What are the benefits of electric car charging points for business?
here are many benefits of electric car charging points, the main ones are listed below.
Provide valued facilities to staff and visitors that own an EV in addition to providing onsite electric car charging for company-owned EV’s such as delivery vans and pool cars.
Convenience
It’s a large convenience for your staff and visitors to charge their EV’s whilst at the workplace. This can be displayed as a perk of working at the organisation, coinciding with your sustainability goals.
Enhance your CSR
Having commercial EV charging stations and encouraging EV ownership/usage will have a positive impact on your Corporate Social Responsibility. The amount of energy used for charging electric vehicles can also be regularly presented as a tangible benefit in terms of carbon reduction.
Educational schemes
Internal schemes (incentivised or non-incentivised) can educate your workforce about EV’s and increase ownership.
Sell electricity to staff and visitors
There’s the option to charge staff and visitors a competitive price for EV charging (compared to plugging in at home). This can be done via coins, tokens, smartphone apps or bank cards on a ‘Pay as You Go’ basis.
Why install commercial EV charging stations?
Air pollution in the UK is currently at an alarming level. This is largely due to the huge volume of petrol and diesel vehicles on the road today.
Thankfully, ownership of electric vehicles – both private and commercial – is increasing year on year. However, many businesses are failing to provide valued electric car charger stations for these owners.
If your business doesn’t already own electric vehicles, or doesn’t have any staff/customers/visitors that need such facilities, it’s inevitable that this scenario will soon change given the growing rate of EV ownership and external pressures for greener business and transport.
For example, many forward-thinking businesses are now operating a fleet of electric vans for deliveries to reduce their impact on the environment, creating the need for commercial EV charging stations onsite.
What is the cost of electric charging points for business?
The cost of charging and running electric cars is low compared to running a diesel or petrol car. A typical EV (charged from flat to full) could cost from as little as £4 to £10, depending on the type of EV and your energy tariff. This cost could fall further if electric car charging stations utilise green energy from a solar PV installation onsite.
As part of a wider energy solution, electric car charging points for business can be integrated with solar carports, utilising the carport’s rooftop solar panels to contribute to the charge of the electric vehicle during daylight hours. Green vehicles charged with green energy.
How to use electric car charging stations at night?
Businesses may choose to install commercial EV charging stations because they already have a solar PV system or solar carport onsite, and they see the benefits of the two working together. If battery storage is also utilised onsite, then company EVs can be charged overnight from the energy that is stored in the battery.
This stored energy may have come from unused electricity generated by rooftop solar PV during the day, in addition to electricity purchased from the grid when the unit rate is cheap.