and 22kW charging.
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Access control and cost allocation
Every fleet needs to know which vehicle took which energy — for cost centre allocation, for reimbursing drivers who charge at home, and for reporting. RFID cards from £7 tie each session to a driver or vehicle. If you are recharging a third party for that energy, or billing between legal entities, you need MID-certified metering in the charger. For internal reporting alone, standard metering is sufficient and considerably cheaper — see our guide to MID metering and billing.
Back office and OCPP
Once you are past a handful of chargers, managing them individually stops working. OCPP is the open protocol that lets chargers report into a single back office regardless of brand — session records, faults, remote start and stop, and scheduling across the whole depot. Every commercial charger we stock supports OCPP 1.6 or later, which matters because it keeps you free to change back office provider, and to add chargers from a different manufacturer later without splitting your management across two systems. If you run more than one site, insist on it — see our guide to choosing an OCPP back office.
Wall-mounted or pedestal?
Depot parking is usually open yard with no wall where the vans sit, which is why pedestals are common on fleet sites. The Evec EDP01 7.4kW dual socket pedestal is £1,300, the single socket ESP01 £1,120, and the 22kW versions £1,615 and £1,465. The alternative is a wall-mounted charger on a mounting post from £240, with back-to-back posts at £355 serving two bays from one upright. Specify crash barriers from £155 — a reversing van is not a hypothetical in a depot.
What it costs
Hardware starts at £469 for a single socket 22kW unit and £688 for the Easee 22kW. On a depot, dual socket units are almost always the right answer — the VCHRGD TwentyTwo at £1,550, Rolec BasicCharge duals at £1,825 and £2,125, or the Evec EDP01 pedestal at £1,300 — because you pay once for the groundworks and cable run per pair of bays. The Workplace Charging Scheme returns up to £350 per socket, and up to £700 on a dual unit. See our breakdown of what a workplace installation costs.
Smart tariffs and charging cost
The largest saving available to a fleet is not the grant — it is charging in the right hours. Scheduling the depot to draw overnight on a time-of-use tariff, rather than whenever vehicles plug in, can cut the energy cost per mile substantially over a year. Every smart charger supports scheduling; the back office is what lets you apply it across the whole site at once rather than unit by unit. If the site has solar, charger-level solar integration lets surplus generation go into the vehicles during the day rather than being exported.
Talk to us about your depot
Tell us how many vehicles, their return and departure times, the daily mileage and whether the site is single or three phase, and we will size the installation and price it. We supply fleet operators, facilities teams and their installers across the UK with free delivery and trade pricing on volume orders.