PowerMe Intelligence

How to Electrify a Depot When Your Grid Connection Is Maxed Out

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:40:36 GMT

So you are the fleet manager at a 30 van depot just off the A38 outside Burton, the order has gone in for the first tranche of electric vans, the leasing company is ready, the operations director thinks it is a done deal, and then you make the mistake of phoning your DNO. The conversation that follows is one of the more depressing experiences in British commerce. You have a 200kVA connection sized back in 2008 when the depot ran diesel forklifts and a kettle, you are already at 80% load on a normal weekday, and you want to bolt somewhere between 250 and 600 kilowatts of fast charging on top of it. The DNO does not laugh, that would be unprofessional, but they put you in a queue. The queue is currently somewhere between eighteen months and three and a half years depending on which substation has spare capacity and how many other warehouses on your estate have had the same conversation. The quote will be five figures plus an opaque "reinforcement" line. The meter goes live whenever they say so.

This is the depot electrification problem nobody talks about in the brochures.

What actually happens when you ask the DNO

Look, the DNO is not the villain. They are operating a distribution grid built for a different century and they are doing it with budgets set by a regulator that did not see the EV curve coming until it had already broken over them. The problem is that you, as the fleet manager, do not have the luxury of waiting for the structural fix. You have a CV9 with electric Sprinters arriving in the autumn, a sustainability KPI on the books and a leasing schedule that does not pause while the substation queue clears.

The standard sequence reads like a Kafka adaptation. Submit a connection application, wait six to twelve weeks for the budget estimate, accept it, pay the design fee, wait three to nine months for the firm offer, accept that, pay the connection charge which by now is anywhere between £80,000 and £400,000 depending on whose cables need pulling out of which verge, wait for the works window, the works happen, the meter goes live, and then you start ordering chargers. From first phone call to first kilowatt is rarely under eighteen months and often the wrong side of three years. Meanwhile the vans are arriving and parking up next to a thirteen amp socket like that is going to do anything useful.

The battery buffered answer in plain English

Here is the thing that flips the maths. You do not need a bigger grid connection, you need a battery sitting between the connection you already have and the chargers the vans need. That is what a FreeMe containerised hub actually is. A 10ft or 20ft ISO container with a hybrid LTO and LFP battery pack inside, anywhere from 150kWh up to a megawatt depending on format, sat on a concrete pad in the yard with no ground works and no DNO application. It trickles itself full off your existing supply through the night and through the gaps in the day when the depot is not flat out. It dispatches fast when the vans plug in.

The 200kVA connection you already have can comfortably push 100 to 150 kilowatts into the battery overnight without breaking a sweat. That is 1.2 to 1.8MWh into the buffer between ten at night and six in the morning. Come daytime the battery delivers at whatever rate the chargers can push, typically 60 to 150kW per head, and the connection never feels it. The grid sees a flat overnight load. The vans see a fast charger. Nobody phones the DNO.

For surge load, picture seasonal peak or a fleet expansion that has outrun the buffer, TitanMe Max comes alongside as a 100kWh van mounted unit that pours 200kW DC into a vehicle anywhere you can park a Fiat Ducato Maxi. Bridge until you can drop another container in, or keep it permanently as the phased rollout asset.

The worked example, real numbers

The depot. 30 electric Sprinters. 60 to 80kWh per van per day depending on round length and weather. Call it 2.1MWh total daily energy across the fleet. Your existing 200kVA connection at 80% load gives you 40kVA of headroom, which trickle charged across sixteen off peak hours is roughly 640kWh of battery refill per night. Not enough on its own.

Drop in a FreeMe 20ft, 1MWh container. Add a small solar tie in on the warehouse roof, the kind of thing a competent commercial installer puts up in three weeks. Solar harvest in a Midlands summer gives you 1.5 to 2MWh per week back into the buffer at zero marginal cost. Run cheaper off peak grid tariffs overnight for the rest. The numbers balance, the vans charge, the DNO queue is somebody else's problem.

The commercial bit

PowerMe leases the kit, you pay monthly, the cost lands on opex and the vehicles run. Operating lease keeps the capex off the balance sheet. For groups that would rather not touch it at all there is the EaaS model, where PowerMe funds, owns and operates the hub and takes a share of the energy revenue while you take a share for hosting it. Different conversations for different finance directors. Same kit either way.

If your depot is in the DNO queue, or you have already worked out the queue is going to outlive your fleet electrification timeline, get the kettle on and let us walk through what the buffered version of your site actually looks like.

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

Electric Race Cars Are Here. The Paddock Power Plan Isn't.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:40:24 GMT

So here is a scene you would not have predicted ten years ago. Silverstone, Goodwood, Brands Hatch, Donington, Thruxton, Croft. A wet Saturday in May. The paddock is filling up. Race transporters reversing in, hospitality units settling on the gravel, marshals doing the same things marshals have done since the Hailwood era. Except parked between the Cosworth tea van and the catering wagon there is now a row of electric touring cars, an electric GT class on the next bay, three Formula E demonstrators on a tour, and a paddock full of customer cars that all want a top up before the drive home. And the National Grid connection at this circuit was sized in 1974.

That is the problem nobody is shouting about yet. Motorsport has gone electric faster than anyone in the paddock catering tent will admit, and the supporting infrastructure is still running on a substation that was put in when most of the cars on the grid had carburettors. Pretty soon, somebody is going to lose a race weekend because the chargers tripped out.

Race weekends are the worst possible load shape

Look at how a circuit actually uses power. Fifty one weekends a year you have a handful of test days, a driving school, some corporate hospitality, the odd track day. The load is modest. Then on race weekend you have the broadcast trucks, the timing gantry, hospitality marquees running ovens and aircon, paddock teams with diagnostic rigs, and now an entire grid of cars that need charging between sessions. Add in the fans turning up in EVs expecting a top up while they watch and you have a load curve that looks like Box Hill on a Sunday morning. Spiky, brief, and absolutely brutal on the kit.

Most circuits sit in rural locations precisely because nobody wanted them in a residential area, which is exactly why the local DNO connection is thin. The cost of an upgrade is the kind of number that gets a chairman reaching for the brandy. Three quarters of a million for a transformer upgrade is not unusual, and the lead time runs to two or three years. By which point the touring car championship has gone fully electric, the support paddock is full of Cup EVs, and the chairman is reaching for the brandy again.

What a properly thought through paddock looks like

This is where you stop trying to drag a Victorian grid into the 2030s and start thinking like a project finance person. Do not build a permanent substation upgrade for fifteen race weekends a year. That is a daft use of capital. Instead, drop in containerised battery buffered charging that turns up for the weekend, does its job, and recovers overnight from whatever connection you do have.

FreeMe in a 20ft or 40ft container parked behind the support paddock gives you a megawatt of dispatchable output without touching a spade. The battery buffer means you trickle off the existing grid through the week and discharge through race weekend at the rate teams actually need. No ground works, no road closures, no DNO application, no nervous phone calls about whether the grid connection will hold up when the safety car comes out and twenty cars all plug in at once.

For paddock hospitality and team garage charging during the meeting itself, TitanMe Max sat on a 5 tonne platform gives you 100kWh of LTO storage and 200kW of DC output where you need it, when you need it. Move it round the paddock between sessions. Park it next to the championship that is on track next. The cars get charged, the team principal stops shouting, the broadcast goes on time.

The bit nobody factors in: the visitor car park

Here is the thing the circuit owners often miss. A race weekend brings in twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty thousand fans. A growing chunk of them now arrive in EVs. They sit in the car park for eight to ten hours. That is the single best dwell time in the entire UK charging market. Better than supermarkets, better than airports, better than hotels. And yet most circuits have either no public chargers at all or four rapids on a corner of the south car park that get smashed by the first twenty arrivals and then trip out for the rest of the day.

A properly sized FreeMe deployment in the visitor car park is a separate revenue line that runs every event, not a cost centre. Under our Energy as a Service model, PowerMe funds and operates the kit and the circuit takes a share of the energy revenue for providing the land. No capex, no ops headache, no procurement saga. The chairman keeps the brandy in the cabinet.

Motorsport without the diesel generator finally makes sense

The other piece worth saying out loud. Every paddock in the country is still running on diesel gensets for the bits the mains cannot cover. Hospitality power, broadcast power, charging power, all of it humming away on red diesel in front of a series sponsor banner that says Net Zero by 2030. The optics are not great and the maths gets worse every year as fuel duty changes and emissions reporting tightens. Containerised battery buffered charging plus a leased mobile unit or two for the surge load gives you a properly clean paddock, a number for the sustainability report that actually adds up, and a story the broadcaster will be glad to tell.

Whether you sit at Silverstone, Brands, Donington or one of the smaller venues, the path to an electric race weekend does not run through the DNO upgrade queue. It runs through kit that turns up, plugs in and does the work. We will happily come and walk the paddock with you.

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

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

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:40:49 GMT

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

Your Customer Wants Their EV Delivered. Yours Will Arrive Flat.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 31 May 2026 08:41:26 GMT

So here is the thing about modern car dealerships. The sales process used to end when the customer drove off the forecourt. Now half of them want the car delivered, the other half want it collected for service, and roughly all of them want it on charge when it arrives. And the dealer principal sitting in some Sytner or Marshall group head office is looking at a customer journey that ends with a flat battery and a Trustpilot review nobody wants.

The manufacturers have done their bit. They have mandated EV sales targets, set ZEV percentages, threatened to claw back margin if dealers do not hit the mix. What they have not done is fix the charging.

The Delivery Driver Problem

Look at how a delivery actually works. The driver collects the car from a PDI compound, often a hundred miles from the customer, and drives it on trade plates to the customer's house or office. By the time it lands on the driveway the battery is typically somewhere between 30 and 60 percent depending on how cold it is and how heavy the driver's foot is. The customer signs for it, the driver hands them the keys then watches them plug it into a three pin socket because nine times out of ten there is no home charger commissioned yet.

The driver then needs to get back to the depot. If they are taking an EV courtesy car back, they need to charge it. If they are jumping in a van, the van needs to charge too. None of this is theoretical, it is happening at every multi site dealer group in the country right now and nobody is funding the infrastructure to support it.

What MobileMe and TitanMe Actually Solve

MobileMe is an 11.5 kWh portable unit that goes in the back of a recovery truck or a delivery van. Eleven and a half kilowatt hours does not sound like a lot, but it is enough to add 30 to 40 miles to almost any EV in fifteen minutes. Which is exactly what you need when a customer's car has rolled to a stop in their gravel driveway and the local DNO has decided their street is at capacity.

TitanMe sits a step up. 40 kWh, 150 kW DC, van mounted. Park it at the dealer's PDI compound, hub site or events compound and you have rapid charging anywhere a Ducato can park. Toshiba SCiB cells, four C charge rate, no active cooling needed. It charges three or four cars an hour, recharges itself off a depot three phase in under an hour and goes home with the driver at night.

Both products lease. The dealer group does not buy them, they pay a monthly figure, they hand them back when the manufacturer pivots strategy again. Which they will.

The Group Maths Nobody Bothers With

So take a dealer group with thirty sites. Pendragon and Lookers used to look like that before the M&A merry go round. Each site does, say, four EV deliveries a week. Four times thirty times fifty two equals six thousand two hundred and forty delivery events a year. Each one is at risk of becoming a customer complaint if the charge level is wrong.

Now look at the group's capex book. They are sitting on planning approval for forecourt rebuilds, new fascia rollouts, manufacturer mandated showroom upgrades and roughly zero budget for distributed mobile charging. The reason is straightforward. Nobody at head office has put a number on what a flat delivery costs in lost loyalty, bad reviews and after sales attrition. So it does not get funded.

The lease model fixes that conversation. It is opex, not capex. It comes out of the same budget line as the courtesy car fleet. It scales unit by unit, group by group, brand by brand. And when the manufacturer announces a hydrogen pivot in eighteen months, you hand the unit back.

What This Means for Group Buyers

If you are looking after fleet and facilities for a dealer group, the practical move is to pilot two MobileMe units on the busiest delivery routes for ninety days, instrument the deliveries, count the saved Trustpilot complaints and run the maths. Most groups will find a payback that is measured in months not years, mostly because the cost of one lost retention sale is roughly six MobileMe leases.

We can deploy in four weeks from order, with no ground works, no DNO application, no planning. The units travel on standard trade plates. The driver gets a half day of training. The dealer gets a charging capability that arrives before the next ZEV deadline rather than after the one after that.

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

Tier One Sites Are Banning Diesel. The Compound Plan Says What?

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sat, 30 May 2026 08:39:26 GMT

So a tier one contractor signs a flashy net zero commitment, the press release does its rounds, and then the site manager looks at the compound and realises three things at once. The diesel genny still hums away twenty four hours a day. The new electric Volvo loader needs charging by Tuesday. And the DNO connection at the perimeter is twelve months out at best.

This is the daily reality on every major UK build right now. JCB has electric mini excavators in production, Volvo CE has launched the L25 Electric and the EC230, Caterpillar is on the runway, and the kit is already turning up on real sites. Balfour Beatty, Kier, Costain, Sir Robert McAlpine, all of them have public commitments to diesel reduction, and the major schemes from HS2 to Hinkley Point C have it written into the works information. The intent is there. The power is not.

The Genny Bill Nobody Talks About

Look, every site compound in the country runs on diesel. A typical 100kVA stage five genny burns around fifteen litres an hour, which on a twelve hour active day is 180 litres, which at today's white diesel rates is somewhere north of £250 a day, and that is just one machine. Add the welfare unit, the canteen, the tower light hire, the temporary distribution boards, and a midsize project is burning four figures a day before anyone has charged anything.

The funny thing is, all that diesel is producing electricity. You are paying twice. Once for the fuel, once for the engine that converts it. And when an electric digger turns up and needs 80kWh by morning, the operator solution is usually to add another genny.

The Grid Will Not Save You

Here is the thing the DNO will not put in writing. A 500kW connection to a remote site, the kind of capacity you need to charge serious plant overnight, is twelve to eighteen months in the queue and the four figures are deep into the six figure range. By the time you have the wayleaves, the cable, the substation and the half hour metering, the project is finished and the kit has moved to the next job.

This is the bit that breaks the net zero plan on paper. Static infrastructure cannot follow a temporary site.

What PowerMe Actually Does About It

So this is exactly the gap PowerMe fills. The FreeMe containerised unit, anywhere from 150kWh up to 3MWh, drops onto a hardstanding compound, plumbs into the site distribution, and charges plant overnight off the LTO and LFP hybrid pack. No trench, no DNO, no eighteen month wait. On a long programme like a station rebuild or a power station civils job, the FreeMe lives on site for the duration on a lease, and when the project ends it lifts off and goes to the next compound.

The TitanMe Max , our 100kWh van mounted rapid at 200kW DC, brings the power to the plant where it sits, which on a linear job like a road scheme or rail corridor means you stop driving the loader two miles back to the compound every time the battery dips. The MobileMe takes care of the site van fleet and the smaller kit, deployed off a recovery style truck wherever the gang is working.

And for the tier one contractors who do not want capex on a temporary site, the Energy as a Service model means PowerMe owns the kit, you pay per kWh dispensed, and the only thing on your books is a usage cost that sits below your old diesel bill.

What Changes Commercially

A few real numbers. Replace a 100kVA genny with a FreeMe on a twelve month site and the diesel saving alone tends to land between £60k and £90k a year, before you count the scope three emissions you can claim against your net zero target. Add the value of being able to plug in electric plant without running three gennies in parallel, and the case writes itself.

The other thing, and this matters when you are bidding work, is that more clients are scoring tenders on embodied carbon and operational carbon. A site that can show zero diesel for plant charging is a tender win. Not a maybe. A win.

So the question on every major build right now is not whether the kit is going electric. It is. The question is whether the compound power plan keeps up, or whether you spend another year burning diesel to charge a digger.

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

Warehouse Landlords Have the Roofs, the Yards and No Charging

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:38:44 GMT

So here is a sector that almost nobody talks about in the EV conversation, and yet it owns the single biggest pile of underused tarmac in the country. The big logistics landlords. Segro, Tritax Big Box, Prologis, LondonMetric, GLP, the lot. Between them they own tens of millions of square feet of warehousing across the UK, and attached to every single one of those sheds is a yard, a service road, a staff car park and usually a trailer park that sits in the open air doing very little overnight. It is the perfect estate for EV charging. So why is almost none of it electrified?

The lease structure was written for a world that no longer exists

The typical big-shed lease is a 15 or 20 year FRI arrangement where the tenant takes the building, pays the rent, and is responsible for everything inside the demise. The landlord owns the structure, the roof, the estate roads and very often the substation. The tenant pays the energy bill. Nobody contracted to install £400,000 worth of EV infrastructure because in 2015 nobody needed to.

Now the tenant has gone and bought 40 electric Mercedes eSprinters, a couple of Volvo FH Electric tractor units, and the fleet manager is standing in the yard wondering where the kit goes. He rings the landlord. The landlord rings the asset manager. The asset manager rings the lawyers. Six months later there is a draft side letter, a quote for grid reinforcement that nobody wants to pay, and the eSprinters are still being charged on a single tethered 22kW post that an electrician bolted to the wall as a favour.

Here is the thing. The grid does not care about your lease structure. The DNO is not interested in who pays. And the tenant who is paying £2 million a year in rent is starting to ask why the landlord cannot get its act together. This is a problem that nobody planned for and almost everybody now has.

The capex argument the landlord always loses

The reason logistics landlords have not deployed at scale is the same reason supermarkets have not, and the same reason councils have not. The capex is enormous, the grid timeline is two to four years, and the asset sits on a yard that the landlord does not really want to be operating. REITs are not in the energy business. They are in the rent business. A £600,000 grid upgrade for a single site that will not be re-rated for another seven years does not make the investment committee very happy.

