Commercial EV charging points across Hampshire

The business parks along the M27 and around Whiteley, Segensworth, Chineham and Farnborough are modern, planned estates with generous surface parking and supplies sized for commercial occupiers. They are close to the easiest workplace charging sites there are.

The thing to get right on these estates is the phasing. A unit with a hundred spaces rarely wants a hundred charge points on day one, but it will want more than six within a few years. Putting the containment and the cable capacity in while the ground is open is the single biggest saving available on these sites.

SSEN operates the distribution network across Hampshire through Southern Electric Power Distribution, so there is no boundary question here. That gives a single consistent process for any connection work.

More often than not, though, the connection is not needed. Purpose-built estates tend to have supplies with real headroom, and with load management sharing what is spare, the number of bays a site can take is usually decided by the car park layout rather than by the electricity.

Southampton and Portsmouth bring port and logistics traffic that behaves differently from ordinary commercial fleets, with movements around the clock and vehicles that cannot wait. Along the M3 towards Basingstoke there is a more conventional distribution economy.

On both, depot charging is a scheduling problem first. The energy the fleet needs overnight and the window it has to go in decide the specification, and rapid charging is added only for the vehicles that genuinely cannot wait.

Hampshire has had a lot of recent residential development, much of it flats and managed schemes with shared parking. Those car parks are where most of the county's landlord charging demand sits, and the answer is the same as everywhere: a shared feed to metered units, residents billed for their own use, and the grant paperwork handled.

Hampshire's housing is varied, from Victorian terraces in Southampton and Portsmouth through large interwar and post-war suburbs to substantial new estates around Basingstoke, Andover and Whiteley. The newer housing is the most straightforward, with off-street parking and a consumer unit in a sensible place. The tighter Victorian terraces in the city centres are the ones where off-street parking decides whether a home charger is possible at all.

The first is a modern business park unit on the M27 or M3 corridor with generous parking and a supply that has genuine headroom. These are the sites where ambition is achievable, and the interesting question is phasing rather than feasibility.

The second is a multi-tenant building where several occupiers share one supply and the metering has to be separated cleanly from the outset.

The third is a port-adjacent or logistics operation running around the clock, where charging windows are irregular and scheduling matters far more than headline charging speed.