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Join for freePosted: Wed 10th Jun 2026
Want to understand more about how rising fuel prices could affect your small business?
In this webinar, Tom Stebbing, senior director of business development at EV experts Pod, gives you the inside track on how electrifying your business is easier than you think, saving you cash and carbon in the process.
Electrification is one of the most effective ways small businesses can reduce costs, cut carbon emissions and future‑proof operations – but where do you start?
Tom breaks down the real-world steps you can take to electrify, from adopting electric vehicles to upgrading how they use electricity on site.
How electrification saves money in practice – not just in theory: Where the biggest cash savings typically come from (such as EV running costs and smarter electricity use) and how to use Pod's ROI calculator to assess whether they stack up for your business.
A simple starting roadmap for adopting electric vehicles (EVs): When EVs make sense for small businesses, what infrastructure is really needed and how to avoid common mistakes that increase upfront costs.
What support and incentives can lower the cost of getting started: The types of support available to small businesses and how to factor them into your decision-making without overcomplicating the process.
Tom is Pod's senior director of business development, focusing on workplace and commercial EV charging solutions.
Having spent the last seven years enabling private and public sector organisations with projects, he's always keen to connect with businesses and individuals to discuss industry trends and explore potential charging solutions.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Powering Local Businesses Lunch and Learn. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today.
Powering Local Businesses is brought to you by EDF Small Business and Enterprise Nation. It's designed to help small businesses grow more sustainably, however you sell and wherever you're based.
Through the hub, you can access energy-saving guidance, expert workshops and a range of free business support resources. We'll be dropping links into the chat throughout, so please keep an eye out.
Today, we're focusing on one of the most impactful things a small business can do right now: electrify.
Whether you've been thinking about switching to an electric vehicle, upgrading how you use energy on-site, or simply trying to understand what electrification could mean for your bottom line, this session is for you.
We're joined by Tom Stebbing, senior director of business development at Pod Energy.
Tom has spent the last seven years helping private and public sector organisations navigate EV charging and electrification projects. He understands the practical realities small businesses face and is here to give you a straight-talking, no-jargon view of what actually works.
In this session, Tom will cover where the real cost savings come from, how to take your first steps towards adopting electric vehicles and what support and incentives are available to help you get started.
Please add any questions to the chat as we go. The session is being recorded, and we'll share the recording and resources afterwards. Over to you, Tom.
Tom: Thanks so much, Caitriona, and hello, everyone. Really nice to meet you. Thanks so much for taking the time to join the webinar today.
As Caitriona mentioned, my name is Tom, and I look after the business development team here at Pod. I've been doing this for a little while now.
I was just chatting to Caitriona before the session and saying that I used to be a small business owner myself, so it's really nice to be able to talk with everyone today.
Hopefully, you'll find the session useful. As Caitriona mentioned, feel free to drop any questions in the chat, and we'll make sure we have time for them at the end.
Here's where we're headed over the next 25 minutes or so. I'll give you a little update on what's happening in the EV landscape. There's lots of positive news, so we'll cover that.
We'll get through some of the basic information that's useful to know if you're trying to navigate this space. We'll look at what charging speeds mean and demystify some of that jargon Caitriona mentioned.
We'll talk about the electrification ladder: what are the simple quick wins you can get to, and what might you want to think about as a second or third step?
We'll then give you a couple of examples of what a return on investment might look like for even a small-scale EV deployment. Finally, we'll talk about how we solve for that at Pod and what that looks like practically.
Caitriona, could I ask you to put the poll up? Hopefully, everyone has just had a pop-up. I'll give everyone a minute or so to answer that.
As I mentioned, I've been working with different-sized organisations on electrification, focusing on electric vehicles for the last little while. It can be quite an overwhelming and complex problem to try to solve.
Here is just a small subset of some of the challenges people might face, so it would be great to get your thoughts. I'll give everyone a minute there, and then we can see where we get to with the poll results.
As promised, I wanted to share some updates about what's happening in the industry.
The first really positive headline is that there are now two million electric vehicles on the road in the UK. That is not a forecast or prediction. It's not what we think might happen. It's two million registered vehicles driving on motorways and through cities in the UK today.
If customers or visitors are attending your business premises, and you have a physical business premises, many of them may already be driving EVs.