And yet the tenant pressure is only going one way. Amazon is electrifying its last mile fleet. DPD already has thousands of electric vans on the road. Royal Mail is buying eSprinters by the lorryload. If you are a logistics landlord and your competitor up the M1 has solved this problem and you have not, your re-letting numbers are going to start sliding within 18 months.

Where PowerMe actually fits the warehouse estate

This is exactly the gap our FreeMe containerised platform was built to fill. A FreeMe 20ft unit drops onto a corner of the yard, no ground works, no trenching across the demise, no DNO application that takes two and a half years. 1MWh of LTO and LFP storage on board, four charging heads, and the tenant can be plugging in electric vans by the end of the week.

For larger logistics campuses where you have multiple tenants sharing the estate roads, a 40ft FreeMe at 3MWh starts to look like an estate amenity in its own right. The landlord owns the asset, the tenants pay per kWh, the revenue funds the asset and the lease question never has to be reopened. For the tighter service yards where space is tight, TitanMe Max in cube form sits on a euro pallet footprint and gives you 200kW DC where the eHGVs actually come and go.

And here is the bit that usually makes the asset manager sit up. The whole thing can be done on Energy as a Service. PowerMe funds the kit, deploys the kit, operates the kit, and the landlord takes a share of the revenue for providing the site. No capex, no grid wait, no operational headache. The shed earns rent, the yard earns revenue, the tenant gets the charging they were asking for, and the lease lawyers never have to get involved.

Why this matters for the next rent review

Charging is going to become a covenant question. It already is for some of the big institutional tenants. If the landlord cannot demonstrate a credible electrification plan, the tenant will go and find a shed where the landlord can. That is not a 2030 problem. That is a 2027 problem and it is being negotiated in lease renewals right now.

The logistics landlords that get ahead of this will be the ones quietly retrofitting yards across their estate, offering charging as part of the service charge, and writing it into new lettings as a standard amenity. The ones that do not will be the ones explaining to their tenants why the building is being mothballed and the fleet is moving to the competitor's park three junctions down.

It is not a complicated problem. It just needs somebody to stop treating EV infrastructure like a bespoke construction project and start treating it like a piece of kit that drops onto a yard. Which, funnily enough, is what we do.

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

Forecourts Have the Land, the Footfall and the Wrong Energy

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:40:42 GMT

So here is the thing about petrol forecourts in Britain. They sit on the busiest corners of the busiest roads, they already have the planning consent, they already have the canopy, the lighting, the CCTV, the till, the Costa concession and a queue of drivers spending money. What they do not have, in any meaningful sense, is electric charging. And the reason they do not have it is not because they do not want it. It is because the local DNO has either said no, said yes but in 2028, or quoted a number that would make any sensible operator quietly put the file back in the drawer.

There are still around 8,300 forecourts left in the UK after twenty years of closures. The big operators (MFG, EG Group, Applegreen, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Shell, BP) are doing the visible work — flagship sites off the M4, the odd hub on the A1, GRIDSERVE’s electric forecourts grabbing the headlines. Most independents and most of the smaller branded sites are nowhere. The question is not whether forecourts should add EV charging. The question is what to do when the wires arriving at your boundary cannot carry it.

The grid problem at a typical petrol forecourt

Right. A petrol forecourt typically has a connection somewhere between 100 and 250 kVA, sized historically for the kiosk, the pumps, the canopy lights, the freezer, the coffee machine and not very much else. The entire electrical load of the site is roughly what one decent rapid charger draws when an EV6 plugs in for fifteen minutes.

To put six 150 kW rapid chargers on a forecourt the way the marketing brochures suggest, you need around 900 kW of grid capacity. You will not have it. You will need a new substation, a deeper cable run from the primary, possibly a road dig, and a queue at the DNO that runs eighteen months in the worst districts. Reinforcement quotes north of £400,000 are routine, and that is before the civils and the canopy and the chargers themselves.

That is the problem in a sentence. The site is perfect. The tarmac is laid. The toilets exist. The coffee is hot. The grid says wait.

What FreeMe actually does on a forecourt

The FreeMe containerised unit (the PM 0.1 range) drops onto the existing tarmac with no ground works and no DNO queue. The 20ft variant carries 1MWh of hybrid LTO/LFP storage and four charging heads, draws its top-up power slowly through your existing connection overnight when the forecourt is quiet, and then discharges fast during the day when cars want 80% in fifteen minutes.

The maths is the bit operators actually care about. On a 250 kVA connection you can trickle the FreeMe at roughly 150 kW continuous through the off-peak window, which puts more than a megawatt-hour into storage between eleven at night and six in the morning. That is twelve to fifteen full rapid charges sitting on the forecourt before breakfast, ready for the morning commute, with your existing grid connection untouched and no reinforcement bill. The kiosk keeps running. The Greggs oven keeps running. Nothing on site fights the chargers for amps.

For smaller independent sites, the TitanMe Max (PM 0.2, 100 kWh, 200 kW DC) is the bridge product. Drop it on the pump island, plug into the existing 22 kW commando socket, and you have a 200 kW rapid running off a connection that would not normally support one. It is the cheapest way for a single-pump rural forecourt to start earning EV revenue while it works out whether to upsize.

The commercial bit, in plain English

Two ways to fund it. Lease the FreeMe and own the energy margin (lease payments fixed, revenue yours, simple) or take it on Energy as a Service, where PowerMe funds and owns the asset, you provide the tarmac and the footfall, you get a profit share and zero capex on the balance sheet. The EaaS route is the one most independent forecourt operators will land on, because EV charging is a new game and nobody wants to bet capex on a hand they have not played yet.

Both routes use the same kit. Both routes sidestep the same eighteen-month DNO cycle. Both routes get a working forecourt EV proposition live in weeks rather than years. And both routes mean the petrol pump and the rapid charger can sit ten feet apart on the same forecourt, sharing the kiosk, sharing the queue, sharing the coffee, which is the only commercial model that actually makes sense for the next decade while the country gets on with the transition.

The forecourts that move first will own the EV traffic on their roads. The ones that wait for the DNO to ring back will not.

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

Ports Are Going Electric. The Quayside Grid Says Wait.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:39:42 GMT

So you have a port. Could be Portsmouth, could be Holyhead, could be one of the smaller harbours on the south coast where the ferry trundles across to France or Spain. Could be Felixstowe, could be Tilbury, could be a fishing harbour where a few rib charters and the lifeboat sit alongside a tea hut. And someone has just told you the future is electric. Electric ferries, electric tugs, electric reach stackers, electric pilot boats, electric shoreside vehicles, the lot. Lovely. Now go and find the power.

Here is the thing about ports. They were not built around electricity. They were built around water, fuel oil, diesel and a couple of substations that were enough for some cargo lighting, a crane and the office kettle. Now you have got Wightlink, Forsea, Damen and half a dozen other operators rolling out electric ferries that need megawatt scale charging in a port turnaround window. You have got Maersk and CMA CGM looking at electric yard tractors and reach stackers. You have got harbour authorities running pilot boats and patrol craft that have all gone battery. And the quayside has a 100 amp supply that was last upgraded when the Falklands War was still on the news.

The Grid Was Sized for Diesel and You Cannot Just Upgrade It

The frustrating part is that everybody knew the diesel was going. Operators have been planning electrification for years. Funding has been written, manifestos have been signed, decarbonisation deadlines printed on glossy reports. What did not get planned was the quayside grid.

Talk to the DNO about putting 5MW into a working port. The conversation is depressing. You are looking at deep ground investigation because half the cabling runs are under live rail or quay structures, you have got historic asbestos and a salt environment that wrecks switchgear, and you have got an upgrade quote that sits north of seven figures before anybody has dug a trench. The timeline is somewhere between eighteen months and three years. Meanwhile the ferry is already on order and the delivery date is in eleven months.

Containerised Power Belongs on a Quayside More Than Anywhere Else

The PowerMe FreeMe is a containerised energy unit. 8ft, 10ft, 20ft and 40ft footprints, 150kWh up to 3MWh, hybrid Lithium Titanate and Lithium Iron Phosphate chemistry under a blended C rate BMS that can deliver high current peaks for a ferry charge then sit on lower draw for a yard tug. The Toshiba SCiB LTO cells handle the cycling stress and a 4C rate, so when a vessel turns up and needs serious power in a thirty minute window, the unit dumps it without falling over.

Drop one onto the quayside. No trench, no DNO upgrade, no eighteen month wait. The container sits on standard hardstanding, lifts off a low loader with the same reach stacker that lifts your cargo and it is operational the same week. Trickle charge it from whatever grid supply you have, top up from solar or wind on site, or run the whole thing on Energy as a Service where PowerMe funds and operates the asset and the port takes a profit share for providing the slot.

TitanMe Max for the Yard, MobileMe for the Pilot Boats

Not every charge job is megawatt scale. Yard tractors, reach stackers, electric forklifts and shoreside vehicles need fast rapid charging in 100 to 200kW territory. TitanMe Max sits in cube form on a euro pallet footprint, delivers 200kW DC from its 100kWh LTO pack, and goes wherever you wheel it. Run it as a roaming charger across the yard, park it where the queues are that day.

The pilot boat and patrol craft side is where MobileMe earns its keep. 11.5kWh, recovery truck mounted, drives down the quay to whichever pontoon needs a top up. None of this needs a substation upgrade. None of it needs a trench. It needs power that turns up when you ask for it.

The Commercial Bit Makes the Numbers Work

Two models. Leasing if you want the kit on your own balance sheet and run it yourself, which suits a busy port with predictable charging duty cycles. Energy as a Service if you would rather not touch the capex, in which case PowerMe funds, deploys and operates the infrastructure and you take a profit share for providing the site.

The Department for Transport maritime decarbonisation pots and the various ZEHM funding rounds that UK ports are eligible for tend to favour deployed assets over paper plans, so you can stack EaaS with grant funding and the maths starts looking close to free money. Greek, Italian and Croatian ports have similar EU funding routes through CEF Transport and the Innovation Fund.

The point is this. The ferry is coming whether the grid is ready or not. The yard tractors are on order. The pilot boat has already arrived. Wait for the DNO and you will be apologising to operators for the next two years. Or get a container delivered and start charging next month.

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

Airport Long Stay Car Parks: Two Weeks Parked, No Way to Charge

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:40:35 GMT

So here is something nobody at any UK airport seems to want to talk about. The long stay car parks at Heathrow, Gatwick, Manchester, Stansted and Birmingham collectively hold more than two hundred thousand cars, the average stay is somewhere north of seven days and you can count the working rapid chargers on the fingers of one hand. Two hundred thousand cars sitting still for a week or more, with absolutely nowhere to plug in.

The maths of it would be amusing if it were not such an obvious miss. If you are a frequent flyer running a Polestar or a Model Y you leave Terminal 5, come back ten days later and find the twelve volt is flat, the high voltage battery sits at sixty percent and you have a four mile crawl to a Gridserve site that probably has a queue. The whole experience screams that someone, somewhere, missed the most obvious commercial real estate in British EV charging.

The dwell time argument is a gift, and the airports are still refusing it

Look at the basic numbers. A supermarket car park has a ninety minute dwell time. A retail park sits at about three hours. A motorway services rapid is in and out in twenty five minutes. The long stay airport park has a dwell time measured in days. Seven, ten, fourteen days for the holiday traffic. For anything below ultra rapid the airport is the perfect environment, a twenty two kilowatt destination charger would refill a Tesla seven times over from arrival to departure.

So why is the rollout so anaemic? Because every airport operator that has costed a proper EV install has come back with a number that begins with a B. Heathrow's long stay alone holds around forty two thousand cars. Stick a seven kilowatt pedestal at every bay, allow for ground works, transformer upgrades, distribution boards, ducting and the DNO queue and you are looking at somewhere between two and four hundred million pounds. For something that does not move passengers through the terminal any faster.

The grid is the second problem, and it is worse than the first

The thing about airports is that the substations were sized for runway lighting, terminal heating, baggage systems and a few hundred staff cars. They were not sized for forty thousand pedestals. The DNO queue for any meaningful upgrade at Heathrow, Gatwick or Stansted is now running at eighteen months minimum and in some boroughs the answer is not eighteen months, it is "build us a new substation and we will see". That is not an EV strategy, that is a capital programme.

This is where the containerised approach changes the picture entirely. PowerMe FreeMe is a charging hub in a forty foot box with up to three megawatt hours of LTO and LFP storage on board. It does not ask the DNO for anything. It does not need a trench. It does not need a transformer pad. It needs a piece of tarmac and a connection, and it will deliver four heads of rapid charging or sixteen heads of fast charging from the moment it is craned off the back of the wagon.

And the commercial model finally makes sense

So here is where the EaaS conversation gets interesting for an airport operator. The bit nobody wants to do is sign off the capex. The bit everyone wants is the revenue line and the ESG narrative. PowerMe funds the lot, deploys the FreeMe units, owns and operates them and pays the airport a profit share for the land. Fifteen percent of every kilowatt hour that leaves a connector, every month, with no capex bill, no DNO grief, no operational staff and no maintenance contracts to write.

For an airport that has been told for three years that EV charging is impossible inside its capex envelope, that is the conversation that gets the FD in the room. And for the short stay and kiss and fly bays, where the dwell time drops to forty minutes and the power demand goes up, the TitanMe Max delivers two hundred kilowatts of rapid charging from a Euro pallet footprint. Same EaaS model, faster turnover, higher revenue per square metre.

What it looks like on the ground

Picture Manchester Airport long stay terminal three. Six FreeMe twenty foot containers spaced across the perimeter, each running twenty four fast charging heads. A hundred and forty four bays with charging, no trenching across the site, no DNO upgrade, deployable in under thirty days from order. Add two TitanMe Max units at the kiss and fly drop off and you have rapid charging for the rush hour. Total airport capex contribution: zero. Profit share over a ten year term sitting in the meaningful eight figures.

This is the conversation we are now having with airport operators in the UK and Europe. The technology is not the bottleneck. The commercial model is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is whichever airport board moves first.

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

Supermarket Car Parks: Best EV Dwell Times, Worst Charging

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 25 May 2026 08:40:13 GMT

So here is the thing about a supermarket car park. You have already won the hardest battle in EV charging, which is getting somebody to stop. The average British shop runs somewhere between eighty and ninety minutes, depending on whether the kids are with you, whether you forgot the wine and had to double back, whether the person in front in the queue is paying in coppers from a sock. The point is, the car is sat there. The driver is somewhere in the meat aisle thinking about whether to buy the four pack of yoghurts or the six pack. And the car, which is the second most expensive thing they own, is doing absolutely nothing.

That ninety minutes is the perfect EV charging window. At 50kW from a fast charger, that is roughly 60 to 70kWh into the battery. Which is more than half a tank in petrol terms. The maths writes itself.

So why are there still queues of Tesla drivers at the GRIDSERVE off the M4 while three Tescos within five miles have a couple of broken Type 2 posts in the corner that nobody has fixed since 2022?

The grid is the wrong fight to be having

Look, the supermarkets did try. Tesco partnered with Pod Point years ago. Sainsbury's announced Smart Charge with the same fanfare. Morrisons did a deal with GRIDSERVE. Asda, Lidl, Aldi, Waitrose, all of them have a charging strategy sat in a PowerPoint somewhere. The problem is that none of those strategies survive first contact with the local DNO.

A typical superstore in Reading or Stockport or somewhere similar was built in the 1990s with enough power for the freezers, the lighting and an industrial bread oven. Nobody planned for six 150kW rapid chargers sucking down 900kW at five o'clock on a Friday. So when the team finally pulls the trigger and asks for an upgrade, the answer comes back from the DNO. Eighteen months. Two years. Three years for a meaningful site. And if you want the substation moved that is on you and it is half a million quid before you have even bought a charger.

Most supermarket boards look at that and quietly move the charging line item to next year's plan. And the year after that. And the one after that as well.

FreeMe drops in without asking the grid for permission

The PowerMe answer is FreeMe . It is a containerised charging unit, available in 8ft, 10ft, 20ft and 40ft formats with battery capacity from 150kWh up to 3MWh and outputs up to two megawatts. The chemistry is Toshiba SCiB LTO on the peak demand and Lithium Iron Phosphate on the bulk storage, blended through a clever BMS so the LTO soaks the surge and the LFP holds the energy. That hybrid architecture is the engineering basis for the ten year design life.

The thing that matters commercially is what FreeMe does not need. It does not need a trench across the car park. It does not need to wait for the DNO. It does not need to dig up the loading bay, move the trolley return or close half the bays for six months. It sits where a delivery van would sit, plugs into whatever supply the supermarket already has for a slow trickle to keep itself topped up, and serves rapid charges from its own onboard battery buffer. No ground works. No eighteen month wait. No half a million quid bill for a substation that was supposed to belong to UK Power Networks.

If the store gets refitted in three years, the container goes on a lorry and goes somewhere else.

The EaaS maths that turns car parks into revenue

The bit that the supermarket finance director wants to hear is the bit where nobody asks them for capex. PowerMe runs this as Energy as a Service. We fund it, we deploy it, we own it, we operate it. The supermarket provides the parking bays and a share of the supply. In return the supermarket takes a profit share of the energy revenue. Typical structure is somewhere around fifteen percent, no working capital out the door, no balance sheet hit, no team hired to operate plugs they did not want to think about.

For a 24 hour superstore in a town like Swindon or Crawley, even a modest six head FreeMe site at 150kW per head will turn over a serious number on energy if it runs at sensible utilisation. The supermarket sits on its profit share and gets the marketing line about being the easiest charge in town. And the customer who used to drive past on the way to the petrol station starts coming inside for the meal deal while the car charges.

That is the bit nobody models. The basket value goes up. EV drivers spend longer in the shop than the average. They buy more. They come back. The supermarkets that figured this out a decade ago with the petrol forecourt are the ones who will figure it out again with the charger.

