EV Charging & Solar Car Ports
Workplace charge points for fleets, staff and visitors — and solar car ports that turn the car park itself into generation — designed, wired and certified by a contractor with 30+ years in commercial electrical work. We handle the part most charger brochures skip: whether your building's supply can actually take it.
NICEIC · RECC · MCS · 30+ years' electrical contracting · Based in County Durham
Quick answer
Workplace and home EV charging, in short:
Figures: gov.uk Workplace Charging Scheme, current as at July 2026.
Electrical work first
A charge point is a continuous high-demand circuit, not a gadget on a wall. Four things decide whether your site can take one — or twenty.
A single 7 kW charger draws roughly the sustained load of an electric shower — for hours, and nobody fits just one. We start with a load assessment of the incoming supply and distribution board, headroom measured against what the building already draws.
Where capacity is tight, chargers share the available power intelligently instead of tripping the main. New connections are notified to Northern Powergrid the proper way, and any supply upgrade is priced in the quote — not in a mid-project phone call.
The IET Wiring Regulations set specific rules for EV installations: dedicated circuits, RCD protection appropriate to each point, and protection against the earthing faults particular to charging cars outdoors.
Charge points sold for workplace use in Great Britain must have smart functionality — schedule, meter and manage charging — which is exactly how a fleet charges overnight on cheaper rates.
Home or workplace
The same Section 722 wiring standard at both scales — what changes is the supply question, the grant (home grants are now narrow, so most homeowners simply buy the installation outright) and the pairing.
| Home charge point | Workplace & commercial | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical setup | One 7 kW charge point | Several 7–22 kW bays for fleet, staff and visitors |
| The first question | Does the consumer unit have a spare way? | What will the incoming supply and board take? |
| Grant available | £350 per socket — flats and no-off-street-parking only | Workplace Charging Scheme — up to 75%, £500 per socket |
| Wired to | BS 7671 Section 722 | BS 7671 Section 722, plus load management |
| Often paired with | Home solar or a battery | Solar, battery storage or a solar car port |
A solar car port is a canopy over parking bays whose roof is made of solar panels — generation, weather cover and charging infrastructure on land you already own. For the right site it solves two problems at once: it powers the chargers underneath it with daytime generation, and it adds solar capacity where the building's own roof is full, shaded, structurally marginal or better left alone.
Planning is friendlier than most people expect. Since December 2023, solar canopies on non-domestic off-street car parks in England have been permitted development, subject to a prior-approval application to the council and sensible limits — no part over 4 metres high, not within 10 metres of a home's boundary, and not in the curtilage of a listed building or scheduled monument.
The honest caveat, which we give every client: a car port costs more per kilowatt of capacity than the same panels on a sound roof, because you are building the structure as well as the array. Where a good roof exists, the roof usually wins, and we will show you both sets of numbers before you choose. Where it does not — or where the car park is the sunniest asset the site has — a car port is a genuinely good answer, and pairing it with battery storage lets the daytime generation meet the evening charging peak instead of missing it.
Grant available
Eligible businesses, charities and public-sector organisations can currently claim the Workplace Charging Scheme — real money, on a closing window. The figures are the government's own:
Up to 75%
Of buy + install cost
inclusive of VAT
£500
Per socket cap
installs completed from 1 Apr 2026
40
Sockets per applicant
across all your sites
31 Mar 2027
Scheme closes
gov.uk's stated final year
Grant schemes drift, so here are the current terms, taken from gov.uk rather than from other installers' websites:
One more for the public sector: state-funded education institutions have their own, more generous version of the scheme — up to £2,000 per socket for new applications from April 2026.
Tell us about your site and we will give you a straight read on whether it qualifies and how the voucher process runs — and, as with everything on this site, the figures above are the government's, current as at July 2026; check gov.uk before you plan a budget around them, because grant terms change.
Enquiry to switch-on
The same four steps whether it is one home charger or a fleet depot — the survey does the deciding, not the brochure.
A load assessment of your incoming supply and distribution board, and a check on whether the network operator needs notifying — so you know what the building can take before anything is ordered.
Charger count and rating, cable routes and dynamic load management where capacity is tight — plus the grant route and any car-port option, if they fit your site.
Dedicated circuits wired to BS 7671 Section 722, with the RCD protection and outdoor earthing done properly, by the electrical contractor doing the work.
Testing, certification and the smart-charging setup — so the system is compliant, evidenced and ready for overnight fleet charging from day one.
New petrol and diesel car sales in the UK end in 2030, and by 2035 all new cars and vans must be zero emission — which means every company fleet is now on a replacement schedule that ends at a plug. The economics already point the same way: electricity through your own supply costs a fraction of what the same energy costs on the public rapid-charging network, so a business that charges its vehicles on site keeps the saving that a business paying forecourt rates gives away. Depot and workplace charging is how fleets actually make EVs cheap to run — the public network is for the gaps.
Usually more than the raw supply figure suggests, and the survey tells you exactly. The crude method divides your spare supply capacity by 7 kW per charger and runs out fast; the proper method uses dynamic load management, which shares the available headroom across all chargers in real time — vehicles charge slightly slower at peak building load and full speed the rest of the day. For most sites that means a useful bank of chargers on the existing supply, with a network upgrade reserved for genuinely constrained buildings rather than specified by default.
Match the charger to the dwell time, not the biggest number on the datasheet. A 7 kW point adds roughly 25–30 miles of range per hour — ample for staff cars parked all day and fleet vans parked overnight. A 22 kW point charges around three times faster but needs a three-phase supply, and — the detail brochures omit — many EVs can only accept 7–11 kW on AC anyway, so the extra capacity can go unused by the very cars plugged into it. We specify from how long vehicles actually sit, which is usually the cheaper answer too.
No. The Workplace Charging Scheme requires dedicated off-street parking associated with your premises and used by staff or fleet vehicles — gov.uk asks for evidence of exactly that, and customer-facing parking does not meet the test. If what you actually want is visitor or customer charging, that is still a job we can wire; it just is not one this grant pays toward, and we would rather tell you that before the application than after it bounces.
Yes — and daytime workplace charging is one of the best uses of commercial solar there is, because the cars are parked exactly when the roof generates. A charger fed by your own array turns surplus generation into driven miles instead of low-value export; add a battery and the evening charging peak can draw on the day’s surplus as well. If you are considering both, have them designed together — shared board capacity, one grid application, one contractor — rather than bolted on in sequence.
Tell us the building, roughly how many vehicles need to charge and how long they sit, and you will get an honest read: what the supply can take, what the grant covers, whether a car port earns its place — and what we would do in your position. And if the survey finds the real first job is the distribution board, we are the contractor for that too. Thirty years in, wiring buildings is still the day job. Call 07720 802405 or use the form.
Commercial solar, battery, EV or any electrical work — no pressure.