EV adoption is going well, even now that we don't have as many incentives in place. What we tend to see is that once people get into an electric vehicle and overcome the initial hurdle, which is that it requires a bit of a change in behaviour and can feel a little complex, they really enjoy the simplicity of driving them.
They enjoy being able to charge at home or at work. And, of course, there is a carbon saving, which is really positive for many drivers.
Moving on to the vehicles themselves, the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel vehicles is still in place, so we're approaching that at a rate of knots.
The good news is that range anxiety has largely been solved. There's a good choice of electric vehicles on offer. I was chatting to someone yesterday who said they had put off adopting an electric vehicle because there wasn't one that could fit all the kids, the dog and all the kit for a holiday.
But now, if you walk into an average dealership, whether it's a European brand, Chinese brand or something else, there is likely to be a good vehicle on offer.
It used to be that 250 miles was at the top end of what you could realistically expect. Now that's quite comfortable for most mid-range vehicles, and some are 300-plus miles. There are even a couple of vehicles getting over 400 miles now.
Charging speeds have also gone up significantly. It's common now to see vehicles able to charge very quickly at a motorway service station, for example. So range anxiety is becoming less of a concern. Charge anxiety is more of the thing you tend to come across when speaking to drivers.
They're not so worried about whether their vehicle will get them from A to B. It's more: once I'm there, where will I be able to charge? Is that going to be cost-effective?
That's also an accelerator for fleets. People are finding that using electric vehicles for operational purposes is much more viable than it used to be. That's really positive.
The final note here is that about 40% of UK households don't have access to off-street parking.
Typically, when we think about electrifying a vehicle, the most convenient place and time to charge is overnight at home. If you can do that, great. There are some really good products from Pod and EDF on the market, so do check those out.
But 40% of the UK is still quite a lot of vehicles and people. Being able to charge at a workplace is normally the next most convenient place to top up a vehicle. Even if you're working hybrid, it might be somewhere you attend two or three times a week.
Being able to get a reliable charge there, where you're not having to queue or pay high public charging prices, is really valuable. Another trend we see in the industry is people deploying EV infrastructure at larger offices to attract people back to those sites, because this is such a big thing for many drivers.
Hopefully, that's a useful update on where the industry is headed.
If you were trying to implement some of this, you might say: "That all sounds great, Tom. I hear you about electric vehicles. There are lots of them on the road, more choice of vehicles and more charging options. But what does that mean for me, and how do I start thinking about electrifying as a business?"
First things first, start with what you can. It may not be electric vehicles. That can be quite a big leap. But there are other things you can think about, such as LED lighting. There can be a big power saving there, and it can typically be fairly low cost and low disruption.
When we talk about deploying EV infrastructure on-site, the installation process can be a bit disruptive, so it's worth bearing that in mind.
It's also worth thinking about how you use electricity. If you're running a manufacturing process, for example, there may be particular times of day when you get a lower energy cost.
Typically, that lower energy cost is less carbon intensive as well, because it isn't at a peak where a natural gas generator might need to be spun up.
There are quick wins in some of those smaller-scale things.
As you start to climb the ladder and say, "We've got LED lighting and decarbonised that. What are some chunkier or more complex things we could get to?", electric vehicles are certainly on that list.
There is absolutely no harm in starting small. There is still some good government funding available, which I'll come on to shortly, and that isn't linked to you deploying a huge number of charge points. It can be just one or two sockets.
One thing you'll hear coming up again and again in this presentation is site capacity. That's a crucial point, so we'll spend more time on that later.
Getting going with one or two sockets, depending on your use case, can be a nice starting point. We definitely saw that in the early days of the industry. People thought: what's the easiest thing I could solve for? Maybe it's even just my own use of an electric vehicle.
Getting a charge point at home is quite straightforward. If you're looking to cater for guests coming to your business premises, provide something for staff, or support operational vehicles, that's when charging on-site at your premises can be worth considering.
Once you've ticked off consumption on-site, the next step would be generation on-site. The cost of solar panels, as with batteries, has come down significantly over the last 10 years. There's a huge amount of manufacturing volume in the solar space, and with batteries too.