The supermarkets that wait for the grid will spend the next five years watching MFG, GRIDSERVE and Applegreen build out the rapid network around them. And the customer will go where the plug works.

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

Why Pubs and Hotels Are Britain's Best EV Charging Estate

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:39:10 GMT

So here is the thing about hotel and pub car parks. They sit empty when they shouldn't, they fill up when they should be earning and almost nobody who owns them is sweating the asset the way they should.

Think about a Premier Inn off junction 23 of the M6. Eighty spaces. Between eleven in the morning and five in the afternoon the place is half empty, then the diners and overnighters roll in and from six in the evening to ten the next morning the entire car park is full of cars sitting there doing absolutely nothing. Same story at any Wetherspoons with a car park, any Marston's roadside pub, any Greene King with rooms above. The estate is enormous, the dwell times are some of the longest in retail and almost none of it has working chargers.

Which is mad really. Because the maths is so obviously in favour.

The dwell time is the whole point

A motorway services charger gets a car for twenty minutes if you're lucky. A supermarket gets you for forty. A high street car park gets you for an hour and a half if the warden hasn't noticed.

A pub gets you for two hours over Sunday lunch. A restaurant gets you for two and a half on a Friday night. A hotel gets you for fourteen hours overnight. That is the dream charging profile and the industry has spent ten years building infrastructure everywhere except where it actually works.

If you're running a 200 site pub estate and your average ticket is creeping up because your customer spends an extra fifteen minutes inside while their car charges, that is worth a great deal more than the energy margin on the kilowatt hours. And the energy margin on the kilowatt hours is not bad either.

Why your operations director keeps saying no

The reason nobody has done this at scale is not because the maths is wrong, it is because the deployment route is broken.

Three things kill it every time. The capex bill, which lands at somewhere between forty and a hundred and twenty thousand a site once you add up the chargers, the trenching, the substation upgrade and the consultancy fees. The grid wait, which on most pub sites is somewhere between eighteen months and never because the DNO has bigger fish to fry than your 100 kilowatt connection. And the disruption, because no operations director wants the car park dug up over a long weekend in May when the beer garden trade is the whole point of the year.

So the proposal lands on the FD's desk and the FD does what FDs do, which is to put it in next year's pile and never look at it again.

What the FreeMe approach actually changes

This is where the containerised piece earns its keep. FreeMe is a battery and charger system in a standard ISO container, sized from 150kWh up to 3MWh. It rolls in on a lorry, gets craned onto a corner of the car park and runs off the existing supply trickling into the battery overnight when the site is quiet. No trenching. No substation. No DNO conversation. Live in a day.

The hybrid LTO and LFP battery chemistry inside, with the Toshiba SCiB cells handling the peak demand and the LFP doing the bulk storage, is what makes the off-grid model actually work commercially. The LTO absorbs the punishment of the fast charging cycles which is why we can put a ten year design life on the unit. Other people running pure LFP simply cannot.

For a 50 to 100 room hotel a 150kWh or 350kWh FreeMe with two heads is usually the right answer. For a destination pub with a hundred spaces a 350kWh unit. For a roadside services operator looking at a multi site rollout the 1MWh container is where the unit economics start getting interesting.

Leasing or EaaS, you pick what fits

PowerMe runs two commercial models for a reason. If you want to own the asset and keep the energy margin, lease it. Monthly payment, off balance sheet treatment available, the same way you finance any other piece of equipment in the estate. If you don't want capex, depreciation or operational headache anywhere near your books, take the Energy as a Service route. We fund the unit, we install it, we run it, you take a profit share on the energy sold and you get a working charger in your car park without spending a penny up front.

The reason both models matter is that pub groups, hotel chains and restaurant brands don't share one balance sheet between them. A privately held regional brewery treats capex very differently to a listed hospitality REIT. The point is that whichever side of that fence you sit on, there's a route to a working charger that doesn't involve a two year argument with the DNO.

So if you've got car parks sitting empty by day and full by night, you've got the best dwell time profile in British retail and almost certainly no chargers to monetise it. That is a problem worth fixing.

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

Business Parks Have Thousands of Cars. Hardly Any Chargers.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:40:09 GMT

So here is the thing about business parks. Stockley Park, Chiswick Park, Green Park, Cambridge Science Park, MediaCity. Some of the biggest car parks in Britain, sitting alongside some of the best paid workforces in Britain, and almost nowhere to plug in an EV. You can drive a Polestar 4 to your office at Stockley every day for two years and still be hunting for a working charger at lunchtime.

It is one of those things that, when you stand back from it, makes no sense at all. The dwell time is there. Eight to ten hours, five days a week. The footfall is there. Tens of thousands of staff across multi tenant sites. The will is there too, with most large occupiers now writing EV charging into their workplace strategy alongside cycle stores and shower rooms. And yet the chargers are not. Why?

The capex nobody wants to wear

The reason is structural. Business parks are landlord owned, tenant occupied and the car park sits in the gap between the two. The landlord does not want to spend two or three hundred thousand pounds digging trenches across a car park that the tenants might walk away from in five years. The tenants do not want to spend it either, because they do not own the asset and they are not staying long enough to write the capital off against the lease. So everybody waits.

The grid wait helps too, because even when somebody does want to write the cheque, the local DNO will tell them it is eighteen to thirty six months before the cable arrives. Right around the time the lease renewal is up for discussion. You can guess what happens next.

The result is the situation you actually see on the ground. Two or three knackered 7kW posts near the visitor bays, usually with one broken and one ICEd by a Range Rover Sport. A few of the bigger landlords have done a deal with a CPO and put in six rapids at the front entrance, but six rapids do not serve a building of three thousand staff and the queue at 5pm makes the point quite clearly.

What changes when the maths gets reset

So here is what changes with a containerised off grid system. The FreeMe drops in on the existing tarmac. No trench across the car park, no DNO upgrade, no eighteen month wait, no roadworks Monday to Friday upsetting the anchor tenant. An 8ft unit goes in next to the loading bay, a 20ft unit sits on a couple of bays at the back and you have between 150kWh and 1MWh of LTO LFP hybrid storage running two to four charge heads in the bays you want them in.

More important than that, the commercial model is what unlocks the site. PowerMe deploys the FreeMe under Energy as a Service . The landlord pays nothing up front. PowerMe owns, operates and maintains the kit, runs the billing, takes the energy revenue and shares a percentage of the take with the freeholder for providing the location. No capex on the books, no kit to keep working after the contract ends. If the tenants leave and the park empties, the unit is craned off the back of a lorry and moved to somewhere with footfall. That is the bit that matters in a leasehold heavy environment. The asset walks if the site fails.

The chemistry behind the headline

The hybrid architecture inside FreeMe is the bit that makes the day actually work. Thirty seven percent of the storage is Toshiba SCiB LTO, the rest is LFP. The LTO takes the peak demand at four C, which means it can shove 200kW into a car without breaking a sweat or needing a chiller. The LFP carries the bulk load underneath at one C. The blended C rate BMS logic moves the cycling stress to the chemistry that handles it best, which is why we put a ten year design life on the unit. Not a marketing number. A Monte Carlo modelled number based on 11.4 years to 80 percent state of health at standard utilisation.

For a business park, the practical impact is that the unit handles the 8am surge as the morning shift plugs in, then ticks along quietly through the day, then handles the 5pm pull as a few hundred cars top up before the commute home. You do not need a sub station, you do not need ground works and you do not need a five year capex case to justify it.

The landlord conversation that actually closes

If you are a managing agent or an asset manager sitting on a multi let park right now, the question to ask is not whether to put chargers in. The question is who pays for them and what happens if the anchor tenant leaves in 2029. With FreeMe on EaaS the answer is straightforward. You pay nothing. You earn a share. The kit moves if the park does. The amenity makes the lease easier to defend at review, the tenants stop asking when the chargers are going in and you stop pretending that two 7kW posts is a workplace charging strategy.

That is the offer. No trench. No DNO. No capex. A share of the revenue and an amenity that finally matches the building.

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

Exhibition Halls Need EV Chargers for One Week in Twelve

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:39:58 GMT

So here is the awkward maths of a place like the NEC. Sixteen and a half thousand car parking spaces, an event diary that runs from Crufts to the Caravan Show to the BBC Good Food Show by way of whatever trade fair has booked Hall 5 next, and a grid connection that was sized when British Leyland still made cars down the road in Longbridge. The car park is rammed for a fortnight, half empty for the next three weeks, then rammed again. Now try and tell me how a permanent fixed charging strategy is supposed to make any kind of economic sense across that pattern. It does not. It cannot. And that is before we even mention the DNO quoting six figures and two years for a grid upgrade.

The Burstiness Problem Static Charging Cannot Solve

Conference and exhibition venues are not like supermarket car parks where the load is roughly steady week to week. They are spiky in a way that breaks every traditional charging business case. When the Caravan, Camping and Motorhome Show is on at the NEC there are something like 80,000 visitors a day across five days. When the smaller B2B trade events run, there might be 4,000 visitors a day. Between events the car parks are nearly empty.

Build enough fixed chargers to cover peak demand and they sit gathering dust for three weeks out of four. Build for average demand and you turn away EV drivers at the gate during the big shows, which is precisely when your reputation is on the line and your social media manager is fielding complaints from someone called Dave who drove down from Sheffield in a Polestar. Most venues have done neither. They have a handful of chargers in row C, half of which are out of order, and a queue from Manchester Central all the way back to Deansgate.

What Happens When 4,000 EVs Turn Up for the Same Show

Look at the practical bit. By 2030 a fair chunk of every UK exhibition crowd will be driving electric. If you have 30,000 cars on site at the NEC for the Good Food Show and even a third of those are EVs needing a top up before they head back to Yorkshire, that is 10,000 charge events across five days. Your existing grid connection cannot do it. The DNO upgrade quote will fund a small extension to the West Midlands transmission network and arrive in time for the 2029 show. Brilliant.

Meanwhile ExCeL has IBC, the London Boat Show and the London Coffee Festival running back to back. SEC Glasgow has SPE Offshore Europe and TRNSMT in the same summer. Harrogate has the Knitting and Stitching Show with a clientele that is, frankly, exactly the early adopter EV demographic you should be planning for. Olympia, Bournemouth International Centre, Manchester Central, the Excel halls down at Royal Victoria Dock — the pattern repeats at every major venue in the country.

Mobile Power That Travels Between Venues, Not Through Trenches

This is where PowerMe's kit was designed for exactly this kind of problem. TitanMe Max is a 100kWh, 200kW DC rapid charger that sits on a euro pallet footprint and can be moved between sites with a forklift and a flatbed. Wheel four of them into the visitor car park for the Caravan Show. Move them to a different venue for the next event. Park them in the staff car park during off-weeks if you want. You are not committing concrete, copper and capex to a use case that only fires properly for twelve weeks of the year.

Pair the mobile fleet with a permanent FreeMe container at the back of the main car park for the always-on baseline load. FreeMe sits on the ground, no digging, no DNO grid upgrade, no civils contractor with a programme that overruns by six months. The LTO and LFP hybrid battery inside it acts as a buffer so you can charge it overnight off whatever modest grid connection you do have, and discharge it fast when 4,000 EV drivers want a top up between the doors opening at 09:30 and lunch.

How EaaS Turns Car Park Tarmac Into Revenue

The other thing exhibition venues tend to miss is that EV charging is not a cost line. It is a margin line if you set it up properly. Under PowerMe's Energy as a Service model, we fund and install the kit, we own and operate it, the venue gets a profit share for providing the floor space. No capex, no grid headache, no procurement cycle that runs longer than the contract you are bidding for.

If you would rather own the kit, we lease it. Either way, the maths starts working when you stop treating EV charging like a cost of doing business and start treating it like an ancillary revenue line that also happens to keep your exhibitors and your visitors happy. Crufts gets harder to win as a venue if the dog owners cannot charge their Kia EV6 between the agility ring and the gun dog final. That is the real commercial argument here, and it is not going away.

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

Festivals Want Green Power. Most Are Still Running on Red Diesel.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:39:56 GMT

So here is the thing about a British summer festival. The marketing tells you it is about ethics, organic food trucks, reusable cups, climate stages and a lineup that includes at least one earnest acoustic act lecturing the crowd about the planet between songs. The reality, parked discreetly behind the fence and humming away for the entire weekend, is a row of red diesel generators the size of shipping containers, chugging through thousands of litres of fuel a day so the headliner can plug a guitar pedal in.

It is one of those weird British contradictions, right? Glastonbury has 200,000 people drinking oat milk lattes while a generator that would not look out of place at a quarry powers the stage behind them. And it has been this way for decades because, frankly, there has never been a better option.

The diesel generator was never the eco choice. It was the only choice.

A festival site is a field. Sometimes a field with a single farm supply hookup if you are lucky, more often a field with nothing at all. You cannot run a Pyramid Stage off a domestic supply, and you cannot ask a DNO to drop a new substation in a Somerset cow pasture for three days a year. So organisers have done what they have always done since the 70s. Hire in diesel generators by the dozen, pay the fuel bill, pay the trucking bill and listen to them rattle on for the weekend.

The numbers are a bit grim. Powerful Thinking, the festival industry's own sustainability group, reckons UK outdoor events burn through around 12 million litres of diesel a year. A single mid sized festival chews through 50,000 litres across a weekend, which is roughly the carbon footprint of flying 60 people to Sydney and back. Red diesel, the stuff most events use because it is cheaper, has been getting harder to justify ever since HMRC tightened the rules in 2022.

So the pressure is real. Sponsors are asking awkward questions. Councils are starting to refuse permits for sites without a credible sustainability plan. And punters, the ones paying £350 for a weekend ticket, are increasingly bothered about why their "green" festival smells like a B&Q car park in 1994.

What actually replaces a diesel generator at a festival

This is where it gets interesting because, until recently, the honest answer was "nothing yet". The kit was not there. Batteries existed but the ones that could deliver real festival grade power were either too heavy to truck in, too slow to recharge between sets or did not have the cycle life to survive a full season of Boomtown, Reading, Leeds, Latitude and back again.

LTO chemistry changes that. Toshiba SCiB cells, which is what sits inside every PowerMe mobile unit and the hybrid stack inside FreeMe, handle 4C charge rates without active cooling and tens of thousands of cycles before they meaningfully degrade. That matters because at a festival you are not sipping power, you are slamming it. Sound desks, lighting rigs, LED walls, food trader sockets, traders' fridges and production cabins, all going simultaneously, then nothing for six hours overnight, then full whack again at midday.

A TitanMe Max gives you 100kWh and 200kW DC output in a euro pallet footprint. A FreeMe 8ft container gets you 150kWh on a forklift. A FreeMe 20ft does 1MWh and four heads. None of them need a substation. None rattle. None stink. And the bigger ones can be topped up from a single grid feed during build week if needed, which is a fair compromise compared to running 30 gennies for four days solid.

The commercial bit, because the romance only goes so far

Here is the part organisers actually care about. Diesel hire plus fuel plus refuelling logistics plus driver hours, on a big festival, runs into six figures every event. Battery hire delivered as an Energy as a Service package shifts that cost from "shovel money into a fuel tank" to "pay a per event service fee", which is roughly what you were paying anyway, except now you can put it in your green credentials slide deck and actually mean it.

For touring promoters running multiple events across a summer the maths gets better. Lease a fleet of TitanMe or FreeMe units, move them between sites on a Hiab, recharge between events on a single grid hookup. One asset stack covering Boardmasters in August, a corporate weekend in September, a Christmas market in December.

If you are running smaller spec, village fetes, county shows, comedy festivals, motoring events, MobileMe is the 11.5kWh recovery truck mountable unit that runs traders' sockets, stage monitors and a coffee cart without anyone hearing a thing.

The bit that has to change first

Honestly, it is the briefing process. Production managers are still being handed a power schedule that assumes diesel. The spec sheet says "100kVA, 24 hour fuel tank, two operators" because that is how it has always been written. Until that sheet starts saying "150kWh LTO, silent operation, zero on site emissions" the suppliers will keep wheeling diesel in.

Organisers who want to be ahead of this, the ones planning summer 2027 already because that is how festival production timelines work, should be having the battery conversation right now, not in six months when the sponsor decks are due.

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

Energy Retailers Want EV Charging Revenue. The Grid Says Wait.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:39:27 GMT

So here is the awkward truth about the UK energy retail market. Octopus, EDF, OVO, British Gas, EON, ScottishPower, every single one of them has put EV charging at the top of their B2B growth deck. Commercial demand is real, the margins on a managed charging service are genuinely attractive and the path to upselling a corporate energy customer onto chargers and software and demand response is right there in the slides. And yet when the actual rollout starts, the whole thing slows down to the speed of a DNO application form.

I have watched this from the inside. The retailer pitches the customer, the customer signs, the energy team go to deploy and then somebody mentions the half meg upgrade at the depot. Eighteen months later, the customer is on the phone wondering why the chargers that were promised at signature have not appeared and the account manager is on the phone to the DNO sounding tired. The deal closes, the revenue does not start.

The energy retailer cannot move faster than the wires

Here is the thing nobody likes to say out loud at the trade body events. The retail side of an energy company has almost no leverage over the DNO. They are separate businesses under the licence ringfence and even where the same group owns both ends of the chain, the DNO has its own regulator, its own queue and its own connection bill to send. So the utility account manager who has just sold a 1.5MW depot charging package to a logistics customer in Wolverhampton is in exactly the same queue as the bloke who runs the chip shop next door. Maybe a marginally faster queue if the connection is straightforward but still a queue measured in quarters not weeks.

The customer does not care. The customer signed a piece of paper that said they would be charging electric trucks by the end of the year. They are not interested in the difference between the supply licence and the distribution licence and frankly nor should they be.

