The charging map is consolidating. That changes your depot-versus-public maths

If you have been reading our charging coverage week by week, it has looked like a series of unrelated announcements. Read together, it is one story with three parts: the networks are consolidating, the build has moved out of the capital, and the binding constraint has shifted from money to grid connections.

Each of those changes something about how a fleet should split its charging between depot and public.

Part one: consolidation

In issue 1 we reported InstaVolt acquiring 228 GeniePoint sites and their 260-plus chargers from Equans, taking its network past 1,000 locations - a first for a UK charge point operator.

That is the headline event, but it is not isolated. Gridserve doubled ultra-rapid capacity at its Solstice Park hub near Amesbury from eight bays to sixteen, adding four 180kW-capable units alongside the existing 350kW chargers, on the A303 route to the south west. Believ has rollouts running with Devon and Torbay councils and in Redcar and Cleveland. Banbury got a major power upgrade.

The pattern is scale. Larger operators buying smaller ones, and existing sites getting deeper rather than new sites getting thinner.

For fleets this cuts two ways, and it is worth being clear-eyed about both. Fewer operators means fewer apps, fewer RFID cards and fewer separate invoices, which is a genuine administrative saving on a problem fleets have complained about for years. Fewer operators also means less price competition at the roadside, at a point where public charging already costs more than twice what home charging does under HMRC's split rate.

Consolidation is good for your admin and probably not good for your pence per kWh.

Part two: it stopped being a London story

The most under-reported figure we have published: 7,044 of the 7,598 new rapid and ultra-rapid charge points added in the two years to April 2026 - 93 per cent - went in outside the capital. The East of England was up 95 per cent, the North West up 83 per cent.

For a national fleet this quietly removes one of the standard objections. Route planning around charging availability was a real constraint on regional operations three years ago. On main corridors it increasingly is not, and any electrification business case still using 2023 coverage assumptions is understating the case.

Worth pairing with the Gridserve detail, because it illustrates the mechanism. Solstice Park did not double because the A303 lacked chargers. It doubled because the ones there were busy. Capacity is now being added in response to demand rather than in anticipation of it, which is a healthier signal about network economics but means congestion arrives before relief does.

Part three: the grid is the constraint now

Three stories this summer point at the same wall.

We covered the plan to cut grid connection costs for EV charging at motorway services in issue 2. In issue 8, Ofgem acting to free up grid capacity by tackling speculative data centre projects sitting in a 73GW queue. And in issue 2, the warning that Britain may miss its 2030 Clean Power target.

Connection cost and connection queue are now the gating factors on charging infrastructure, not capital or planning. That has a direct consequence for any fleet considering depot charging: the lead time on your own grid connection is a project risk that sits outside your control and outside your contractor's.

The corresponding opportunity is that the alternatives are getting real. MAN has started series production of MCS-ready electric trucks. Octopus Energy and CATL formed a joint venture to build battery-swapping hubs for electric HGVs across the UK and Europe - a depleted battery exchanged for a charged one in minutes, no plug, no megawatt connection at your depot. Wren Kitchens has depot charging installed for electric HGVs. Stagecoach is rolling out its Chargd programme nationally, opening 15 depot charging sites to rival operators.

Four different answers to the same question. None of them is settled.

What to actually decide

The split between depot and public is the decision, and it is cost-led with a hard operational constraint on top.

The cost side is not close. HMRC's advisory electric rate is 7p a mile for home charging against 15p for public. Our Fleet Cost Index blends those at 70/30 to reach 9.4p, against 23.53p for diesel. Shift a van from mostly-depot to mostly-public and its running cost advantage over diesel roughly halves. Depot and home charging is where the electrification saving actually lives; public charging is where it leaks.

The constraint side is capacity and time. Depot charging requires a connection you may not be able to get quickly, and a yard layout that works. Public charging requires nothing except a card, which is precisely why it is more expensive.

So the practical order of operations:

1. Establish what your grid connection lead time actually is, from the DNO, in writing, before you commit to a depot-first strategy. This is the single item most likely to derail an electrification timetable.
2. Work out what proportion of your charging genuinely has to be public - the trunk routes, the drivers without driveways, the overnight-away vehicles. Price that at 15p a mile, not at a blended rate.
3. Fix home charging access for drivers who can have it. On 12,000 miles a year, the gap between 7p and 15p is roughly £960 per driver. That funds a home unit inside two years. Our cost to charge page holds the underlying electricity figures.
4. For HGV operations, watch the swapping and MCS routes rather than committing to megawatt depot charging on today's connection prices.

The summary

The network is getting better, more concentrated and more expensive to use at the roadside, while the cheapest charging remains the charging you install yourself and cannot always get connected. That tension is the fleet charging decision for the next two years.