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

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