Off grid is the only honest answer

PowerMe was built for this exact gap. The FreeMe range is containerised charging infrastructure with onboard energy storage and hybrid LTO and LFP chemistry that drops onto an existing yard or car park without a trench, without a DNO upgrade and without a wayleave conversation with the neighbours. The container arrives on a lorry, sits on the tarmac and starts charging vehicles the same week. The energy retailer can wrap their own supply contract around it, badge it in their own colours and book the revenue on the customer's normal billing cycle.

The clever bit, and this is where the utility B2B teams should be paying attention, is that FreeMe also acts as a buffer. The unit pulls energy from whatever connection the site already has, however modest, charges its own battery during the quieter periods then delivers high power on demand to the vehicles. So a customer with a 100kW site supply can still deliver 350kW to a tractor unit because the buffer fills the gap. The retailer gets a deployable product, the customer gets the service they were sold and the DNO upgrade can come later as a planned upgrade rather than a critical path blocker.

Where TitanMe Max earns its keep

Some customers want a mobile answer rather than a fixed asset. A logistics network with eight depots might not want eight FreeMe units sitting permanently; they might want two TitanMe Max units that move around the estate on a rota. TitanMe Max sits on a pallet footprint, runs at 200kW DC and shifts between sites on a flatbed without the customer having to file a single planning application. For the utility B2B team, this is the product that converts a slow site survey into a Friday afternoon deployment.

The Toshiba SCiB LTO chemistry inside the mobile range matters here, not because anyone reads the cell datasheet but because the cycle life and the charge speed mean a single unit can do four or five jobs in a day rather than two. The economics work because the asset turns over faster than anything LFP based can manage.

EaaS suits the utility model surprisingly well

The Energy as a Service model is built for the utility. The retailer signs the customer onto the energy supply contract as normal, PowerMe owns and operates the kit on a revenue share and the retailer keeps the customer relationship without the capex sitting on their balance sheet. Leasing also works where the customer wants to own the asset on a finance line but EaaS is where the volume goes because nobody at a busy logistics operator is looking for a new piece of capex to argue about at the next budget meeting.

The retailer gets to keep its promise. The customer gets the chargers it was sold. The DNO timeline becomes a planning exercise for the next phase rather than a blocker on the first one.

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

Your Anchor Tenant Wants EV Chargers. Your Capex Says No.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:40:13 GMT

So here is the thing. Retail park landlords spent thirty years perfecting the tenant mix. Anchor supermarket at one end, B&Q or Wickes at the other, Costa and Pets at Home dropped in the middle and a Greggs by the entrance so the school run feels productive on the way home. The footfall worked, the rents held up, the service charge covered the bins and the lighting and the bloke who paints over the trolley scrapes once a year. Lovely. Until the anchor tenant wrote and asked when the EV chargers were going in.

The Tenant Mix Has Changed and Nobody Told the Landlord

Retail park tenants are not asking nicely any more. They are putting it in the lease. Major grocers are writing minimum charger counts into new leases and renewals, the DIY chains are running their own electric van fleets in and out of the loading bays and customer surveys keep coming back saying the same thing. People with EVs pick the retail park that has chargers over the one that does not. They do their weekly shop while the car tops up, they grab a coffee, they wander into Currys to look at a telly they had no plans to buy. Footfall up, basket size up, dwell time up. The leasing team should be putting champagne on the table for it.

Except the landlord has been handed the bill. A proper 350kW hub with a DNO upgrade is the wrong side of a million quid before the first car plugs in and the DNO has helpfully sent through a connection offer with an eighteen month lead time and a quote that has more zeros than the last refurbishment. The capex committee, who were quite happy approving paint and signage, now have a charging infrastructure budget line they did not ask for. So they sit on it. And the anchor tenant emails again.

The Maths Most Retail Parks Get Stuck On

The standard story goes like this. You commission a feasibility study, the consultants come back with a number, the number is too big, the board says no, the leasing director quietly takes the chargers out of the next renewal and the tenant goes elsewhere. Or you do push ahead, you trench the car park to lay cable, you close half the surface for six weeks, the tenants who pay your rent get angry about the lost spaces, the DNO turns up late, the substation upgrade overruns and the chargers come on at half the speed you specified because the local network cannot deliver the load you assumed in the spreadsheet. Either way the landlord is the one wearing it.

This is before we get to the operating headache. Who takes the payments? Who fixes the broken screens? Who chases the OCPP backend when it falls over on bank holiday weekend? Whoever signed the cheque, that is who.

How PowerMe Drops It In Without the DNO Queue

FreeMe is a containerised charging system that arrives by HGV and is commissioned in days, not months. The 8ft variant runs 150kWh, the 10ft runs 350kWh with two heads, the 20ft goes to a megawatt with four heads and the 40ft sits at three megawatts when you genuinely have the demand. It sits on the existing car park surface. No trench. No civils. No DNO upgrade if the load profile suits and a much smaller grid ask if you do want to plug it in for top up. The Toshiba SCiB LTO chemistry inside takes a fast recharge without the cycle life penalty that LFP gets hammered with, which means the asset stands up to retail park duty cycles where you might do two hundred sessions on a Saturday and three on a Tuesday.

The point is operational. Sign the deal on a Wednesday, the unit lands the following month, the tenants stop emailing, the EV drivers stop driving past to the Aldi down the road. You go from a problem the board has parked to a profit centre that turns up in the management accounts.

The Profit Share Most Landlords Have Never Been Offered

Here is where it gets interesting. PowerMe runs two models. You can lease the kit if you want the energy revenue and the operating control, and the leasing facility is structured so the asset stays off your balance sheet. Or you can go Energy as a Service, where PowerMe funds, deploys, owns and operates the unit and you receive a profit share for providing the bay. Zero capex. Zero operating headache. The chargers turn up, the network runs, the tenants get what they wanted and a cheque arrives every quarter. Property directors who have spent the year explaining why the capex committee said no quite enjoy that conversation.

Either model gets the chargers on site inside a quarter, which is the difference between holding onto the anchor tenant and watching them open the renewal letter looking for a reason to leave.

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

Electric Boats Have Arrived. Your Marina Pedestal Hasn't.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:54:02 GMT

So you run a marina, and last summer two visiting yachts asked you about charging. Both of them electric. One was a Candela C8 hydrofoil, the other was a Vita day cruiser, and the chap on the Vita pointed out, politely enough, that the 16 amp blue pedestal at the end of pontoon C was not going to do the job. It might do a kettle. It was not going to put a meaningful charge into a 252kWh battery before the tide turned.

And that, in a sentence, is where most UK marinas now find themselves. The boats have gone electric. The pedestal hasn't.

The pedestal nobody designed for an electric boat

Marina shore power was specified back when the most demanding thing on a yacht was a fridge that struggled and a 240 volt heater you weren't really supposed to use. 16 amp or 32 amp pedestals on the residential berths, maybe a 63 amp blue commando on the visitor finger if the marina had been generous with the cable runs. None of that is going to charge an electric boat. A Vita Lion comes in at 252kWh. A Candela C8 at 69kWh. X Shore boats sit somewhere in the middle. RAD Propulsion has retrofit kits going onto traditional hulls that need a proper top up between passages. All the big groups, from Premier Marinas to MDL, from Boatfolk to Yacht Havens, have the same letter from the same DNO sitting on a desk somewhere. The pedestal was never going to cope.

And the funny thing is, you can ring up the DNO and ask for an upgrade, and you will get a number back that you cannot use. Eighteen months minimum, six figures for the cable, plus a ground works bill that gets bigger every time someone realises the supply runs under the boatyard. That is not a marina upgrade. That is a marina rebuild.

The car park nobody costed in either

Here is the bit boards don't always spot. The berth holder who arrives in a Tesla Model Y and the visiting weekender who pulls up in an electric Range Rover have both also got nowhere to charge. The marina car park, the same one with the cracked tarmac and the lines somebody painted in 1998, has quietly become a forecourt. Berth holders are spending the weekend on the boat, the car is sitting there for forty eight hours doing nothing and they would happily pay 60p a kWh to have it full when they go home on Sunday. You are not capturing that revenue because there is nothing for them to plug into.

Two demand profiles, one site, neither of them served. Quietly, every weekend.

What actually solves it

The PowerMe answer is built for exactly this kind of site and it ships in days rather than years. TitanMe is a 40kWh, 150kW DC unit mounted on a van. It will drive down the access road, pull up at the fuel berth or the slipway and deliver a real charge to a tender, a day boat or a car in fifteen minutes flat. For the bigger marinas, FreeMe is the containerised solution that sits by the harbour office, drops in without ground works, runs on its own Toshiba LTO battery bank and serves the car park and the visitor berths at the same time. Both products do the thing the DNO cannot do, which is turn up.

Commercially, you have two routes. Lease the kit if you want to run the energy revenue yourself, or take it on Energy as a Service where PowerMe funds, deploys and operates the unit and you take a profit share for providing the site. Either way you have not dug a trench, you have not paid for an HV upgrade and you are not waiting on a quote from a DNO surveyor who has not returned a call since March.

The marina that captures it first wins the cruising route

Cruising patterns in the Solent, the South West, the East Coast and the Scottish lochs all key off where you can refuel. Electric boats are no different, except the refuelling station is your charger and the alternative is a marina ten miles down the coast. The first marina on a cruising route with proper electric capacity becomes the default destination. The second one gets the boats that did not get a berth. The rest of them lose a generation of boaters who simply stop showing up.

The leisure marine market in the UK runs to billions, electric is arriving faster than the trade press wanted to admit and the question for any marina operator is not really whether to charge for power. It is whether you have anything worth charging from.

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

Why an EV Breakdown Costs Three Times What a Petrol One Does

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 17 May 2026 08:40:31 GMT

So here is the thing nobody in roadside recovery wants to admit out loud. EV breakdowns are not a marketing problem or a future problem or a transition problem to be worried about somewhere round 2030. They are a margin problem. Right now. Today. And the operators sitting around the depot saying we will deal with it when the volumes get bigger are about to find out that the volumes are already bigger than they realise.

The AA's own figures tell the story. Out of charge calls are now sitting comfortably in the top three reasons a recovery operator gets dispatched to a private car. Not gearbox. Not clutch. Not the alternator. Battery flat in a Model Y on the hard shoulder of the A14 outside Newmarket. And here is the bit that should be making fleet directors sweat. Every single one of those calls takes about three times as long to clear as the petrol equivalent.

The Job You Used to Bill in Forty Minutes

Look, an out of fuel call in the petrol world is forty minutes if the driver has to come from halfway across the county. You arrive, you put five litres in the tank, you wait while it primes, you wave them off and you are already rolling toward the next job. The operator goes home at six. Easy.

The EV version is nothing like that. You arrive, the car is sat on zero state of charge. You cannot stick a jerry can in it. You cannot tow it on a rope because most modern EVs have the motors permanently engaged with the drive wheels and dragging them at speed cooks the inverter. So now you are loading the car onto a flatbed, driving it to the nearest functional rapid charger which on a bad day in Cumbria might be forty minutes the other way, parking up while it takes on enough juice to actually make it back to the customer's drive, then loading or following them home. Two hours minimum. Often three.

And the customer is furious because they were already late for whatever they were trying to get to. The driver is annoyed because that is one job he has done in three hours when he would normally have done three jobs. And the operations director is looking at fleet utilisation on Monday morning wondering where the money went.

The Maths That Actually Matters

So let us do the maths properly because this is where it gets interesting. A typical Category 1 recovery job pays the operator somewhere between one hundred and eighty and two hundred and twenty quid. If the driver and the truck clear that in forty minutes you are running at a sensible cost recovery and the business eats. If the same job takes two hours because the car is electric, you have just tripled the cost of doing it and the customer is still paying you the same two hundred.

That is the difference between a job that funds the business and a job that quietly bleeds it. Multiply by however many EV calls a busy operator is now taking in a week and the picture turns grim quickly. The AA, the RAC, Green Flag, the independents on every industrial estate from Truro to Thurso. They all know this. Nobody has had a clean answer.

MobileMe Is the Clean Answer

This is where PowerMe MobileMe comes in. MobileMe is an 11.5kWh LTO battery pack with a 40kW DC output, bolted to the back of an existing recovery truck. Toshiba SCiB cells which means it does not cook itself at a 4C discharge rate, does not need active liquid cooling and recharges back up while the truck is moving to the next call. The unit will give a stranded EV roughly fifty to seventy miles of range in about fifteen minutes. Long enough to get to a proper rapid charger. Long enough to get home. Long enough to make the meeting the customer was already late for.

The driver arrives. Plugs in. Brews a cup of tea. Job done start to finish in twenty minutes. He is rolling toward the next call by the top of the hour. The customer is in their own car heading down the road. The flatbed never came out the depot. The operations director is suddenly smiling at the utilisation numbers again.

Lease It, Mount It, Run It

We sell MobileMe on a lease. Outright the unit is £19,995 plus VAT . Lease payments scale with fleet size and term, three year option being the most popular. Ten year design life on the battery thanks to the LTO chemistry which is roughly double what you get on the LFP units some competitors are pushing. Mount it on the truck, integrate the charging session into the dispatch system, train the driver in an afternoon. That is the whole job.

We have already had conversations with two of the big motoring organisations and a fair handful of independent operators about portfolio rollouts. The interesting question is not whether MobileMe works. It clearly does. The real question is which recovery operator is going to be first to turn EV breakdowns from a margin sink into a chargeable service line, and which operator is still loading Teslas onto flatbeds at three in the afternoon in 2027 wondering why the P and L looks like it does.

I know which side of that line I would want to be on.

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

Electric HGVs Have Arrived. The Depot Grid Has Not.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:39:30 GMT

So the first Volvo FH Electric tractor unit rolled into a Midlands depot last month, plugged in and quietly drained about eighty percent of the available site power. The operations director told me about it on the phone, and the bit that stuck with me was that he sounded resigned rather than angry. The kit had arrived. The grid had not. He knew exactly what was coming next, which was an eighteen month DNO quote and a number with too many zeros on it.

Here is the thing nobody quite says out loud. The HGV electrification story is real now. Volvo FH Electric, DAF XD Electric, the Tevva 7.5 tonners, the Mercedes eActros, the Renault E Tech T, they are all shipping into UK fleets and they all want to plug into the same shape of depot that was sized for a few forklifts and a lighting rig. The maths does not work.

The Number That Makes Logistics Directors Stop Talking

A single electric tractor unit needs roughly 350kWh per turnaround. Round it up for losses and the demand is closer to 400. A modest twenty tractor depot running a single overnight cycle is looking at 7MWh a night. That is not a top up, that is a new substation. The DNO will quote eighteen months at best, more often two years, and they will ask for the grid reinforcement bill on top, which sits anywhere between two hundred grand and three quarters of a million depending on where you are.

Now layer on the fact that most logistics yards are leased, not owned. So a fleet director is being asked to put half a million quid of trench, transformer and DNO works into a site they may not be at in seven years. The boardroom does not like that conversation. Neither does the CFO. And the truck is sitting outside the office, on order, with a delivery date in twelve weeks.

Why Static Charging Was the Wrong Answer to Begin With

The standard playbook is to bolt a static charger to the wall, run an armoured cable across the yard and pretend the grid will catch up. It will not. The grid in most industrial estates was specified at a time when the heaviest electrical load was the welder in the maintenance bay. Stick six 350kW chargers on it and the substation phones home asking what you think you are doing.

Static charging also assumes you know exactly where the trucks need to plug in for the next twenty years. Anyone who has watched a logistics yard for an afternoon knows the bays move, the lane direction changes and the third party tenants come and go. Concrete and copper buried in the ground does not care about your operations plan.

What FreeMe Actually Does in a Depot

FreeMe is our containerised charger, eight to forty foot ISO footprint, 150kWh to 3MWh of onboard storage and a hybrid LTO/LFP architecture that lets it absorb grid trickle overnight and deliver fast charge during the turnaround window. It sits on the yard, no ground works, no DNO upgrade. If the depot moves in three years it goes with you on a low loader. If the fleet doubles, you put a second one in alongside.

For the operators who want to electrify the first three tractors before the boardroom signs off the depot upgrade, TitanMe Max is the interim. It is a 100kWh, 200kW DC unit on a euro pallet footprint. Park it next to the tractor that needs juice, walk it to the next bay when that one is done. Pilot the electric fleet without breaking a single paving slab.

The Commercial Bit, In Plain English

There are two ways to run this. Lease the kit and operate it yourself, which is the right call if you want to control the energy buy and run the chargers as part of your own balance sheet. Or the EaaS model, where PowerMe funds the unit, deploys it, owns and operates it and you take a profit share for providing the depot. Zero capex, no DNO bill, no eighteen month wait and the fleet starts running electric next quarter rather than next decade.

The fleets that move first on this will be the ones explaining to the supermarket retailers and the third party logistics customers why their CO2 numbers are going the right way. The fleets that wait for the grid to catch up will be explaining why they cannot bid on the contract.

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

Net Zero Productions Are Still Running on Red Diesel

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:39:03 GMT

So here is the contradiction nobody at the production meeting wants to admit. Netflix has its sustainability pledge, the streamers are all signed up to the BAFTA albert standard, Pinewood is talking about being a green hub and yet base camp on a typical location shoot is still a diesel generator parked behind the makeup trailer chugging away for fourteen hours a day. Two generators if it is a big shoot. Three if catering is on site. The badge says Net Zero Production and the smell says otherwise.

This is one of those things where the marketing department and the production sparks live in completely different worlds. Marketing wants the green credentials on the press release. Sparks wants the genny to start when they hit the button at five thirty in the morning in a damp field outside Tunbridge Wells. You cannot blame either of them. The question is whether anyone has actually built the alternative.

The energy demand on a real location is not small

Let us be specific about what a location shoot actually needs. You have the camera trucks, two or three of them depending on scale, each with batteries to charge between takes. You have the lighting trucks running HMIs, LEDs, the lot. You have hair and makeup, which is hairdryers, straighteners, mirror lights, the kettle. You have costume, which is a steamer and another kettle. You have catering, which is the proper killer because catering hot tables and walk in fridges pull serious load. You have the production office trailer with laptops, monitors, comms gear, satellite uplink. You have unit base with crew vans and these days an increasing number of crew vans are electric.