That's something we've seen deployed really nicely. And because battery costs have come down significantly, not only does that mean better choice and availability for vehicles, it also means on-site battery storage is now much more viable than it was a few years ago.
Hopefully, those are some practical examples to get you thinking.
If we zoom in on charging, here are some examples of how to start with something simple and then grow from there.
As I said, with one or two charge points, you could still claim government funding. A key requirement is understanding your electrical capacity.
You can get more power onto your site. In my experience, that normally adds complexity and is likely to add cost. But in most cases, you can fit something onto the existing electrical supply on most sites.
I'll come on to charging speeds in a moment. But let's say you have employee or visitor charging. In most cases, the dwell time, the time someone is on-site, is quite long.
The equation we want to do for EV charging, when we're thinking about the right charging speed, is: what is the use case of the driver? Where does that driver need to go? And what is the dwell time of the vehicle? How long will the vehicle be on-site?
When I think about a vehicle, I think about it moving because whenever I'm in it, it's moving. But typically, a vehicle is static for about 95% of its life.
Once you start thinking about static time and dwell time, there is a good period where you can energise that vehicle. You don't need to stand over it like you do with a petrol or diesel vehicle to fill it up. You can plug it in, walk away and it charges.
Even if it charges relatively slowly, because it's plugged in for eight or nine hours, you can still get a good amount of charge back into the battery.
For employee charging, if someone is on-site for around eight hours, or visitor charging if someone is attending a business premises for three hours, there is a middle ground before you need to jump to high-powered charging. Often, you can squeeze that onto an existing electrical supply.
Making that nice and easy with good digital infrastructure, such as apps and payments, is really important.
Once you've got your head around that, if it's working well, you can learn from it and grow the network if you have multiple locations.
What most businesses we work with do is start with one and see how that goes, then roll it out from there. You don't need to go huge on day one.
Once we get into more complex use cases around fleets, it becomes more operationally critical.
We did some work with an ambulance service a little while ago, and they did exactly this. They started with one location just to charge staff vehicles, then slowly worked through the process and got to some quite complex fleet activity.
It's good to take it one step at a time and learn as you go.
Fleet electrification often has a better payback than many people realise. Public charging costs tend to be quite a bit higher than the energy cost you might secure for yourself on-site.
So even if the infrastructure cost is slightly more expensive, if you're currently using a lot of public charging, the payback period can be quite competitive. That's worth bearing in mind.
Let's unpack charging speeds a little bit. You'll probably see a certain number of kilowatts mentioned. Hopefully, this slide helps explain that.
When we talk about kilowatts, that's essentially the rate of energy flowing through the charge point. The analogy I always use is filling up a bath. Kilowatts is how much pressure is in the system and how much water is coming out of the tap.
Kilowatt hours are the bathtub: how much the bath can actually hold. In this case, that's the battery.
The size of the battery in the vehicle changes depending on the model, size of vehicle and so on. But the kilowatt rate is what the charge point is controlling.
You could say that, based on an average battery size, it will take a certain amount of time to go from 20% to 80%. But bear in mind, it depends on how big the battery is.
If you look at a three-kilowatt charge, that's around what you'd get by plugging into a regular three-pin plug, which charges at around two kilowatts. Three kilowatts is just slightly higher than that.
Even at that low entry point, you can typically get a full charge overnight.
I had a customer a little while ago, a bakery based in south London. They had electric vehicles that were out very early, around four or five in the morning, doing deliveries around London.
But then those vehicles were back by midday, and they charged from midday all the way through to five the following morning.
That was completely fine for that use case, even at a very low speed. Based in a densely populated city like London, it worked.
You don't always need to go straight to big, high-powered charging. Even a small, low-powered solution can be really useful.
If we jump to the middle option, that's what we call fast charging. This is still an AC charger.
To explain the difference between AC and DC charging: AC is alternating current. DC is direct current. They are two slightly different waveforms. The grid operates in AC and batteries operate in DC, so at some point, a conversion needs to happen.
When you plug into an AC charger with your DC battery, the vehicle completes that conversion for you. There is a component in the vehicle that smooths out the waveform and drops the energy into the battery.
Those parts take up space, they're heavy and they can be expensive. All of that is bad if you're a vehicle manufacturer, because you want to keep costs and weight down. So manufacturers don't usually specify a very large converter.
