EV Touring Has Doubled. Your Campsite Charging Hasn't.

So here is the thing about the great British camping trip. The kids, the dog, the awning that takes a small religious ceremony to put up, the inflatable bed that deflates by Tuesday, the bacon sandwich at six in the morning. Same as it ever was. Except the car on the pitch next door is now a Kia EV9 with three hundred miles range, and by Thursday it has twenty.

Look at the numbers. EV sales in the UK have pushed well past one in four new cars. Tow vehicles for touring caravans are a particularly fast converting segment because, you know, you are buying a forty grand car for two weeks in August and people are choosing the spec that matches the school run for the other fifty weeks. So your Saturday changeover this summer is going to look very different to your Saturday changeover three years ago. Same pitches. Same Wi-Fi complaints. Very different fuel problem.

The sixteen amp pedestal was never going to do this

Most UK touring pitches give you a sixteen amp electric hook up. That is roughly 3.6 kilowatts of usable power if the rest of the row is not pulling. An EV9 has a 99 kilowatt hour battery. The maths is not subtle. Plug a tired EV into a hook up on Sunday night and by Friday morning, if everything goes right and nobody else on the row puts the kettle on, you might get most of it back. Most. Right.

The real problem is the row, not the post. A typical caravan park electrical install was sized for a few kettles, some 12V lighting and a fan heater per pitch. Add ten EVs charging on top of that, all pulling at the same time, and the main supply trips like a fairground ride. The site operator gets blamed. The DNO gets a phone call. The DNO says the new connection upgrade is, oh, eighteen months. By which point three more EV families have booked in.

The campsite economic story has changed too

Here is what nobody mentions. EV charging is no longer just a "do we have to offer this" question. It is a commercial line on the P&L. Touring families plan their fortnight around it. Look at the booking forums, look at the Caravan and Motorhome Club threads, look at how Pitchup is filtering. Rapid charging on site is now a tick box that decides which park gets the booking and which gets the polite email back. So the choice for a site operator is not whether to charge, it is whether to be on the list of campsites that can or the list of ones that cannot.

There is a margin point that nobody seems to be doing the maths on either. A typical EV touring family will dump fifty to seventy kilowatt hours into the car at some point in the week. At a sensible operator margin that is worth a tidy amount per session, and you have, well, a couple of hundred pitches if you are a decent sized park. Run the numbers across a season and a containerised rapid is paying back like a holding tank.

How PowerMe drops in without the eighteen month wait

This is where the FreeMe sits naturally. A 150 kilowatt hour containerised unit with two CCS heads, parked at the entrance or beside the reception block, drops in on a level concrete pad in a couple of days. No DNO application. No trenching across the touring field. No "sorry, we are closed for ground works in May". It runs off its own LTO and LFP hybrid battery, tops up overnight on whatever supply the site already has and delivers the rapid charging when the family rolls in on changeover day.

For a busier park, an 8ft FreeMe will keep six to eight cars a day fed at proper rapid speed. Step up to the 10ft and you are at 350 kilowatt hours and a much busier day. Either way it is sized for a touring park, not a motorway services car park, and that matters because the capex profile follows the unit, not the megawatts.

The commercial bit that actually closes the conversation

Two ways to do this. Either lease the FreeMe, run the energy yourself and keep the gross margin on every kWh, or take the Energy as a Service route where PowerMe funds, installs, owns and operates the unit and the site takes a profit share for providing the land. The EaaS route is the one most caravan parks pick because there is no capex line, no equipment on the balance sheet and no headache about who fixes it when somebody reverses an Allegro into the cable. PowerMe carries the equipment, the energy and the operations risk. You keep the bookings and a share of the revenue. Done.

So while the DNO finishes its eighteen month tea break, your park can be live this season with rapid charging that actually copes when the August bank holiday hits. That is the gap and that is the answer.

Get in touch: info@powerme.energy / +44 20 8050 8198 / www.powerme.energy