Charging Two Electric Vans in One Lunch Break, No Grid Upgrade

So picture a plant hire branch at five to twelve. The foreman has two electric vans coming back off the morning delivery round, a yard the size of a tennis court, and an afternoon run that has to be out of the gate by one. The vans need enough charge in them to finish the day. The clock does not care about any of it, and neither does the customer waiting on a generator and three Stihl saws across town.

This is the operating reality at a major UK tool and plant hire group we designed a solution for. National network of branch depots, electric vans rolling out across the estate, and one stubborn problem that every off the shelf charger walked straight into.

The lunch hour does not care about your DNO queue

Here is the thing about a plant hire delivery operation. The rounds split naturally, morning and afternoon, with the vans coming home for a reload over the lunch break. That window is the only time both vans sit still on site, and it is the only time they can take charge before going back out. Miss it and you are stuck with three bad options: split the rounds and burn driver hours, send a van out half full and hope it makes it back, or simply give up the afternoon delivery slot altogether. None of those keep customers happy.

Every charger they tested could only feed one van at a time. So while van one drank its fill, van two sat there doing nothing, and the lunch hour quietly evaporated. You cannot charge two vans in sequence in fifty minutes when each one needs the whole window to itself.

And then the real kicker. The grid connection at most of these branches was sized, decades ago, for a hand tool washdown bay, a couple of strip lights and a kettle. Nobody wiring up a plant hire depot in the 1990s was thinking about 150kW of van charging. To get a connection big enough to charge two vans hard at lunchtime, you are joining the DNO upgrade queue, and that is a wait measured in quarters, not weeks, with a bill to match.

Two vans, one battery, no upgrade

The answer was a single FreeMe containerised hybrid unit per branch, in the small 8ft or 10ft format. Twin head charging, so both vans plug in and charge at the same time, at the rate they actually need rather than the rate the thin grid will grudgingly allow.

The clever part is what happens the rest of the day. The FreeMe battery harvests excess solar off the depot roof through the morning and pulls cheap off peak energy off the grid overnight, trickling it in at a rate the connection can comfortably handle. Then, during the lunch window, it dispatches all that stored energy in a hard fast burst that the grid connection on its own could never sustain. The battery does the heavy lifting, not the wire in the ground.

It works because of the chemistry. PowerMe builds FreeMe on a Toshiba SCiB LTO and LFP hybrid, and the LTO portion handles the high power peaks without breaking a sweat or cooking itself. That is what lets a thin connection behave like a fat one for the fifty minutes that matter.

There is a bonus too. The same battery doubles as load smoothing for the rest of the depot, so the branch office runs cleaner on stored solar with less grid draw across the working day. You are not buying a charger that sits idle for twenty three hours. You are buying an energy asset that earns its keep all day and then performs at lunch.

What actually changes commercially

Both vans recharged simultaneously, inside fifty minutes, every single day. The afternoon round goes out on time. No DNO upgrade, no trenching, no statutory works, no eighteen month wait for a connection that may or may not arrive. The unit lands on a wagon, gets craned into position and is working that afternoon.

And because this is rolling out across a national estate, it goes onto a lease. Opex not capex, one predictable monthly figure per branch, no lump sum capital request fighting its way through a board for kit at fifty sites. The finance director gets a number that scales cleanly with the estate, and the operations director gets two vans charged before the foreman has finished his sandwich.

Two vans, one battery, no upgrade. That is the whole job.

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