EV charging near your sites: why it matters and how to check it

Charging near a site matters when your customers or vehicles drive electric and stay long enough to plug in: hotel guests overnight, shoppers at a supermarket or mall, staff at an office, a fleet parked at a depot. To check it, count the public charging stations within a short distance of each site, then look at how many are fast, how many cars can charge at once, who runs them and whether they work. A site with no charger nearby is either a gap to fill or a reason drivers go elsewhere.

This article is for retail and property teams, hotel groups, fleet and logistics managers, car dealers and city planners. It explains which businesses gain from nearby charging, how to read station and power figures, the traps in the data, and how to keep an up-to-date picture for a whole network of sites.

Who should care, and why

• Supermarkets and shopping centres. A driver who can charge during the shop has a reason to choose you over the store across town. A car park with no charger nearby is a candidate for your own.
• Hotels. Guests with electric cars ask before they book. Slower chargers within walking distance suit an overnight stay; a fast charger nearby helps guests leaving early.
• Fleets and depots. Vans and taxis that cannot all charge at the depot need fast public chargers on their way out and back.
• Car dealers. A test drive in an electric car is easier when a fast charger sits close to the showroom.
• Offices and venues. Staff and visitors plan around where they can charge during the day.

Stations, charge points and power

Three words get mixed up. A station is a location, such as a car park. A charge point is one place a car can charge, so a station with six points serves six cars at once. Power, in kilowatts, decides how fast a car charges. The EV charging block lets you keep only stations that reach 7, 22, 50 (counted as fast) or 150 kW (ultra-fast), within 500 m, 1 km, 2 km, 5 km or 10 km of each place.

With Pass on set to each incoming place, every one of your sites goes on with these fields:

• ev_stations and ev_points: stations and charge points within the distance.
• ev_fast_stations and ev_max_kw: how many are fast, and the highest power nearby.
• ev_nearest and ev_nearest_km: the nearest station and how far it is.
• ev_operators: the main operators near the site.

Set to pass on the stations found instead, each station comes as its own item with its operator, address, connectors, highest power, status, who may use it, and when its details were last confirmed.

Choosing the distance and the power

Match both to what the customer does at your site. Someone shopping walks from the charger to the door, so 500 m or 1 km is the honest radius, and slower power is fine if they stay a while. A fleet driver detours by car, so 5 km of ultra-fast chargers may matter more than a slow one next door. A made-up example of the difference: a hotel in Cape Town might show four stations within 1 km at any power and none at 50 kW or more within 2 km. Both are true; which matters depends on whether guests stay the night or pass through.

Starting points, not rules. Adjust to how your customers arrive and how long they stay.

What the figures cannot promise

The stations come from a public register of chargers filled in by charging networks, public bodies and drivers. Its coverage varies by country; where few stations are listed for an area, the step says the coverage may be thin, so a zero there may mean missing data rather than no chargers. A station's status is as last reported, and last_verified says when that was. A station listed as working a year ago may not be today.

Mistakes to avoid

• Reading zero as demand. No chargers near a site can mean nobody has built one yet, or that few people there drive electric. Look at what else is around before investing.
• Ignoring who may use it. Some stations are for one company's customers or a fleet only. Check the usage field before counting it as available to your visitors.
• One check, then silence. New stations open every month. A one-off list goes stale; a weekly check keeps it right.

An AI employee that watches charging around your sites

1. Upload your stores, hotels or depots to My data.
2. Add EV charging with Where set to each incoming place, the distance and the power you chose, and Pass on set to each place with counts.
3. Add a Filter for sites with no charging station nearby, or a Sort and limit to rank sites by fast stations.
4. Optionally add an xMap LLM block to write a short charging note per site for the front desk or the property team.
5. Email the list monthly, or add a Google Sheets row per site.

For a second flow, list the stations themselves around each site and add Only new, so you hear once about each new charger near a branch. Teams that run both know where they lack charging and where a rival network just arrived.