A land-development intelligence firm has identified hundreds of petrol stations that are within just 300m of electrical substations with enough spare grid capacity to power EV chargers.
Forecourt firms considering EV chargers often face prohibitive installation costs due to sites being far away from substations, with £1m grid connections not uncommon if underground cables have to be laid over significant distances.
In some locations it is simply not possible to add chargers due to the local grid not having the spare capacity to power the rapid and ultra-rapid chargers drivers increasingly expect, while in others it can take years to secure a connection due to queues of hook-up requests that have already been made to network operators.
The result is that forecourt firms looking for sites that can be future proofed for EVs without entailing vast expense or long lead times can face difficulties when finding suitable development locations.
Now, an analysis carried out by Ortelias has identified 320 petrol stations in England that are within 300m of substations and are also in areas with substations with at least 1 megawatt (MW) of spare capacity.
Of those sites, 199 have no signed project ahead of them in the queue for substation connections, increasing the likelihood of quicker connections. And while the lack of an official national register for EV chargepoints means the data doesn’t indicate whether a site already offers recharging, such details can be easily verified online.
The granularity of Ortelias’ dataset makes it possible to determine that the Shell Co-op forecourt on Martin’s Way in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, which lacks EV charging, is 129m (all distances as the crow flies) from the Verity Way Primary substation, which has 6.3MW of spare capacity and no queued connection projects.
The Tesco/Esso forecourt on Eastbourne Road in East Sussex is even closer to power, being just 28m away from a substation with 9.7MW of capacity headroom, and no queued connections.
Rontec’s Dudley Port forecourt in Tipton, West Midlands, also lacks chargers, yet is only 156m away from the Tividale substation, which carries a whopping 42.6MW of spare capacity and has no connection projects already accepted.
Park Garage Group’s Creek Road site in Deptford, southeast London, is 296m away from 9.6MW of spare capacity at the Deptford substation, which has no signed projects in its connection queue.
Ortelias conducted the analysis by mapping forecourt locations from the government’s Fuel Finder database against information published by electricity network operators.
As well as identifying sites with the potential for EV charging, Ortelias monitors the listings of over 4,000 property firms, mapping locations against various criteria to help companies identify land, both built and unbuilt, which could be suitable for development.
James Ahearne, a chartered surveyor and co-founder of Ortelias comments:
“Most forecourt operators treat EV charging as a property question. It is really a grid question. The cost and the timescale are set by how far the site sits from a substation with capacity to spare, and that is something you can establish from published data before you commit.”
