Commercial EV charging points across West Sussex

The concentration of business around Crawley and Gatwick means large surface car parks, shift patterns that run around the clock, and a lot of van and light commercial traffic. Shift working is the thing that changes the design. A car park that empties and refills three times a day cannot be treated like an office car park where everything sits from nine until five.

Where shifts overlap, the bays need to turn over, which usually means a mix: enough slower bays for the vehicles that stay, and a small number of faster ones for those that do not.

Chichester, Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, Shoreham and Worthing have smaller commercial estates, more independent occupiers and a strong seasonal element. Charging at a site with summer peaks and quiet winters is sized differently from one with steady year-round demand, because the case for rapid charging rests on how often the extra capacity is actually used.

In most of these towns the honest answer is more slower bays rather than fewer fast ones, and a phased rollout that adds capacity when demand proves itself.

Like Surrey, West Sussex sits across a network boundary. SSEN operates in much of the county and UK Power Networks covers the eastern side, so the operator depends on the site postcode. We confirm it from the address rather than assuming.

On the larger northern sites the more likely constraint is the site's own agreed capacity rather than the network. Where a site is already close to its limit, load management and scheduling do more for the number of bays than an upgrade would.

The M23 and A23 carry most of the county's freight, and the depots that serve the Gatwick economy sit along them. Depot charging here is shaped by the airport's own rhythms, which means vehicle movements that do not follow an ordinary working day.

That suits scheduling rather than raw power. Charging is spread across whatever window each vehicle actually has, and prioritised by departure time rather than by arrival.

The housing runs from the Victorian and Edwardian terraces of the coastal towns through interwar suburbs to the large modern estates around Crawley and Burgess Hill. The newer estates are straightforward. The coastal terraces are the hardest, because on-street parking and shared frontages mean there is often no compliant way to run a cable to a car, and we will say so rather than fitting something that will cause a problem later.

The first is a large employer in the Crawley and Gatwick corridor running shifts, where the car park turns over more than once a day. Bays have to be shared rather than assigned, which changes both the number needed and the access control.

The second is a distribution or service operation working to airport rather than office hours, where charging has to fit around vehicle movements that do not follow a normal day. That is a scheduling job.

The third is a coastal town site with seasonal demand, where the honest recommendation is usually more slower bays and a phased approach rather than rapid charging that sits idle for eight months of the year.