Add it up and a mid sized drama location is asking for between 100kWh and 400kWh across a typical shooting day. A feature film base camp can push past that. And then somebody parks an electric Berlingo on the unit base and asks where they plug in. Right.

Mobile is not a nice to have. It is the whole point.

Here is the bit that makes location production different from a stadium or a hospital car park. The job moves. Monday you are in a manor house near Bath. Tuesday you have wrapped and you are in a warehouse in Croydon. Wednesday is a tunnel exterior somewhere on the M4. You cannot trench in fibre, dig a transformer pit and submit a DNO application for a location you will leave on Thursday morning. The whole infrastructure has to walk in, sit there for the dwell and walk out again behind you.

This is why static charging conversations are pointless for productions. Forget the DNO. Forget the eighteen months. You need power that arrives on a low loader, plugs in and goes home with the crew.

Where PowerMe actually fits the shoot

The PowerMe TitanMe is a forty kilowatt hour LTO battery system mounted on a van. It is the obvious unit base solution. It rolls onto location with the rest of the trucks, parks up and delivers 150kW of DC charging plus AC capacity for the trailers. The Toshiba SCiB chemistry inside means it takes a fast recharge between days, so the location manager is not waiting overnight to get the unit ready for the next call. For crew EVs and the lower draw kit it is the one piece of kit that replaces the smaller genny entirely.

For bigger productions the TitanMe Max steps in. One hundred kilowatt hour, 200kW DC, cube form factor, sits on a euro pallet footprint. Drop it next to the camera trucks and it handles camera battery flow, lighting reserves and the heavier crew vehicle charging all from one source. You pair it with a containerised FreeMe if base camp is sitting for a few weeks on a back lot at Pinewood or Shepperton, where it makes sense to deploy 350kWh and forget about it for the duration.

The MobileMe, recovery truck mounted, becomes the safety net. Someone has run an electric tracking vehicle flat on the way to set. The MobileMe pulls up, gives them enough to limp to the TitanMe at base, the day continues. No call to the recovery firm at eight in the morning when the unit is meant to be turning over.

The commercial bit nobody talks about

Productions do not buy equipment. Productions hire. The PowerMe leasing model maps cleanly onto a six week or twelve week shoot. You take the unit for the duration, hand it back at wrap and it goes out to the next show. The albert carbon calculator gets a result it can actually live with, the line producer gets a budget line they can defend and the sparks gets a button that works at five thirty in the morning.

You know what the funny thing is? The studios have been waiting for someone to bring them this. The pledge is signed, the calculator is open, the gap on the spreadsheet is the diesel line. Fill the gap properly and the next press release writes itself.

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

Universities Want Net Zero. Their Car Parks Are Still Petrol.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:39:27 GMT

So here is the thing about universities. Every prospectus has a section on sustainability. Net Zero by 2030. Carbon neutral campus. Single use plastic banned in the union bar. The vice chancellor has done a TedX about it. The estates director has a wall planner with green stickers all over it.

And then you walk out to the staff car park and try to charge your Tesla.

There are two posts by the cycle rack from 2019, a 7kW Type 2 each, and one of them has been broken since the Christmas before last. The other one charges your car at the speed of a slightly enthusiastic kettle. Meanwhile across the car park there are forty other EVs, the students are turning up with Hyundais on PCP and the lecture theatres are full of people who genuinely care about all this stuff.

This is the gap. Net Zero ambition meets capital constraint meets listed campus and the answer is two broken Type 2 posts.

The grid wait nobody on the prospectus mentions

UK universities operate on grid connections that were designed for a different century. The cabling at Oxford and Cambridge runs under cobbles that English Heritage has feelings about. The science block at Edinburgh has a transformer from the 1970s. Loughborough has a campus the size of a small town and a DNO connection point that was sized when the university taught two thousand students, not seventeen thousand.

When the estates team rings the DNO to ask about an upgrade for fast charging the conversation goes one of two ways. Either it is an eighteen month wait and a six figure reinforcement quote, or the DNO points out that the substation cannot take any more load and the upgrade is in the queue behind a housing estate that has not been built yet.

That is not a sustainability strategy. That is a problem.

Trenching across a campus the registrar will not let you touch

Even if the grid plays ball there is the small matter of ground works. UK campuses are full of services nobody documented. Steam pipes from the 1950s heating system. Fibre lines the IT department added in 2003 when the network went hot. Listed building grounds. Quad lawns the bursar is more protective of than her own children. War memorials. Bronze age remains if you are unlucky enough to be York or Durham.

Try telling the registrar that you want to dig a trench from the substation to the car park and watch the colour drain from her face.

What actually works on a campus

This is where it gets interesting. PowerMe builds a containerised charger called FreeMe . Eight foot, ten foot, twenty foot, forty foot variants depending on how much energy a site needs. It runs off a hybrid battery system, Lithium Titanate handling the peak load and Lithium Iron Phosphate doing the bulk storage. The whole unit drops in on a hard standing, plugs into whatever grid connection is already there and tops itself up overnight while delivering 150kW or 200kW DC charging to the cars during the day.

No trench. No DNO upgrade. No conversation with the listed building people. No ground works. No bronze age burial sites disturbed.

It looks like a shipping container painted in the university brand colours. Which, given that half the modern halls of residence already are shipping containers, fits the campus aesthetic perfectly.

The capex line the bursar will actually sign off

Here is the bit universities really need to hear. The vast majority of UK universities have not got capex for charging infrastructure. They have got it for a new sports hall and a hydrogen research lab and a building that will be named after a donor who has not been born yet, but they have not got it for forty fast chargers in the staff car park.

PowerMe runs a commercial model called Energy as a Service . We fund the unit, we own it, we install it, we operate it, we maintain it and we run the software. The university provides the location and takes a profit share. Fifteen percent is the typical number. No capex, no operating cost, no risk on the asset.

The car park starts generating revenue for the university instead of costing money to maintain. The sustainability report gets a chapter that is not complete nonsense. The vice chancellor's TedX talk gets a slide that actually shows a deployed asset. The estates director takes the green sticker off the planner.

For the surge weeks, graduation, open days, freshers, the summer conference season when the university hires the place out to corporates, we can drop in a TitanMe van mounted unit alongside the FreeMe to absorb the peak. When the surge is over it drives away. Try doing that with a static install bolted to a concrete plinth.

Where this goes next

The universities that move first on this will end up with a tidy commercial asset, a sustainability story that is actually true and a car park that does not embarrass them on the open day tour. The ones that wait for the DNO will still be in the queue when the eHGVs arrive.

If you are the estates director, the sustainability lead, the bursar or the chap in maintenance who has to keep the Type 2 posts working with a multimeter and a prayer, give us a call. We will walk the site, model the deployment and put real chargers where the broken ones used to be.

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

Why Your CPO Network Stops Where the DNO Says It Does

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:38:23 GMT

So you run a CPO. The dashboard says four thousand sites live, the press release said six thousand by next year, the investors want ten thousand by 2028 and the development team has just dropped over a list of forty potential sites where the DNO has quoted eighteen months minimum, three of them with a connection bill that would make a Range Rover blush. That is the gap between the strategy slide and the spreadsheet, and it is getting wider every quarter.

CPO network expansion has hit a wall that nobody really saw coming three years ago. It is not demand, demand is fine. It is not equipment, the hardware vendors are queuing up the loading bay. It is the grid, and the planning, and the ground works, and the asbestos under the forecourt, and the leaseholder who wants a sit down before you cut into the tarmac. Every site you actually want is the one that takes two years to deliver.

The map with the white spaces

Look at your coverage map. You know the bits you do not like to think about. The A road between two motorway services where every Tesla driver is hunting for a charger. The retail park on the edge of a market town where Sainsburys would let you in tomorrow if you would just bring the kit. The country pub group with seventy sites that wants a partner. The travel plaza next to a junction the DNO will not touch until 2028.

These are not edge cases. These are the sites where your competitors are not yet present, the ones where you would win market share tomorrow if you could just get a charger live. And right now you cannot, because the eighteen month rule applies to all of them.

Why the static site model breaks at the edges

The economics of the traditional CPO site work brilliantly at a transformer that already exists with spare capacity. They fall apart the moment you need an upgrade. A 1MVA DNO connection in the South East is now quoted at £180,000 plus, before any cabling, ground works or commissioning. Twelve to twenty four months later you have a site. By then your nearest rival has probably stuck up a competing hub two miles down the A road.

The other problem nobody talks about is leasehold. Most of the genuinely useful sites are leased, not owned. Spending £400,000 on ground works for a fifteen year lease with a five year break clause is a board level decision and it should be. Static infrastructure ties your capital to dirt you do not own.

FreeMe as the bridge

FreeMe is the containerised side of the PowerMe range. ISO container footprint, 8ft through to 40ft depending on the capacity you need, from 150kWh up to 3MWh. A hybrid chemistry with LFP doing the bulk storage and Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate on the front of the system to absorb the 4C peak demand. Off grid capable, so it does not need a DNO upgrade to deliver 200kW, 350kW or higher to the dispensers.

What that means in CPO terms is straightforward. You pick the site. The container drops in on a crane. There is no trench, no transformer, no DNO wait, no eight hundred pound a yard ground works bill from a contractor who has decided this week is the week to ask for danger money. The dispensers go up. The unit recharges from the existing supply trickle, or from a smaller grid connection you can actually get, and it serves the kerb at full output.

Two weeks from order to live. Sometimes faster, depending on what the site needs above ground.

The commercial bit and why it matters to the CPO P&L

You have two ways to take the kit. Lease, which keeps the unit on PowerMe's balance sheet, gives you a fixed monthly payment and full operational control of the energy revenue. Or Energy as a Service, where PowerMe funds the asset, deploys it, owns and operates it, and you take a profit share for branding the dispensers and bringing the site. EaaS is how the network expands without burning your own capital, and it makes more sense than you might think for the sites you would never have built off your own balance sheet anyway.

Either way the asset is mobile. If the site underperforms the container comes off and goes to one that does. That is a thing static infrastructure can never offer you. The leaseholder ends the lease, the kit walks. The retail park footfall drops, the kit walks. The local DNO finally delivers a grid upgrade in 2029, the kit walks to the next eighteen month gap site. Capital does not get stranded under tarmac you do not own.

The reason all this matters is simple. The CPOs who win the next phase of the market will not be the ones with the biggest cheque book for ground works. They will be the ones who can put kilowatts where the cars actually are, faster than anyone else, and move them when the demand pattern shifts. That is a different business model and the kit has to match it.

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

Electric Taxis at the Rank: The Charging Maths Nobody Did

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:38:47 GMT

So here is the thing. Transport for London says every new private hire vehicle has to be zero emission from January, and every black cab licensed since 2018 has been a plug in hybrid LEVC TX5 with a battery just big enough to wind up its driver. The fleet is going electric, the rules say so, the manufacturers have lined up Tesla Model 3s and BYD Atto 3s and the LEVCs are clocking up half a million miles each, and nobody appears to have asked the obvious question. Where do the bloody things charge?

Look at Heathrow on a Monday morning. The taxi feeder park at the perimeter has eight hundred cabs waiting to feed the terminals. The dwell time in the queue is between forty minutes and three hours depending on the day, and there are roughly twelve working chargers on site. Twelve. For eight hundred cars. The driver gets to the front, drives to the terminal, picks up a fare to Putney, comes back with sixty miles on the battery, joins the back of the queue and prays the rank reaches the chargers before the battery does.

Paddington is the same story with less tarmac. The mainline station rank handles seven hundred cabs across a peak day, the holding area is on the Praed Street side with one charger that has been broken since February, and the drivers run circuits to a Shell garage on Edgware Road that has a single 50kW unit shared with the postcode. Every minute a cab spends plugged in is a minute it is not earning, and every minute it is not plugged in is a minute closer to a flatbed back to the depot.

The grid says no, and it says no slowly

The obvious answer is more chargers, and the obvious answer is wrong because the obvious answer requires a DNO upgrade. Heathrow's perimeter substations are tapped out servicing the terminals. The grid connection process for new high capacity charging at any London station rank is eighteen months minimum and the DNO will tell you, with a straight face, that the queue starts at thirty months for anything above 400kVA. By the time the grid arrives the contract for zero emission PHV has already lapsed and the rank operator has lost the relationship.

A taxi rank is not a forecourt. The dwell time is high, the throughput is concentrated, the demand is predictable to the minute because every flight lands at a known time and every commuter train clears the station on a fixed timetable. What ranks need is a thumping great power source that turns up in the morning, plugs the drivers in fast and goes home when the surge dies. They do not need a permanent installation that is sized for the worst case and idle for nineteen hours a day.

Why TitanMe Max is built for this exact problem

TitanMe Max is the cube. One hundred kilowatt hours of Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate in a euro pallet footprint, 200kW DC output, two charging heads, and a weight figure that drops to 1,430kg when the Gen 2 Toshiba cells arrive in the fourth quarter. You wheel it onto a corner of the rank, it does not need a foundation, it does not need a grid connection, it sits there and feeds taxis. At 200kW DC a LEVC TX5 with a thirty one kilowatt hour battery goes from twenty per cent to eighty in about thirteen minutes. That is roughly the time a driver spends moving through three positions in the Heathrow queue.

Run two TitanMe Max units back to back and you have four charging heads, twenty top ups an hour, and a power profile that scales with the queue. Park them next to the rank office. When the morning surge dies you swap a spent one for a freshly charged one and the rank does not notice. The LTO chemistry takes that pace day after day without sulking, because four hundred high power cycles a week is what Toshiba designed the cell to do.

Leasing makes the numbers work

Rank operators do not buy infrastructure. They run cabs and clip the cab. The PowerMe leasing model puts a TitanMe Max on the rank for a monthly fee that comes out of the per kilowatt hour charge the driver pays, and the operator never has to sign a finance lease with a bank that has never lent against a charger before. For a busy station rank a pair of units pays for itself inside the first quarter. For Heathrow scale, the Energy as a Service model is cleaner. PowerMe funds the kit, owns it, runs it and the rank shares the energy margin without spending a pound of capex.

Either way the rank has chargers tomorrow. Not in eighteen months. Tomorrow.

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

Council Car Parks: EVs Coming, Capex Gone, Grid Already Maxed

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 10 May 2026 08:40:04 GMT

So here is the awkward part of being a council in 2026. You have got an EV uptake forecast that nobody can argue with, the Department for Transport keeps reminding you about LEVI funding deadlines, residents are filing planning enquiries about kerbside charging, and the section 151 officer has just reviewed the capex programme for the next three years and politely told you there is no headroom for a £700,000 charging project at the leisure centre. Right? You know how this goes. Then somebody at the cabinet meeting suggests "what about the car park behind the library", everybody nods, and six weeks later the DNO comes back with a quote, an eighteen month wait and a connection charge that would buy a small fire engine.

Here is the thing. The economics of static EV charging were never built for the public sector. Static charging assumes a developer with a warm balance sheet, a piece of land with a fat grid feed and a horizon long enough to amortise the trench. Councils have one of those three on a good day. The trench alone is often the biggest single line item, and the trench is always the bit that ends up on the front page of the local paper next to a photo of a hole in the ground and an angry shopkeeper saying his footfall has dropped 40 percent.

Look at what councils actually need. They need EV charging at the leisure centre car park, the high street pay and display, the park and ride, the depot for the bin lorries that are turning electric whether the council is ready or not, and residents bays for the third of the borough that has no off street parking. Five different sites, five different load profiles, five different grid headaches, five different planning processes. And a capex envelope of zero, because there is no zero on this planet that is more zero than a council capex zero in May 2026.

EaaS Is the Public Sector Model Nobody Built Properly Yet

This is where Energy as a Service stops being a marketing slide and starts being the only commercially honest answer. The council provides the site, PowerMe funds, deploys, owns and operates a containerised FreeMe unit, and the council takes a profit share on every kWh dispensed. No capex line. No capital approval committee. No DNO bill. No trench. No fight with the conservation officer about the cabling route through the Victorian car park. The unit sits on the tarmac, plugs into whatever supply is available, runs off its own LTO and LFP hybrid battery and tops up overnight on cheap power.

For the council finance team this matters more than the technology does. EaaS shows up as a revenue line, not a capital ask. It moves the conversation from "can we afford this" to "how quickly can we replicate it across the other six car parks". The political conversation changes too, because nobody has to defend a £700,000 cheque to the local press when the deal is "the council provides the space, the operator provides everything else, and the council gets a share of the income".

Cornwall, Birmingham, Camden and the Bin Lorry Problem

Take a real example. A unitary authority like Cornwall Council has a fleet of waste collection vehicles slowly turning electric, a depot near Bodmin with a grid feed sized for the year the depot was built, and a LEVI bid that funded the chargers but did not fund the substation upgrade nobody costed properly. The DNO timeline is 2028. The first electric bin lorries are arriving in 2026. So what does the depot manager do? Sit in the dark for two years, hope for divine intervention, or drop in a containerised FreeMe with 350kWh of LTO and LFP buffer that charges six lorries overnight without touching the main feed.

Birmingham, Leeds, Camden, Westminster, every London borough you care to name, the same maths plays out. The grid problem is real. The timeline is real. The political pressure is real. The capex constraint is real. The only thing that needs to change is the procurement model.

Leasing for the Councils That Want to Own It

Some authorities will want the asset on their own books, particularly where the car park is generating decent income already and the political message is "the council is investing in the green transition". Fine. The same FreeMe unit is available on a leasing arrangement, the council pays a fixed monthly figure, owns the energy revenue outright and walks the asset to a different site if the use case changes. Try doing that with a 350kW static charger after you have just dug a 60 metre trench across the car park.

