The CPO Land Grab: Why the Fastest Network Wins the Best Sites

So here is the thing nobody running a charge point network will say out loud at a conference but everybody knows on the drive home. This is a land grab. The prime sites, the ones with the right traffic, the right dwell time and the right neighbour, are being claimed right now and once a competitor plants a flag on a good forecourt or a busy retail park you are not getting it back. You are not waiting for a better version of that site to come along. There isn't one. It was the site.

And yet the single biggest thing standing between a CPO and a signed site is not the landlord, not the planning, not the customer demand. It is the grid connection. Or rather the lack of one, and the queue you join to maybe get one.

The best sites are being claimed while you wait in a queue

Look at where the volume operators have grown. GRIDSERVE, InstaVolt, MFG with their Motor Fuel Group forecourts, Osprey, BP Pulse. The ones moving fastest are the ones who worked out that whoever gets to the good ground first owns it. A high traffic A road junction, a supermarket car park with a two hour shop, a logistics park off the motorway. These are finite. There are only so many of them in any given town and your rivals are looking at exactly the same list you are.

The cruel part is that a brilliant site with no power is just a car park. You can sign the lease, agree the revenue share, get the design done and then sit there for the better part of two years waiting for a distribution network operator to tell you what a new connection costs and when, if ever, you can have it. Meanwhile the competitor two miles away who found a workaround is live, taking sessions and building the brand loyalty that means drivers never even try yours.

The DNO queue is the enemy of a land grab

Here is the maths that kills more CPO expansion plans than any board ever admits. You find the site, you fall in love with the site, you apply for the connection and then you discover the upgrade is a six figure number and a multi year wait, because the local substation was sized for a row of houses and a chip shop, not a bank of 150kW rapids. So you walk away from the site. Or you take a smaller connection than you wanted and put in slow chargers nobody uses. Or you wait, and while you wait somebody else solves it differently and takes the ground.

None of those three outcomes is winning the race. They are all just losing it at different speeds.

How off grid kit lets you plant a flag first

This is exactly the problem PowerMe was built to take off the table. Our FreeMe containerised charging hubs arrive as a finished unit, sit on the surface with no ground works and no trenching, and run off whatever grid connection the site already has plus solar where the roof or canopy allows it. The battery harvests energy all day at a rate the thin connection can sustain, then dispatches it fast when the cars turn up. The grid feeds the battery slowly. The battery feeds the car quickly. That gap is the whole trick.

Because the chemistry is Toshiba SCiB lithium titanate in a hybrid pack, the unit can push real rapid output, up to 150kW and beyond on the larger formats, from a connection that on paper should not allow it. For a site where you want to be live in weeks and not years, that is the difference between owning the ground and watching somebody else own it.

And where you need to move faster still, to trial a location, cover a temporary surge or hold a site while the permanent kit is built, TitanMe Max gives you 100kWh and 200kW of DC output in a cube the size of a euro pallet that you can drop in and run today. Plant the flag now, prove the demand, then scale the install once you know the numbers stack up.

Own it or operate it, your commercial choice

The other thing the off grid route changes is how you pay for the expansion. Under our leasing model the kit goes on as operating cost not capex, so you can roll out across a dozen sites without your balance sheet looking like you bought a power station. Under Energy as a Service we fund, deploy and operate the asset and you take a share, which means you can claim ground you could never have afforded to wire yourself.

Either way the point is the same. The network that gets to the best sites first wins, and the only thing that has been stopping you getting there first is a queue you do not actually have to join.

The good sites are going. The question is whether your flag is on them or somebody else's.

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