Car parks & public networks: EV Charging for Business

Public paid car parks: a genuine charging network, not a staff perk

A standalone or council-run public car park is the one EV use case on this site where you are building a genuine public charging network — vehicles the operator has never met, drivers paying at the point of use, and the full weight of the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 landing on you. That single fact reshapes everything: the funding you can claim, the hardware you install, the grid connection you negotiate, and the compliance that bites.

First, forget the Workplace Charging Scheme. The £500-per-socket WCS is explicitly for staff and fleet parking behind a business — it does not touch bays sold to the public. Public car-park charging is instead funded commercially by the charge point operator (CPO) under a concession or revenue-share, and where a local authority is involved, through LEVI (Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure) funding, which is routed via councils specifically to expand on-street and public destination charging. That distinction decides your whole grant conversation before a cable is pulled — see grants and funding for how LEVI and CPO concession models are structured.

Second, the hardware skews heavily toward DC rapid. Destination dwell times in a paid public car park are short and turnover-driven, so 50kW DC rapid units (£25,000–£45,000 each) and 150kW+ ultra-rapid dominate the specification, with a smaller apron of 7–22kW AC bays for longer-stay parking. A realistic mid-size town-centre scheme might be 6–12 rapid bays plus 10–20 AC bays. Compare the technologies on charger types before you fix the ratio, because the DC-heavy mix is what drives the biggest cost line: the grid.

Third, the grid connection is substantial and usually the critical-path item. A dozen rapids can demand 500kW–1MW+, which frequently triggers a costly DNO reinforcement and always requires G99 approval before works for the three-phase high-load connection. Intelligent dynamic load management is essential here — it lets you stage the connection, cap aggregate draw, and often avoid or defer six-figure reinforcement costs while still serving peak demand.

Fourth, the compliance is the strictest of any use case. Because these are public, paid charge points, PCPR 2023 obliges you to deliver 99% rapid-network reliability, contactless payment, transparent pence-per-kWh pricing, 24/7 free helpline access and open data — all enforced by the OPSS. New non-residential car-park buildings with more than 10 spaces also fall under Building Regs Part S for cable routes and charge point provision. Get the metering, pricing display and reliability monitoring wrong and the regulator, not just the market, will notice.

Finally, the payback runs on utilisation and tariff spread rather than on capital grants: revenue is p/kWh margin over wholesale electricity across thousands of public charging sessions, so siting, uptime and pricing strategy matter more than the sticker cost of the units. Because a public network is a business in its own right, the full deep-dive on standalone and public car-park schemes lives on our sibling site, evchargersforcarparks.co.uk, which covers CPO concession models, LEVI bids and rapid-network economics in depth.

Whether you are a car-park operator weighing a CPO concession or a council shaping a LEVI-funded scheme, tell us the site, the space count and the target rapid ratio, and we will size the grid connection and hardware for you — start with a quote.