How is electric vehicle charging installed at a council or school site?

Charging infrastructure on a public site is mostly an electrical capacity problem and a civil works problem. The charger itself is the simplest part.

Which is why the sequence is to establish what the site can supply before deciding how many chargers go in.

Capacity first

Each charger draws a defined load, and several chargers drawing at once can exceed what the site's supply provides.

Which means the assessment starts at the main switchboard and the incoming supply: what is installed, what is already committed, and what headroom exists. On most older council and school sites the honest answer is very little, particularly where air conditioning has been added since the supply was sized.

The options from there are a supply upgrade, which involves the network operator and carries both cost and lead time, or load management, where the chargers share the available capacity and reduce their draw when the building demand rises. Load management is frequently the better answer on a site where vehicles are parked for hours, because the available power is adequate when it is spread over the dwell time.

The upgrade path runs through the same work as [electrical upgrades in occupied buildings](/answers/electrical-upgrades-in-occupied-buildings), and the network side through the approvals described in [service location and utility relocations](/answers/service-location-and-utility-relocations).

Matching the charger to the dwell time

The common error is to install fast charging where it is not needed.

**A staff or fleet carpark** where vehicles sit for a full working day needs only slow charging. The vehicle is there for eight hours and a modest supply delivers a full charge.

**A visitor carpark** at a facility where people stay an hour or two needs a higher rate.

**A public-facing charger** intended to serve passing traffic needs rapid charging, a much larger supply, and a commercial arrangement about who pays for the energy.

Specifying rapid charging for a staff carpark buys a supply upgrade nobody needed and triples the cost of the installation.

The civil and layout work

This is where most of the construction sits.

Conduit and cable routes from the board to the parking spaces, trenched or installed in new pavement. Pits at the charger positions. Footings or bollards for the units. Protection from vehicle impact. Line marking and signage for the designated spaces. Lighting at the charging positions, because a charger used after dark needs it.

Accessible provision is part of the layout rather than an addition: at least one charging space arranged so a person using a wheelchair can reach the charger and move around the vehicle, with a connected accessible path to the building. That path is governed by the same requirements as [pathways and accessible routes across a site](/answers/pathways-and-accessible-routes-across-a-site).

The pavement work and the trenching sit with [carpark and hardstand works](/answers/carpark-and-hardstand-works), and any service crossings have to be located before excavation.

Providing for later without installing now

The most useful decision available on a public site.

Installing conduit, pits and cable capacity to more spaces than are being fitted with chargers costs a fraction of returning to do the civil work again, because the expensive part is opening the pavement rather than the cable.

Which means the design establishes a target number of future spaces, provides the civil infrastructure and the board provision for them, and fits chargers to the spaces required now. That is the decision an asset owner thanks you for in five years.

Working in a carpark that stays in use

A carpark on an operating site cannot usually be closed entirely.

The work is staged so part of the carpark remains available, with the construction zone fenced, the pedestrian routes maintained and the traffic management adjusted at each stage. On a school site the drop-off and pick-up arrangements are the governing constraint and the staging is planned around them, as described in [traffic management and deliveries to a live site](/answers/traffic-management-and-deliveries-to-a-live-site).

Trenching across a pedestrian route needs a temporary diversion rather than a plate over the trench where that route is used by students or the public.

Handover and operation

The asset owner needs the electrical certification, the network approval, the charger commissioning records, the load management settings, the network or management platform details, and the maintenance requirements.

They also need a decision recorded about access and payment: whether the chargers are restricted to staff or fleet, how that is enforced, and who is billed for the energy. That is a client decision rather than a construction one, and it is better settled before the units are commissioned than after.