Most vehicles will max out at around 11 kilowatts on an AC charger. This is a common misconception. Someone might walk into a dealership and be told: "This vehicle can charge up to 300 kilowatts." Then they might plug into an AC charger rated at 22 kilowatts and think they're going to draw 22 kilowatts.
But there's a distinction between how a DC charger works and how an AC charger works. The AC charging speed will normally be capped at around seven or 11 kilowatts because of the size of that inverter.
The follow-up question is: how are some vehicles able to charge at 200 or 300 kilowatts? That's where we get to rapid charging.
That's your motorway service station charging, where you see Tesla Superchargers or networks like Gridserve, Fastned and Ionity. The charge point itself is much larger and more expensive because it is doing the conversion from AC to DC for you.
By the time the current hits the vehicle, it's already direct current. It bypasses the converter and goes straight into the battery. As a result, the charge point can have much bigger power modules and inverters, and the charging rate can be much higher.
There is still a limitation on the vehicle side. The power electronics within the vehicle need to handle that high power rate, but that's how you get the difference.
If you're looking at vehicles and thinking about how you'll be charging, it's important to check both the AC and DC charging speed of the vehicle.
If you're charging a fleet vehicle overnight, and you can work out how many miles you need and therefore how many kilowatt hours you need, that will help you decide what charger you need.
In our experience, a seven-kilowatt or 11-kilowatt charger is normally really competitive. Only about five percent of vehicles on the road can charge at 22 kilowatts AC. Most of the time, seven or 11 kilowatts is healthy.
To put it into context, a seven-kilowatt charger is going to add roughly 25 miles of range per hour plugged in. An 11-kilowatt charger will add around 40 miles of range per hour plugged in.
The equation I'd always recommend is: what's the use case of the driver? How far is the delivery run or journey? What's the dwell time of the vehicle? How long is it on-site?
If the vehicle is on-site for a long time and doesn't need to drive very far, you can use a low charging speed. If the vehicle is not on-site for long and needs to go quite a long way, that's when you need to ramp up the charging speed.
Here is a breakdown of what we'd see as the deployments in different use cases.
One thing to draw out around payment is that if you deploy a home charger, it's plugged into your electric meter at home. There usually isn't much payment handling or authorisation needed.
On a business charger, it's very different. If you're a business, you are paying for the electricity being consumed by staff or whoever else is using it. You will typically want to collect that cost back.
So it's important to understand the payment journey of any charger you deploy on-site. What does the driver need to do? Who collects the payment? Is there payment onboarding you need to do?
On a home charger, because one individual is using it, you don't need lots of software sitting on top of that product. Normally, it's just an app to control it and read basic data.
If you're deploying a business solution, for example two chargers at a holiday let, you might have lots of different people using those chargers at different times. In that case, you need to set access control. Is it open to the public? Is it not? Do you want to schedule access?
You also need to track energy costs. Maybe staff pay one rate and guests pay a different rate. That can add complexity, so we would recommend using a commercial-grade charger with a suitable back-office system like ours.
I can see we're approaching the 25-minute mark, so I won't spend too long on this. But I'll reinforce what we talked through about payment handling.
There's actually a positive ROI on EV charging. It's a utilisation game at the end of the day. How much is someone going to use the charger? What is a reasonable rate to charge? Based on the number of hours people are plugged in, you can calculate the return.
That's something someone like us can help with.
Some things to think about are: what's the set-up with the landlord? Are they going to be OK with it? In my experience, most landlords are happy as long as you use a reputable provider who can give a good scope of works, so they understand the work being done. It typically adds value to their property.
Electrical supply is also very important. Most properties in the UK were not designed with EV charging in mind, so it's important to get a proper professional opinion on the limitations. That can be a determining factor.
Car park planning and restrictions are worth double-checking, although there have been some changes in the law over the last 12 months to make that a bit easier.
On ROI, think about who will use the chargers. Are you looking to reduce your costs because you won't need to pay for public charging? Or do you think you could monetise people visiting the site because EV adoption has increased?
One thing that really helps with ROI is the Workplace Charging Scheme.
Pod is an OZEV-approved manufacturer and installer, which means we can claim the funding for you by installing it and using that kit.
