Commercial EV charging points across Surrey

Brooklands at Weybridge, the Surrey Research Park at Guildford, the business parks around Leatherhead and Chessington, and the office stock in Woking and Redhill make up most of the county's larger workplace charging demand. These are surface car parks with long dwell times, which is the easiest charging problem there is: vehicles sit for seven or eight hours and need nothing faster than 7kW to leave full.

Behind those, Surrey has a lot of light industrial and trade counter units, often on estates with shared yards and a single incoming supply feeding several tenants. Those sites need the metering sorted out before anything is installed, because otherwise one tenant ends up paying for another's charging.

Surrey sits on a network boundary. SSEN operates across much of the county and UK Power Networks covers the eastern side, so which operator you deal with depends on your postcode rather than on the county. We confirm it from the address before any application goes in.

In practice the more useful question is not who the operator is but how much spare capacity your existing supply has. On most Surrey commercial sites there is more than the owner expects once load management is in play, and the connection application is avoided entirely.

The A3 and the M25 shape almost all of Surrey's logistics activity, and the depots that serve it sit close to those roads rather than in the towns. Depot charging here is a duty cycle problem: vehicles come back in the evening and leave early, so the whole fleet has to be charged inside that window without exceeding the site supply.

That is a scheduling job as much as an electrical one. Charging is spread across the night and prioritised so the vehicles going out first are ready first.

A large share of Surrey's newer housing is flats and managed developments with a shared car park, and those are the sites where charging is hardest to retrofit and most often asked for. The answer is usually a shared feed to a handful of metered units rather than a unit per space, with residents billed for what they use so the cost does not land on the service charge.

Surrey's housing runs from Victorian and Edwardian stock in the older towns through a great deal of interwar and post-war suburban housing to modern estates. The interwar and post-war houses are the easiest, because the driveway is usually on the same side as the meter. Period properties in the conservation areas around Guildford, Farnham and Dorking need more thought about where the unit goes and how the cable is finished.

The first is an office or business park unit with forty to a hundred spaces and a supply sized for the building rather than the car park. The answer is almost always load management and a phased rollout rather than an upgrade, because the vehicles sit all day and do not need speed.

The second is a managed residential development with a shared car park and a management company that needs the electricity billed to residents rather than absorbed into the service charge. That is a metering and access problem more than an electrical one.

The third is a light industrial or trade unit on a shared estate, where the supply is shared with neighbouring tenants. Those need the metering settled before anything is installed, or one tenant quietly pays for another's charging.