The Question for Councils Right Now

Are you trying to buy chargers, or are you trying to deliver charging? Because those are not the same question. If you are buying chargers you are signing up for capex, capex approval, a connection wait, and a long argument with the highways team about reinstatement. If you are trying to deliver charging, you can have a FreeMe sitting on the leisure centre car park inside a fortnight, a profit share agreement on the desk and a press release that says the council added rapid charging without spending public money.

The shift is not technical. The technology has been on the market for two years. The shift is procurement, mindset and a willingness to stop pretending the grid will arrive in time.

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

Coach Operators Are Going Electric. The Depot Isn't Ready.

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:39:58 GMT

Look, here is a slice of the EV transition that nobody is putting on the front page of the trade press. Coaches. Big 13 metre things that take fifty kids to a Year 8 trip out of Nantwich at seven in the morning and then trundle off to Heathrow with a load of holidaymakers by lunchtime and then back to the yard for an overnight run to Edinburgh. The fleet that nobody loves is going electric and the depots, frankly, are nowhere near ready.

The coach operator is the unglamorous middle child of road transport. Not a fleet van, not an HGV, not a black cab, not a refuse truck. Sitting on diesel margins thinner than a school catering contract, running on tender locked routes, and now facing the same net zero pressure as everyone else without the capex to show for it. So when the question of electrifying the coach fleet comes up, the answer is rarely the vehicle. The vehicles are arriving. The problem is the yard they go home to.

A coach is not a van and the battery proves it

An electric Transit carries 75kWh on a good day. An electric coach, the Yutong U12 or the BYD B12 or the Volvo BZL, is north of 350kWh and the long haul versions land at 540kWh. That is roughly seven times the energy of the van and roughly eleven times the energy of an electric saloon car. It does not nibble at the grid, it eats it.

To turn one of those coaches around in ninety minutes between a school run and an airport run you need 200kW or you do not turn it around at all. To pull a tour coach in at midnight off a Manchester run and have it ready for a 6am departure, the maths still says 200kW, ideally with two coaches charging at once. The depot grid that previously ran a kettle, a wash bay and the vending machine outside the canteen is going to look at the ask and laugh.

The grid is not coming, certainly not in time

Coach depots tend to sit on industrial estates, on agricultural fields converted to yards or on end of road sites where the land was cheap thirty years ago. The DNO upgrade quote for the 1MW or so that a serious electric coach yard needs is currently coming back at eighteen to thirty months wait and somewhere between £150,000 and £400,000 in cost. That is per yard. For an operator with five depots and an EBITDA margin most schools would be embarrassed to put on a budget line, the answer is no.

And it is no even before you have asked the bank for the chargers, the canopy, the metering and the comms cabinet. By which point the local authority that put your school transport contract out to tender has already given the route to someone with a battery powered fleet.

The honest answer is the kit walks in

PowerMe TitanMe Max is the 100kWh, 200kW DC mobile charger on a five tonne platform. It drives into the yard, plugs into whatever spare 32 amp socket the depot has, refills its own battery overnight or off solar, and pushes 200kW into a coach when the coach turns up. The depot does not need a new substation. It needs to keep the gates open and let the unit do its work.

For the bigger yards, FreeMe in 20ft container form delivers 1MWh of usable storage with four 200kW heads. Four coaches in a synchronous turnaround, no DNO upgrade, no trench, no canopy, no permitted development worry. The 40ft variant runs to 3MWh which is a regional hub for an operator running tours out of three counties. Toshiba SCiB LTO chemistry on the mobile units handles the 4C charge rate without the cooling overhead the LFP world is paying for. The unit walks in. If the lease on the yard ends or the operator outgrows the site, it walks out. Try doing that with a hardwired forecourt charger.

Buy the diesel saving, not the kit

Coach operators have never wanted to own diesel pumps. They wanted the diesel. The pump was someone else's capex. The same logic applies here, which is why our Energy as a Service contract drops onto a coach depot the way it does. PowerMe funds the unit, owns it, operates it. The operator pays per kWh delivered, much the way they paid per litre of diesel. Profit share is on the table for operators with strong yard footprint. No capex, no balance sheet pain, no DNO bill, no waiting.

For operators who want the asset and the depreciation, PowerMe Leasing offers a finance lease on the same kit. Same delivery, different balance sheet. School transport contracts running on a five year window like the asset on the books. Tour operators with a private equity story tend to like the EaaS profit share. We are agnostic. The operator picks the model that fits the year end accounts.

So here is where it actually lands. By 2030 most school transport contracts up for renewal will be electric tender locked. Local authorities are already writing it into the spec. The coach operators who have solved depot charging this year are the ones writing the bid winning answers next year. The ones still waiting for the DNO are bidding for routes they cannot service.

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

NHS Hospital Car Parks: The EV Cash Machine Nobody Builds

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:39:50 GMT

So here is the thing. Drive past Addenbrooke's, the Royal Free or Manchester Royal Infirmary on a Tuesday afternoon and what you will see is a car park the size of a small village, packed solid, with a ten minute queue of cars waiting for someone to leave. Staff cars staying eight hours. Visitor cars staying two. Nurses on twelve hour shifts. Outpatients in for half a day of tests. The dwell time is enormous, the footfall is enormous and the parking revenue, frankly, is already embarrassingly large.

And yet, on the EV charging front, almost nothing.

The maths on this is not subtle. The NHS runs around 1,200 hospital sites in England alone. UK plug in vehicle adoption is now well past a quarter of new registrations. Staff are buying EVs faster than the public, partly because the NHS itself runs salary sacrifice schemes through several frameworks that make a Polestar cheaper than a diesel Qashqai. So you end up with hospital workforces driving electric cars, parking on hospital land for entire shifts, and walking away with exactly the same amount of charge they came in with. It is the most obvious commercial opportunity in the British EV landscape and it is sitting there untouched because nobody has worked out how to pay for it.

Why the trusts cannot just install chargers

Look, the obstacle is not enthusiasm. Most estates teams I have spoken to know exactly what they want to do. The obstacle is capex, lead time and grid. A typical large acute trust has somewhere between fifteen hundred and three thousand parking spaces split across staff, visitor and patient. To put serious charging in, you need transformers, ducting under live operational car parks, six figure DNO connection quotes and an eighteen to thirty month wait for the grid upgrade itself. Then you need someone to fund it, run it, bill it, maintain it and not get sued when a cardiologist's Tesla refuses to charge on a Saturday morning.

Trust finance directors are not stupid. They look at the capex line, look at the chairs that need replacing in A&E, look at the tariff income and they politely defer the whole thing. Which is why most NHS car parks today have, at best, a token row of slow chargers near the main entrance that the hospital chaplain uses on a Wednesday.

What changes with off grid containerised charging

This is where FreeMe rewrites the spreadsheet. PowerMe drops a containerised unit into an existing parking bay area, no ground works, no DNO connection needed on day one, no trenches across the live car park. Two heads, four heads or eight heads depending on the size of the trust. A 350kWh containerised FreeMe pulled into the visitor overflow car park, plugged into the existing supply or running entirely off battery on a managed cycle, can be live within days of arrival on site.

And here is the commercially interesting bit. Under the Energy as a Service model, the trust does not pay for the equipment. PowerMe owns and operates the unit. The trust takes a profit share for providing the site, the patients and staff get the charging, and the unit walks back off the asphalt the day the trust decides it wants something different. Capex is zero. Grid upgrade is optional. The risk sits with us.

The numbers the trust finance director actually cares about

Take a 1,500 space hospital car park. Assume seven percent of visitor and staff vehicles are electric today, which is conservative for May 2026 and rising fast. That is roughly a hundred plug in cars circulating through the site every week. At an average top up of 25kWh per session and a margin north of 20p per kWh delivered, you are looking at a charging income line that pays for itself on visitor dwell time alone, before you have even touched the staff salary sacrifice EVs parked from seven in the morning to seven at night.

The trust does not have to model any of that. PowerMe runs the model. PowerMe runs the unit. The trust signs the host site agreement, takes the monthly cheque and gets to put a green tick next to the EV charging line on its sustainability report.

Why now matters

NHS England is not subtle about its 2030 net zero ambitions and the staff travel emissions line is the single largest movable number on most trusts' carbon ledgers. A car park full of EVs that cannot charge is not a sustainability win, it is a problem deferred. The trusts that move now are the ones who lock in the visitor catchment, who get the staff retention argument right, who plug into the Depot Charging Scheme funding window which closes 30 June 2026, and who do not have to explain to the auditor in three years why the car park is still effectively running on diesel patients.

The trusts that wait will end up doing this in 2028 with the same grid quote, eighteen months longer to wait and a lot more EVs in the staff bays.

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

Silverstone, Wembley, Goodwood: The EV Charging Surge Problem

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 06 May 2026 08:40:57 GMT

So picture the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Three days, 480,000 spectators, the biggest sporting event in the country by attendance. Now picture that same crowd in 2030 when half of them turn up in EVs and would quite like enough charge to get home without having to sleep in the village hall in Brackley.

The maths is brutal. Even if a fifth of those cars need a top up, that is fifty thousand vehicles wanting maybe 30kWh each. One and a half gigawatt hours of energy demand piled into a Sunday afternoon. The local grid in Northamptonshire was put in for a few villages and a service station. It was never designed to feed a small city for one weekend a year.

The static charger trap

Here is the thing. Most stadia and racecourses, when they finally get round to thinking about EV infrastructure, end up being sold a fixed charger setup by one of the big networks. They pay for ground works. They pay for a DNO upgrade that nobody warned them would take eighteen months and cost more than the chargers themselves. They end up with a bank of chargers that sit idle 350 days a year and fall over on the days that actually matter.

Goodwood Festival of Speed runs four days. The Cheltenham Festival runs four days. Aintree Grand National runs three days. Wembley hosts maybe forty event days out of 365. Twickenham is similar. The economics of fixed infrastructure on a venue that runs at five percent utilisation are, to put it politely, miserable.

What surge demand actually looks like

The pattern at every major venue is the same. Cars roll in over four hours, sit empty for six, then leave in a rush over two. Static charging cannot serve that load shape. You either over spec for the surge and waste capital the rest of the year or you under spec and watch furious customers post on social media about the queue at the charger.

Even at venues that are not strictly event led, like a Premier League ground hosting a midweek European tie or a music festival turning a field into a temporary city for the weekend, the surge is unforgiving. You do not need year round capacity. You need event day capacity that arrives on Friday and is gone by Monday.

TitanMe Max: rent the capacity, do not bury it

This is exactly what TitanMe Max was designed for. A 100kWh van mounted unit putting out 200kW of DC charging that drives onto site, parks where you need it, charges cars all weekend then drives off when the punters have gone home. No ground works. No DNO application. No marketing manager having to explain to the board why the static chargers are losing money 320 days a year.

For a Goodwood or a Silverstone you bring in a fleet of TitanMe Max units, position them across the public car parks and charge as many cars as you have units running. When the event finishes they go back to the leasing pool and roll on to the next venue. You pay for what you use. You do not capitalise infrastructure that sits idle.

For venues that do have genuine everyday demand from members or training facilities, FreeMe drops in containerised. No trenching, no DNO upgrade, off grid capable using the integrated battery to flatten whatever grid input you can get on site. Stadium staff car parks, racecourse public car parks, conference centre hardstanding, all get a working charging hub in days not years.

How the commercials actually stack up

Two ways to fund this. Lease the kit on a monthly basis that lines up with the event calendar (the standard leasing model) and write the cost off as event opex rather than capex sat on the balance sheet. Or hand the site over for Energy as a Service where PowerMe funds, deploys, owns and operates the charging while you take a profit share for providing the land. EaaS suits venues that want zero capex and a clean revenue line on what was previously dead tarmac.

The point is the funding model has to fit the demand. A racecourse that runs eighteen days a year does not need a fixed infrastructure spend that punishes it for the other 347 days. It needs surge capacity that arrives, performs and leaves. That is what mobile charging on Toshiba SCiB LTO chemistry actually does. Recharges in fifteen minutes between cars, cycles all weekend, rolls back in for the next event.

You know what is going to happen otherwise. Every year a major event will produce a queue story. Every year somebody will write that EVs are not ready. Every year venues will get blamed for not solving a problem the grid was never going to solve for them. Surge demand is not a failure of EVs. It is a failure of imagination from the people selling charging kit.

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

Caravan Parks and the Grid That Was Never Going to Cope

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 05 May 2026 08:39:09 GMT

So here is the thing about a caravan park in May. Every pitch is booked, the site shop is doing a roaring trade in disposable barbecues and Calor refills, and somewhere in the corner there is a Tesla Model Y plugged into a 13 amp socket that was originally installed for somebody's electric blanket in 1987. The owner is asking reception why his car only added eleven miles of range overnight. Reception has no idea. The grid, frankly, has even less.

This is the quiet crisis of the British holiday park. The car park is full of EVs. The customers expect to plug in. And the electrical infrastructure on most rural sites was specified back when the heaviest load was a Frigidaire fridge and a 2kW immersion heater.

The DNO Answer That Takes Longer Than a Child Grows Up

Ring up the local DNO and ask for the supply upgrade you actually need to put in eight 22kW chargers, then watch what happens. The first answer is usually a quote running into hundreds of thousands of pounds, because rural three phase is a long way away and the cable has to come through fields, under tracks, around protected hedgerows and across drainage that nobody has mapped since the 1960s. The second answer is the timeline. Eighteen months at best. Three years at worst. Sometimes four if the substation needs reinforcement.

You are running a caravan park. You do not have eighteen months. You barely have eighteen weeks before the next bank holiday weekend lands.

There is also the small matter of planning. A lot of these sites sit in AONBs, national parks or conservation areas. Dig a trench across a Site of Special Scientific Interest and the council will be on you before the JCB has cooled down. The customers, by the way, do not care about any of this. They care that they cannot charge their car.

Why Static Rapid Chargers Do Not Fit a Holiday Park

Even if you could get the grid upgrade through, the economics of a static rapid charger on a caravan site do not work. Utilisation is brutally seasonal. Six weeks of high summer, a couple of bank holidays, a handful of half terms, and the rest of the year you are paying to run a steel box that nobody is using. The maintenance contract, the network fees, the energy standing charges, all of it ticks over whether anyone is plugging in or not.

Holiday parks need infrastructure that flexes with occupancy. They need it deployed without ground works, because the council will not approve the ground works in time and the ground works themselves cost more than the chargers. They need it now, not in 2028.

FreeMe: a Charging Station That Arrives on a Low Loader

FreeMe is PowerMe's containerised off grid charging system. It comes in 8ft, 10ft, 20ft and 40ft sizes. The biggest unit holds 3MWh of battery storage, the smallest 150kWh, and they all charge from whatever supply the site already has, including a single 32 amp commando socket if that is genuinely all there is. The battery does the heavy lifting. The grid, such as it is, just keeps the buffer topped up overnight when nothing is plugged in.

Crucially, no ground works. The container drops onto a hardstanding area, gets connected to the existing supply with a length of armoured cable, and is live by the end of the afternoon. There is no trench across the site. There is no DNO application. There is no wayleave negotiation with the neighbouring farm.

And because the chemistry is hybrid LTO and LFP rather than the usual LFP only setup, the unit can deliver short bursts of high power without complaining when twelve cars all turn up at the same time on a Saturday afternoon. Which on a holiday park is the only time anyone ever turns up.

The Commercial Model That Suits a Holiday Park

Caravan parks generally do not have a charging infrastructure capex line in their budget. They have lawn mowers and septic tanks and replacement Wi Fi access points, and a decent year's profit gets reinvested in shower blocks and landscaping. So PowerMe runs two models. You can lease the unit on a fixed monthly rate against the asset, or you can hand the site over to PowerMe under Energy as a Service, in which case we fund the unit, install it, operate it, take the energy revenue and pay the park a profit share for hosting it.

For most holiday parks, EaaS is the right answer. No capex, no operational headache, a small revenue line on top of the pitch fee, and a charging facility the site can advertise on the booking page. Park operators already know that "EV charging on site" is now a filter on every search engine and on Pitchup and on the Caravan and Motorhome Club site. Without it, the modern caravanner who has just spent £50,000 on a Hymer with a tow capacity that requires a battery electric tow car is booking somewhere else.

The Bank Holiday Monday Point

The next May bank holiday weekend is twenty days away. Every decent caravan park in the country is already fully booked. A meaningful share of those bookings include at least one EV. And the grid, which was never going to cope, is not going to cope this year either.

The good news is you no longer have to wait for it.

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

The Car Dealer EV Problem: You Cannot Demo What You Cannot Charge

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:40:02 GMT

So picture the scene. A customer walks into a Mercedes dealership somewhere in Reading on a Saturday morning, they are properly sold on the EQS, they want a test drive and the salesperson walks them out to the forecourt where the demo car has been sitting for three days. They open the door, fire it up and the dashboard says eleven per cent. Now what?

That, in miniature, is the car dealer EV problem. And it is not going away because the cars are coming whether the infrastructure is ready or not.

A forecourt full of EVs and not a charger in sight

Walk round most British franchised dealerships today and you will see a curious thing. Half the stock on display is electric. Polestar 4s, BMW iX1s, the new wave of Stellantis EVs from the Peugeot e-3008 to the Vauxhall Grandland Electric and increasingly Chinese brands pushing in alongside them. The marketing is all about zero emissions and pence per mile and yet the cars themselves are sitting on a tarmac apron that has, at best, two 7kW outlets at the back of the workshop next to the bins.

Tesla solved this years ago because Tesla is vertically integrated and built its own charging into every dealership from day one. Everybody else inherited a problem. The dealer estate was designed for petrol, the parking layout was designed for petrol, the workshop was designed for petrol and someone has now bolted EV onto the side of it and asked everyone to make it work.