The funding is £500 per socket, which is fairly generous, and it's pretty easy to claim. All the business needs to do is generate a voucher code and send that to someone like us. We can then deduct £500 per socket from the cost of installation.
I want to make sure we have time for questions, so I'll skip through some of these bits and go to questions at the end. Caitriona, have we had any questions come through?
Caitriona: Yes, we've had a few questions come through. Thank you so much for your presentation, Tom.
Let's take this question from Sandra. Sandra is asking: "Do different cars have different charging stations?"
Tom: Very good question. Thankfully, we're not in an Apple versus Android world where BMW has one plug and Tesla has a different one.
That was sort of the case in the early days of the market, but nowadays it's much more standardised. It's something called a type two connector.
There is now also a legal requirement that when you take delivery of an electric vehicle, it has to have a charge cable with it, which is a type two connector.
Unless you're buying a very old, first-generation Nissan Leaf, you're unlikely to come across problems with different connectors. It's very standardised now, but it's a good question.
Caitriona: Brilliant. Thank you. That's great to know.
We've had a few questions from Everton as well. Building on the charger question asked by Sandra, are all charger plugs now standardised, or do we need an adapter?
Tom: They should be standardised. It's that type two connector, which is the cable you should receive with the vehicle.
Even on a DC charger, it's now something called CCS, or combined charging system, and that's the same across vehicle manufacturers in the UK. It's different in the US, but unless you're planning to drive to the US any time soon, you should be all right.
Caitriona: Thank you. Someone else is asking: "What if they live in a flat?"
Tom: Really good question. It slightly depends on whether it's right to park or demised parking. If you have your own parking space, then potentially it's a conversation to have with your landlord.
It's an area of the market that is accelerating quite a bit at the moment. Normally, what landlords want is a charge point operator, someone like Pod, to come in, put in a number of charge points and pay a kind of revenue share to the landlord.
Some landlords are doing that themselves, but it comes down to whether there is enough demand in the building to merit making that investment, and then whether it comes off the service charge. That's where you need to make sure you've understood the software set-up, so all the billing is accurate and fair.
That's exactly my situation. I live on the third floor of an apartment building. My landlord said it needs to be wired into my meter, which would mean running a cable around 150 metres from the car park. That isn't very viable.
It is a challenge, but now we're in the early majority adoption phase and landlords are seeing lots of electric vehicles on the road, they recognise this is something tenants will ask for. There are solutions on the market that cater for that.
Unfortunately, you are still reliant on your landlord. But public charging has come a long way in the past couple of years as well. There's much more choice and much better pricing.
If a local business has a reliable charger at a good cost, that could be another reason people choose to use it.
Caitriona: Thank you. It sounds like there are lots of options people can explore, which is great.
Another question asks: "How can chargers help earn revenue?"
Tom: That's a good example. Let's say I have an electric vehicle, but I don't have a way of charging at home because I live in an apartment or terraced house.
The next thing I would do is look on the public network and search for people who have installed chargers and made them available. Where is my nearest public charger? Or is there a charger at a location I'm already arriving at anyway?
This happened to me a little while ago. I was driving home from Cornwall and needed to charge halfway. I looked for somewhere I could charge and also get a decent cup of coffee.
I plugged my vehicle in for about an hour, and I bought a coffee, cake and other bits at a lovely little farm shop halfway back to London.
That's where you're providing a public service to EV drivers in your local area or people passing through.
People are willing to pay for that energy because otherwise they're not going to get home, or they need to top up once a week or whatever it might be. In that case, you're acting as a reseller of that energy.
Our digital infrastructure would record that Tom plugged into this charge point. You, as the site owner, set the rate. You might be buying energy at 25p and decide to sell it at 50p. You're making a 25p per kilowatt hour margin on that.
It's a utilisation game. The more people you get using that charge point, the more revenue you make. That's where the software and app side of things comes in.
Caitriona: Thank you. We're just coming to the end of the session now, but thank you so much, everyone, for joining us on today's Powering Local Businesses webinar.
We'll share the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. Thank you, Tom, for sharing your expertise and practical insights with us. It's been a really useful session.
I hope everyone has a lovely rest of their day.
Tom: Thanks, everyone.
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