The result is dealers who are fundamentally selling a product they cannot demonstrate at full strength. Demo cars run flat. PDI cars get handed over at sixty per cent because there was no time to charge them. Used EVs sit on the back of the lot bleeding range while waiting for a buyer. None of this is great for conversion.

Why fixed chargers only solve half the problem

The instinct is to put in static chargers and call it done. And to be fair, plenty of groups have. Lookers, JCT600, Marshall Motor Group and Inchcape have all announced infrastructure programmes over the last couple of years. The trouble is twofold.

First, the grid connection. If you want a couple of 50kW DC chargers on a typical dealership site, the District Network Operator queue is somewhere between eighteen months and three years depending on which corner of the country you are in. Some sites have been told it is not happening at all without a substation upgrade the dealer is expected to pay for. So the chargers go in at 22kW AC, which is eight hours from twenty to eighty per cent. Useful for an overnight, useless for a Saturday afternoon demo.

Second, location. Even where dealers have got proper DC chargers fitted, they are usually tucked away at the back of the workshop or on a corner of the lot. The cars that need charging at any given moment are scattered across a five acre site. The PDI bay is over there, the valeting bay is over there, the demo lineup is at the front and the used pitch is round the back. Walking each car to the charger and walking it back is a full time job for somebody who could be selling.

Where TitanMe fits

TitanMe is our van mounted unit. Forty kilowatt hours of Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate cells, 150kW DC output, mounted on a Ford Transit or equivalent platform. It does one thing very well, which is drive over to the car that needs charging and put a useful chunk of range into it. From twenty to eighty per cent on most EVs in well under half an hour. No ground works, no DNO application, no tarmac dug up.

The commercial reality is that one TitanMe can comfortably cover a ten acre dealership site. The PDI team uses it in the morning to top up new arrivals, the sales team uses it in the afternoon to keep demos charged and the valeting team uses it in the evening to make sure handovers go out at full battery. For a multi site dealer group, it rotates between sites on a weekly schedule and pays for itself across two or three forecourts rather than one.

Plate it up in dealer livery, run it as a service vehicle on the books and it does not look out of place. We have customers running them in matching colours to the courtesy car fleet so the customer sees the same brand experience all the way through. It is a sales tool dressed as a van, which is exactly what most dealerships need right now.

The commercial bit

We lease TitanMe rather than sell it because the maths makes more sense that way for most dealers. Leasing puts it on an opex line rather than capex, which is the line your finance director cares about and it leaves you free to upgrade as the technology moves on. We handle the maintenance, the software updates and the warranty. You handle selling cars.

The simple test most dealer principals run is whether one extra deal a month covers the lease cost. The answer is yes, comfortably. The harder question to answer is what the cost is of customers walking out because the demo had no charge, or PDI getting handed over at sixty per cent, or used EV residuals dropping because the cars sat with empty batteries for a fortnight. Nobody has done the maths on that yet but the number is not small.

The cars are coming. The grid is not. And in the meantime there is a perfectly serviceable van that drives over and charges the car. The whole thing is not actually that complicated.

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

Electric Diggers and the Grid That Isn't There

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:39:07 GMT

So here is a job site I drove past last month near Reading. Four storey commercial frame going up, decent size, the usual choreography of cranes and concrete wagons and lads in hi vis arguing about lunch. And parked at the gate, lined up like exhibits in a museum, were three brand new electric telehandlers. Beautifully painted. Stickers boasting about zero emissions. Plugged into absolutely nothing because the only power on site was a diesel generator the size of a Transit van.

The diggers were electric. The power was diesel. You could not make it up.

The construction electrification problem nobody is solving

Look, electric plant is happening whether the industry is ready or not. JCB, Volvo, Liebherr and Caterpillar are all shipping battery powered telehandlers, mini excavators and wheel loaders. Local authorities are starting to write zero emission requirements into tender documents, particularly in London where the Mayor's policy on construction emissions has teeth. Big developers like Berkeley and Lendlease are setting their own internal targets that filter down to subcontractors whether they like it or not.

The problem is that a typical UK construction site does not have a grid connection capable of fast charging anything bigger than a power tool. You get a temporary builders supply, maybe 100 amps three phase if you are lucky, and that is already committed to lighting, welfare cabins, the hoist and a dozen other things. There is no spare 150kW lying around for the diggers.

So what happens? The site team falls back on diesel generators to top up the batteries, which rather defeats the point. Or the plant operator drives the kit back to the yard every night, loses two hours of working time and adds wear on the transporter. Or, most commonly, the plant just sits there charging at a slow trickle until somebody figures it out.

Why mobile power makes sense on a moving target

Construction sites are the one place where it makes no sense to install permanent charging. You finish the job in eighteen months, two years if it is a big one, and then the whole compound has to come out. Anything you put in the ground is wasted capex.

The TitanMe Max changes the maths. One hundred kilowatt hour Toshiba SCiB battery, 200kW DC output, sized to a euro pallet footprint so it sits on the back of a Fiat Ducato or a similar light commercial chassis. You bring it on site Monday morning, plug the plant into it through the day, take it off site when the job finishes. No ground works. No planning conversation with the local DNO. No stranded asset when the project moves to its next phase.

And because it is LTO chemistry rather than the LFP that everybody else uses, you get four times the charge rate. A telehandler with a 60kWh pack goes from twenty percent to full in about twenty minutes off the TitanMe Max, which means you can rotate two machines through the same charger across a working day rather than tying one bit of kit up for hours. Throughput matters when you have plant on a hire rate.

The lease versus EaaS question on a construction job

Two ways to do this, and they suit different operators.

If you are a main contractor running multiple sites and you want the asset on your balance sheet, the lease model works. Pay a monthly figure, redeploy the unit between sites as projects start and finish, write the cost into your project preliminaries the same way you would a tower crane or a welfare unit.

For one off jobs or for plant hire companies, the Energy as a Service model is cleaner. PowerMe owns and operates the unit, you pay per kilowatt hour delivered to the plant and there is no capital outlay at all. Whichever pot the project uses to pay for diesel or hired generators just redirects to clean power instead. The numbers usually come out within a few percent of what operators are already paying for diesel, and that is before anybody factors in the noise reduction, the air quality scoring on tender returns or the fact that no apprentice is shovelling fuel anywhere.

What this looks like on the ground

A typical mid sized site running two electric telehandlers and a mini excavator works out at roughly 250kWh of demand a day. One TitanMe Max parked on site, recharged overnight either off the builders supply at three phase or off a second unit on rotation, covers the whole job. Add a second unit if the plant population grows or if the programme tightens.

For larger sites or for commercial framework agreements, a FreeMe 8ft container at 150kWh capacity sits in the corner of the compound and feeds plant, welfare cabins and EV cars all from one box. Same off-grid principle, just at a scale that suits a longer programme.

Nobody else in the UK market is doing this with LTO chemistry at the right form factor. The competitors are either fixed kit you cannot move, or LFP based mobile chargers that take an hour to refill themselves between jobs. Neither answers the construction question, which is mobile, fast and walks off site when the job ends.

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

Surge Charging: Why Ports, Airports and Exhibition Venues Need Different Infrastructure

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:00:01 GMT

So have a think about how charging actually works at a port, an airport or a major venue, because the standard mental model that most CPOs are using simply does not fit.

A car park at a service station has a relatively predictable load curve. Morning peak, lunch peak, evening peak, and the rest of the day it is reasonably steady. A static EV charging install can be sized against an average and it broadly works. Now look at Dover on a bank holiday. Look at Birmingham NEC on the Thursday of a major show. Look at the taxi rank at Gatwick on the last day of a school half term. Look at the F1 weekend at Silverstone or the Cheltenham Festival or the Three Day at Badminton. The load is not a curve, it is a cliff. You have ninety percent of your demand inside ten percent of the year and a static install would either be permanently undersized for the surge or cripplingly expensive to size for it.

So what do you do? The honest answer most operators have arrived at is "nothing, for now". They are quietly hoping the grid catches up. It will not.

The hidden cost of overbuilding for a peak

Sizing a permanent static install for the Friday of Crufts is one of the worst capital decisions you can make. You spend a fortune on the grid upgrade, the trenching, the switchgear, the chargers themselves and then watch the kit sit at five percent utilisation for eleven months of the year. The maintenance and software bill keeps coming whether the cars are there or not. The accountant works out that on a £/kWh sold basis you would have been better off staying with diesel generators in the back of a transit van.

The other side of the coin is the operator who undersizes for the peak. The chargers exist, they are just queued ten cars deep on the Saturday morning of a county show. Customer experience is destroyed. Drivers head off to the nearest forecourt instead of the venue car park, the dwell time spend evaporates and the venue gets the bad review on the way out.

Neither outcome is good business.

Two products, one playbook

This is the scenario PowerMe was actually designed for. We do not believe in building one giant static answer for an event-driven load. We build a base load and a surge load that work together.

FreeMe handles the base. A containerised battery hub on the site, sized to handle the steady traffic, deployed without ground works on whatever supply the venue currently has. It drip charges off-peak and delivers fast charge when needed. For a port, an airport long stay, an NEC car park or a stadium that has any kind of weekday baseline, this is the unit that earns its keep three hundred and sixty five days a year.

TitanMe handles the surge. A van mounted 100kWh, 200kW DC mobile rapid charger that can be brought onto site for the busy weekend, the show, the festival, the cup final, the air show and then leave again on the Monday morning. Same battery chemistry, same AI control, same OCPP backend. You are paying for the kit when it is generating revenue, not when it is sat idle.

Combine the two and you get a surge ready, base loaded, off-grid capable charging operation that flexes with the calendar rather than fighting it.

Why this matters for local authorities and councils

This is not just a private sector story. Plenty of city councils and local authorities are sitting on car parks that they would love to electrify but cannot justify the capex against the utilisation. A market square that gets one big event a month, a coastal car park that goes from empty in February to full in August, a leisure centre with peak load on Saturday mornings, all of them benefit from kit that flexes.

The Energy as a Service model is particularly attractive in the public sector. PowerMe funds, deploys and operates the infrastructure on the council's land. The council gets a profit share for hosting and a charging service for residents. There is no capital outlay and no procurement nightmare on a multi-year capital programme. It is the closest thing the public sector has to a free electrified car park, and in a tight local government budget environment that matters.

Why the LTO chemistry actually counts here

A boring point that turns out to be commercially important. Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate cells charge and discharge at much higher C rates than the LFP chemistry most competitors use. For a venue running surge events that means the unit refills faster between sessions. For a recovery scenario at a port or an airport it means the kit cycles harder without a thermal headache. The same hundred kWh of nameplate capacity does more work in a day. That changes the unit economics in a way the spec sheet does not always make obvious.

So if you operate any of the following

A port, ferry terminal or harbour
An airport with long stay and short stay car parks
An exhibition venue, conference centre or stadium
A festival, racing or motorsport venue
A local authority car park with seasonal demand

The thing standing between you and a charging revenue line is almost certainly not the chargers. It is the cost and the lead time of building a static answer for a non-static load.

PowerMe was built for exactly that gap.

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

From Pub Car Park to Profit Centre: EV Charging Without Digging Up the Tarmac

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:30:04 GMT

So here is a question that more or less every pub group, restaurant chain and hotel director in the country is now wrestling with. The customers are turning up in EVs. They want to charge while they eat. The car park is sat there doing nothing for fifty thousand pounds a year of business rates. Everyone agrees something should be done. What actually gets done is, in most cases, nothing at all.

Why? Because the moment a hospitality operator starts looking at static EV charging the problems pile up uncomfortably fast. The grid in a country pub is sized for a kitchen, a few fridges and the lights, not a row of 50kW chargers. The DNO upgrade quote comes back with a six figure number on it and a date in 2027. The site is on a long lease with break clauses that nobody wants to disturb. The freeholder will not contribute to civils for kit they do not own. The local council needs planning consent to dig up the gravel. By the time you have argued that lot through it is two years on, the customer has gone elsewhere and the chef has resigned.

This is exactly the kind of project that needs a different mental model rather than a bigger budget.

The leasehold problem nobody fixes

If you operate a pub estate, a restaurant chain, a hotel group or you are a commercial landlord with a multi-let warehousing or retail park, the first question on any infrastructure investment is "do we still own this site in eight years time?" Most of the time the honest answer is "probably not, or at least not on these terms". So the appetite to spend serious capital on something physically attached to the building is, quite reasonably, low.

This is what kills most static EV charging projects in hospitality long before the engineering question is even asked. The tenant does not want to fund kit that cannot move with the lease. The landlord does not want to fund kit that benefits a tenant who might leave. Everyone waits for the other side to pay.

PowerMe was specifically designed to walk straight through this stand-off.

Kit that arrives, earns and leaves if it has to

The FreeMe range, our containerised battery hubs, are non-permanent infrastructure. They drop onto the existing yard or car park surface, plug into whatever supply the building already has, and start trading. There are no ground works. There is no DNO upgrade. There is no planning headache the way there is with a hardwired forecourt install. If the lease ends or the site changes hands, the unit can be lifted onto a low loader and redeployed somewhere else.

For a leasehold tenant that completely changes the calculus. The kit is not a sunk cost stuck to a building you might leave. It is a piece of finance-leased plant that earns money while it is on site and walks away with you if you go.

For a landlord that owns multiple sites it changes the calculus too. You can fund a unit, host it on a tenant's car park under an EaaS arrangement, take a profit share for hosting and redeploy if the tenant mix changes.

Why it actually pays in hospitality

The numbers in hospitality work for one specific reason. The dwell time is built into the visit. A driver who comes in for Sunday lunch is on site for an hour and a half. A diner at a four course tasting menu is there for three. A hotel guest is parked for sixteen hours overnight. A conference at a country estate hotel parks for two days. Compared to a forecourt where the customer is racing the clock, a hospitality car park is one of the most economically attractive places in the country to put a charger because the energy gets sold without anyone feeling like they have queued.

Combine that with the basket spend impact, the same logic that has Morrisons rolling 250 ultra-rapid bays into its supermarket estate this year, and the case writes itself for any operator with more than a few sites.

Two ways to put it on site

We will not pretend every pub or hotel wants the same commercial model. So PowerMe runs two:

Equipment leasing for the operator that wants to control the customer relationship and keep the energy revenue, paid as a monthly opex line
Energy as a Service for the operator or landlord that does not want to own the kit at all, takes a profit share for hosting, and lets PowerMe handle the backend

Either way, the conversation no longer starts with "we need to spend half a million on civils". It starts with "where do we want it parked?"

Commercial landlords, this one is for you too

If you let warehousing, light industrial estates, retail parks or mixed use schemes, you have the same opportunity sitting on your shared car park. EV charging on a multi-let estate is one of those amenities that quietly improves rent reviews and tenant retention without anyone making a song and dance about it. PowerMe units are sized for that scenario from the 8ft FreeMe up to a full 40ft 3MWh hub, depending on the load, the footfall and the throughput.

Pubs, restaurants, hotels, racecourses, country estates, golf clubs, marinas, multi-let estates and shared car parks. If it has a tarmac surface, a customer base and the wrong size of grid connection, that is the gap PowerMe closes.

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

The Electric Petrol Can: Why Roadside Recovery Is About to Become a Real Revenue Line

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:30:17 GMT

So picture the scene. It is twenty past four on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the A14 just outside Cambridge. A salesman in an electric saloon has cheerfully driven past three motorway services because the screen said he had enough range, and now the screen says he has not. He pulls onto the hard shoulder, calls his breakdown provider and the operator on the other end of the phone has to make a decision. Send a flatbed and tow him forty miles to the nearest rapid charger? Send a generator van and trickle in enough range to limp him home? Or, ideally, send a recovery truck with an actual rapid charger bolted to the back and put fifty miles of usable range into him in fifteen minutes by the side of the road?

Right now, in 2026, the third option does not really exist for most recovery operators. The first two are how this gets handled. Both are slow, expensive, customer-hostile and absolutely terrible for the brand of whichever motoring organisation has its name on the side of the truck. And the volume is climbing fast as the EV parc passes two million on UK roads.

This is the gap MobileMe was built to fill.

The bit the roadside industry already knows

Recovery operators have been grumbling about this in private for at least eighteen months. The traditional answer, a small petrol generator on the back of a van pushing 7kW into the customer car, is a rounding error of useful charge. You are looking at over an hour of run time to deliver fifteen miles of range. The customer is freezing on the verge of a dual carriageway, the patrol is missing his next call, and the brand promise of "we will get you moving" is quietly being undermined every time it happens.

The honest engineering answer to this problem has always been the same. You need a battery on the truck. Not a generator. A proper, reasonably high power, reasonably high capacity, ultra fast cycling battery that can dump useful energy into a customer's car in the time it takes to swap a wheel.

The reason that has not been a commercial reality is that until very recently the battery chemistry made it uneconomic. LFP cells need to be sized fairly conservatively to deliver the sort of C rate you want for a roadside top up, and the recharge cycle on the truck is so slow that one job a day is your lot.

LTO chemistry changes that completely.

What MobileMe actually is

MobileMe is the recovery truck mounted version of the PowerMe range. We sometimes call it "the electric petrol can" because that is the simplest way to describe what it does. It is an 11.5kWh LTO battery system designed to bolt onto the bed of an existing recovery truck, deliver fast charge to a stranded EV at the roadside and recover its own state of charge in minutes rather than hours when the truck gets back to base.

The numbers that make the maths work are these. Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate cells charge and discharge at much higher C rates than the LFP that competitors use. So the kit recharges fast between jobs and the cycle life sits comfortably above twenty thousand cycles, which means the unit is good for a working life that fits the realities of a 24/7 recovery operation rather than needing a battery swap every couple of years.

For a recovery operator that means one truck can run multiple charging jobs in a shift. Job done at the roadside. Top up at base. Out again. Repeat.

A new revenue line nobody else can offer

Here is the commercial bit that should be of interest to anyone running a recovery business or a motoring organisation. The customer who has run out of charge is, in that moment, willing to pay almost anything for an extra fifty miles of range. The cost of a tow is one number. The cost of an emergency charge is, frankly, whatever the recovery operator chooses to make it, and the customer is grateful regardless. It is a chargeable service that does not exist in the price list of most operators today, simply because the kit to deliver it has not been viable.

When you stack a fleet of recovery trucks fitted with MobileMe units, you are not just solving the operational problem. You are creating a new chargeable service line that scales with the EV parc. Fewer tows. Faster jobs. Higher revenue per call out. Better customer experience. Better brand.

If you are an energy company looking at how to add useful B2B services around your network or a breakdown insurer trying to manage the cost curve of EV related call outs, the same kit gives you the same answer.

Lead times and how to get one

MobileMe has a lead time of ten to twelve weeks because the design is final and the manufacturing partner is in place. We offer it on equipment leasing, secured against the asset, so a recovery operator can put a fleet of trucks through the conversion as a monthly opex line rather than a balance sheet event.

For an operator with twenty trucks on the road and a growing slice of EV related call outs, fitting half a dozen of them with MobileMe in 2026 is the difference between watching the volume climb and being one of the people quietly making money out of it.

The petrol can has had a hundred year run. Its electric cousin starts now.

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

Forecourt Without the Grid: Adding Ultra-Rapid Charging in Weeks Not Years

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:00:29 GMT

So here is the awkward truth about the British forecourt in 2026. Petrol and diesel volumes are sliding, EV registrations are climbing, and the customer who used to fill up in three minutes now wants to plug in for fifteen and pop into the shop while they wait. The economic prize is right there in front of you. The trouble is the grid says no.

You only have to look at what the big operators are doing to work out where this is heading. MFG is pumping £400 million into ultra-rapid bays. Morrisons is rolling 250 of them into its supermarket estate this year. GRIDSERVE is opening Markham Vale in the summer. Forecourt Trader has been running pieces about new entrants like EV-OG selling drop and go off-grid containers because the rural sites simply cannot get a meaningful grid upgrade in any sensible time frame. The whole market has worked out the same thing: the forecourts that win this decade are the ones that get the chargers in first. The ones that wait for the network operator to come round are still going to be standing in the queue when the customer has already gone elsewhere.

The question is not whether you should be adding ultra-rapid charging. The question is how you do it without a grid upgrade that costs more than the rebuild of the canopy.

What is actually breaking the project

For most forecourt and supermarket sites the chargers themselves are not the expensive bit. The grid connection is. Reinforcement contributions to the DNO can run into hundreds of thousands. Cable runs across a live forecourt are a logistical nightmare. Planning sits on the desk for months. Then the network operator gives you a date in 2027 or 2028 and the project quietly gets shelved.

If you operate twenty sites across a region, multiply that by twenty. Some of them are in towns and might be doable in a window. Plenty of them are rural or semi-rural and simply will not get the supply they need without a substation upgrade that nobody wants to pay for.

This is the bit where most articles tell you to be patient. We disagree.

The off-grid answer that already works

The PowerMe FreeMe range was designed for exactly this scenario. It is a containerised battery hub with built in ultra-rapid chargers, sized from 150kWh in an 8ft footprint up to 3MWh in a full 40ft, with output up to 200kW per head and four heads per unit on the bigger boxes. It uses an LTO and LFP hybrid battery architecture, so the LTO chemistry handles the peak demand at 4C while the LFP carries the bulk capacity, all managed at cell level by the BMS so the system delivers fast charge without burning the cells out. The headline figure that matters: the design life is ten years at standard utilisation.

For a forecourt operator the practical implication is this. You take whatever supply you currently have, even a modest one, and you drip charge the FreeMe overnight or during the quiet hours. When the customer turns up at lunchtime and wants 50kWh in fifteen minutes, the FreeMe delivers it. You are no longer constrained by the grid at peak. You are constrained by the size of the battery, which we can scale to suit the throughput.

There are no ground works. There is no trenching across the live forecourt. There is no DNO queue. The unit drops onto the existing surface, plugs into your existing supply and starts trading. Installation is measured in hours not weeks.

The numbers that actually move the dial

Two things make this work commercially for a forecourt or a supermarket car park:

Dwell time spend. A driver charging for fifteen to twenty minutes is a captive customer in your shop, your café, your loo, your meal deal aisle. The ARPU on an EV charging session beats the ARPU on a tank of fuel by a country mile once you factor the basket spend.
Funding flexibility. PowerMe runs both equipment leasing and Energy as a Service. The leasing model puts the unit on a monthly opex line so the income covers the cost. The EaaS model means we fund, deploy and operate the infrastructure on your site and you take a profit share for hosting. Capex zero. Risk shared. Site monetised.

Either way you are not writing a million pound cheque to the DNO before the first car plugs in.

Why this is urgent

The big retail brands are not waiting. Once they have rolled their estates the customer expectation shifts. A driver who has charged at a Morrisons in Macclesfield does not then accept a forecourt in the next town that has no charging. They drive past. The economics of a forecourt without ultra-rapid charging in 2027 are going to look uncomfortably like the economics of a phone box.

The good news is the kit exists, the funding exists and the deployment can start now. The bad news is everyone else has worked that out too.

If you operate forecourts, supermarket car parks, retail parks or service stations and the grid is the thing standing between you and a charging revenue line, that is precisely the problem we built FreeMe to solve.

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

Eighteen Months for a Plug Socket: Why Depot Operators Cannot Afford to Wait

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:00:01 GMT

So here is the thing about electrifying a depot in 2026. You order the vehicles, you sign the leases, you brief the drivers, you sort the welfare, you do all the things any sensible operations director would do and then you call the DNO to ask about a grid upgrade for the chargers. That is when reality lands on the desk like a wet fish.

Lead times for a meaningful depot upgrade in the UK now sit somewhere between eighteen and thirty six months. Not weeks. Not "soon". Not "by Christmas". Actual years. And that is before anyone has put a spade in the ground or written a cheque for the civils, the trenching, the substation works, the planning conditions and the legal nonsense that goes with putting a megawatt or two of capacity into a yard that was originally built for a few diesel pumps and a portacabin.

For an HGV operator the maths is brutal. A modern electric tractor unit wants somewhere in the order of a megawatt of charging if it is going to turn around between shifts. Run twenty of them out of a single yard and you are knocking on the door of a primary substation upgrade. Even a parcel depot running 7.5 tonners or transit vans needs serious headroom once you scale beyond a handful of units. The grid was not designed for this and nobody is going to redesign it overnight.

So while the boardroom is being told the fleet is "going electric by 2030", the depot is sat in a queue waiting for a network operator to get round to it.

The bit nobody talks about at the conferences

Here is what gets glossed over in the keynotes. The cost of the grid upgrade is rarely the chargers themselves. It is everything around them. Reinforcement contributions to the DNO. Cable runs across yards that are still operational. Switchgear, transformers, ground works, planning, ducting, power factor correction, metering. By the time you have added it all up you are often looking at a million pounds of capital before a single vehicle has plugged in. And the depot still does not work harder than it did with diesel.

That capex hits the balance sheet, scares finance, slows down the rollout and in many cases kills the project entirely. Which is precisely why the government has stepped in with the Depot Charging Scheme, the £170 million pot that funds up to 70% of chargepoint and civils costs, capped at a million quid per organisation, with the first window closing on 30 June 2026. It is a real number, available now, and it is meant to unblock the operators who are ready to move.

The trouble is, "ready to move" assumes the grid is ready too. Often it is not.

A different way of thinking about it

This is where PowerMe genuinely changes the conversation. Rather than waiting for the network operator to upgrade your supply, the FreeMe containerised hub brings its own battery storage with it. We are talking 150kWh up to 3MWh of LTO and LFP hybrid capacity, sat inside an ISO container footprint, deployed on the existing yard surface with no ground works, no planning headache and, crucially, no eighteen month wait for a substation.

The unit charges from whatever supply you do have, even a modest one, drip filling the battery overnight or during quiet hours, then delivers fast charge to vehicles when they are actually in the depot. The AI managed BMS handles the cell level load balancing so the unit gives you a fast turnaround without melting the connection at the property boundary.

If you have a 200kVA supply today and you need 600kW of charging at peak, the maths used to say no. With a FreeMe sat behind it the maths says yes.

Capex that does not need to be capex

The other piece worth mentioning is the funding. We do not insist on you buying these things outright. PowerMe operates two commercial models depending on what suits the operation:

Equipment leasing keeps it as a monthly opex line, secured against the asset, so the kit pays its way as it earns
Energy as a Service means PowerMe owns and operates the infrastructure on your site and you take a profit share for hosting, with no capital outlay at all

For a logistics business that lives and dies on cost per drop, turning a seven figure capex item into a predictable monthly cost is often the difference between the project happening and the project sitting in a slide deck for another year.

The window is open. Briefly.

The Depot Charging Scheme is not going to last forever and the good sites will fill up first. The operators who win this round are the ones who can combine grant money with kit that actually deploys in weeks rather than years. Static charging that needs a grid upgrade does not qualify in that race. Containerised, off-grid capable, AI-managed kit does.

If your fleet is on order and your depot is not ready, that is the gap PowerMe was built to close.

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

LFP vs LTO: Why Battery Chemistry Matters More Than Price Per kWh

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:59:36 GMT

The EV charging sector talks about lithium iron phosphate batteries as if they're the answer to everything. LFP is cheap, it's safe, it's good enough. For static installations where the battery sits in one place and cycles once or twice a day, that's broadly true. But for mobile charging applications where the battery needs to cycle multiple times per shift, recharge in minutes rather than hours and survive tens of thousands of cycles without degradation, LFP is fundamentally the wrong chemistry.

This isn't opinion. It's electrochemistry.

The C Rate Problem

The critical specification for any mobile charging battery is its C rate: how fast the battery can charge and discharge relative to its capacity. LFP cells typically operate at 1C, meaning a 50kWh pack takes approximately one hour to fully charge or discharge. For a static hub that recharges overnight and deploys power across a 12 hour period, 1C is perfectly adequate.

For a recovery truck mounted unit that needs to charge a stranded EV in 20 minutes and then recharge itself at the next rapid charger before the next callout, 1C is useless. The maths simply doesn't work. A 1C battery on a recovery truck sits idle for an hour between jobs while it recharges. That's half the driver's shift wasted waiting for a battery.

Lithium titanate (LTO) cells operate at 10C to 20C. A 50kWh LTO pack can discharge at rates that make the battery itself no longer the bottleneck in the charging equation. More importantly, the same pack can recharge at a 300kW rapid charger in approximately 12 to 15 minutes. That's a fundamentally different operational model: charge a vehicle, drive to the nearest rapid charger, recharge, drive to the next callout. The battery keeps pace with the driver rather than the other way around.

The Cycle Life Equation

LFP batteries achieve approximately 2,000 to 3,000 full cycles before capacity degrades to 80% of original. For a static installation cycling once daily, that's roughly 6 to 8 years of useful life. Acceptable for most commercial deployments.

For a mobile unit cycling 4 to 6 times per day, the same LFP pack reaches end of life within 18 months to 2 years. At that point you're replacing the entire battery module, which is the most expensive component in the system. For a leasing model where the asset needs to generate returns over a 5 to 7 year finance period, replacing the core component every 2 years destroys the business case entirely.

LTO cells achieve 10,000 to 20,000+ cycles at full depth of discharge. Toshiba's SCiB cells, which are the benchmark for the chemistry, are specified at 45,000 cycles at 10C. For the same mobile unit cycling 6 times daily, an LTO pack lasts approximately 5 to 10 years before requiring replacement. That's a single battery pack for the entire finance period, which transforms the unit economics from marginal to compelling.

The Weight Trade Off

LTO is not without disadvantages. Energy density is lower: 60 to 120 Wh/kg versus 130 to 200 Wh/kg for LFP. This means a 50kWh LTO pack is heavier than its LFP equivalent, which matters for vehicle mounted and mobile applications where payload capacity is constrained.

However, the weight penalty is less severe than headline numbers suggest. LTO cells require less thermal management infrastructure due to their superior thermal stability, which partially offsets the cell level weight difference at pack level. And for many mobile applications, the operational advantage of fast cycling outweighs the weight penalty: a lighter battery that takes an hour to recharge is less useful than a heavier battery that takes 15 minutes.

The Cost Question

LTO cells cost approximately £120 to £160 per kWh at pack level versus £55 to £80 for LFP. On a per unit basis, an LTO equipped mobile charger costs more to build than its LFP equivalent.

On a per cycle basis, the equation reverses completely. An LTO cell delivering 20,000 cycles costs approximately £0.006 to £0.008 per kWh per cycle. An LFP cell delivering 2,500 cycles costs approximately £0.022 to £0.032 per kWh per cycle. LTO is 3 to 4 times cheaper per cycle, which is the metric that actually determines profitability in a service model.

For fleet operators and finance partners evaluating the total cost of ownership over a 5 to 7 year period, the higher upfront cost of LTO delivers a lower total cost and a more valuable residual asset at end of term.

The Right Chemistry for the Right Application

The intelligent approach is not to choose one chemistry for everything but to deploy each where its characteristics create the most value. LFP for static containerised hubs where weight is irrelevant, cycling frequency is low and the cost per kWh of capacity is the primary driver. LTO for mobile and recovery applications where cycling frequency is high, recharge speed determines operational throughput and the battery must survive the full finance term without replacement.

This dual chemistry strategy is not common in the sector because most companies lack the battery management expertise to optimise across different chemistries. Managing LFP and LTO cells requires different charge profiles, different thermal management approaches and different degradation models. An AI system that manages every individual cell, rather than treating the pack as a single unit, can optimise for each chemistry's specific characteristics and extract maximum performance and lifespan from both.

That capability is what separates an intelligent mobile energy company from a box on wheels.

The Grid Connection Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

james@foster.coach (James Foster) — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 10:57:52 GMT

So here's the thing about EV charging infrastructure in the UK that nobody in the industry seems willing to say out loud: half the sites that need charging cannot get a grid connection within any timeframe that makes commercial sense.

I don't mean it's a bit slow. I don't mean there's some paperwork to wade through. I mean 18 months to 3 years from application to energisation, and that's if your local Distribution Network Operator doesn't come back and tell you the substation needs upgrading first, which adds another 6 to 12 months and a cost that makes the charging infrastructure itself look like a rounding error.

The industry knows this. The DNOs know this. The government knows this. And yet every major charging network in the country continues to build its business model around fixed, grid connected infrastructure as if the grid constraint doesn't exist. It's the elephant in the room at every conference, every investor presentation, every policy roundtable. Everyone nods along about the 300,000 public chargepoints target for 2030 while quietly ignoring the fact that the electrical infrastructure to power them is years behind schedule.

The Maths Nobody Shows You

Let me give you a real example. A fleet operator with 40 electric vans at a depot in the Midlands. They need approximately 200kW of charging capacity overnight. Straightforward enough, you'd think.

The DNO quotes them 14 months for a new supply and a connection cost of £185,000. That's before a single charger is bolted to the ground. Add the chargers themselves, the civil works, the commissioning, and you're looking at north of £300,000 total installed cost and a wait time that pushes past 18 months when you factor in planning, procurement and installation.

During those 18 months, what happens to the fleet? Either they delay the transition to electric entirely, which means missing their own decarbonisation targets and paying the higher fuel costs that justified the switch in the first place. Or they split the fleet across multiple sites, which creates logistical complexity that costs money every single day in additional mileage, driver time and management overhead.

Nobody calculates the cost of waiting. But it's real and it compounds. Every month a fleet operator delays EV deployment because they're waiting for a grid connection, they're paying diesel prices, missing out on fuel duty savings, falling behind competitors who figured it out faster and losing the operational efficiency that electric vehicles deliver from day one.

The Alternative That Already Exists

A battery based mobile charging system doesn't need a grid connection. It doesn't need planning permission in most cases. It doesn't need civil works, DNO applications, substation upgrades or 14 month lead times. It needs a flat surface and about four hours of someone's time.

The same fleet depot that was quoted 18 months and £300,000 for grid connected charging could have a containerised battery hub deployed and operational within weeks, with zero capital outlay under a leasing model. The battery recharges from whatever supply is already available on site, or from a separate rapid charge point nearby, and the AI management system ensures every cell in every battery module is optimised for performance and longevity.

Is it cheaper per kWh than a direct grid connection over a 10 year period? No, probably not. But that's the wrong comparison. The right comparison is the total cost of doing nothing for 18 months while you wait, plus the capital expenditure of the grid connection when it finally arrives, versus the cost of deploying mobile charging now and generating value from day one.

When you run that comparison honestly, with real numbers rather than optimistic projections, the mobile solution wins for the majority of constrained sites. Not because the technology is magic, but because time has a cost that the fixed infrastructure model refuses to acknowledge.

Why This Matters Now

The UK has approximately 1.5 million battery electric vehicles on the road today, with another million plus plug in hybrids. The ZEV mandate is pushing manufacturers to sell an increasing proportion of electric vehicles every year. Fleet operators are under pressure from their own ESG commitments, from customer expectations and from the simple economics of fuel versus electricity.

The demand side is accelerating. The supply side, specifically the grid, is not keeping pace. That gap is going to widen every year for the foreseeable future. The National Grid's own forecasts show the scale of investment required and the timeline is measured in decades, not months.

So we have a choice. We can keep building business models that assume the grid will catch up, which is essentially a bet on infrastructure investment that successive governments have failed to deliver for 30 years. Or we can deploy intelligent mobile energy systems that work within the grid's current limitations while the long term upgrades happen in the background.

One of those approaches delivers revenue from day one. The other delivers a planning application and a wait time.

I know which one I'd choose. But then I've spent four years watching companies try to build EV charging businesses on the assumption that grid connections would be quick and cheap, and not one of them got both.