Fernando
11 Jun 2026
The UK needs roughly 213,000 new public chargepoints by 2030. There are about 87,000 installed today, the government target is 300,000, and the gap needs closing in under four years.
This isn’t going to happen one charger at a time. The model is shifting towards large-scale charging hubs – GRIDSERVE’s Super Hubs now feature up to 48 ultra-rapid bays per site, rapid charging networks are expanding across the UK and Europe, and the £381 million LEVI Fund is now moving from procurement into delivery, targeting over 100,000 new on-street chargepoints through local authorities alone.
For the charge point operators and contractors delivering this infrastructure, speed is everything. Every week a site isn’t operational is a week of lost revenue and a week the network isn’t serving drivers. The focus, understandably, has been on grid connections, charger hardware, and site acquisition.
What’s received less attention is what goes in the ground.
Every charger needs a foundation
At a single-charger level, this seems trivial. But at network scale, it’s anything but.
A large charging hub requires dozens of individual concrete elements: charger pedestal bases, canopy foundations, transformer pads, switchgear housings, cable ducting, and drawpits. Each one traditionally involves excavation, formwork, reinforcement, in-situ pours, and curing time. Multiply that across a multi-bay site and the foundation programme alone can consume weeks before a single charger is mounted. Every additional week on site is a week of prelims, labour, and plant hire – costs that compound quickly across a multi-site programme.
For on-street installations under the LEVI Fund, the constraints are different but equally pressing. Residential streets mean road closures, disruption to residents, and pressure to minimise the duration and scale of civil works. Extended curing periods and heavy lifting equipment are exactly what councils and their contracted operators want to avoid.
And across a national or European network – where an operator might be building dozens or hundreds of stations in parallel – the cumulative demand for concrete foundations is substantial, repetitive, and ripe for a more efficient approach.
The problem with how foundations are built today
CPOs and their construction partners currently have two main options, and both have significant limitations at scale.
Cast-in-situ concrete looks cheap at point of install, but the total delivery cost tells a different story. Each foundation requires its own mini construction process – dig, form, reinforce, pour, cure, strip – and the whole thing is weather-dependent. When you factor in formwork materials, specialist labour, plant hire, curing delays, and the site prelims that run for every extra week, the real cost per foundation is significantly higher than the concrete alone. On a 30-bay hub site, the sequential nature of in-situ work adds weeks to the programme and thousands to the budget. On a residential street, it means longer road closures, more disruption, and higher reinstatement costs.
Standard precast blocks are faster – no curing, consistent quality, and increasingly common in the EV sector. But conventional precast blocks are solid, heavy, and not optimised for the loads they actually carry. That means more concrete than necessary, higher transport costs (you cannot flat-pack a solid block of precast concrete), and a bigger carbon footprint than the application demands. They do the job, but they do it with more material, more energy, and more emissions than they need to.
What’s missing is a foundation system designed for the way modern charging networks actually scale: standardised for repeat deployment, lightweight enough for efficient logistics across dispersed sites, fast to install without curing, and low enough in carbon to match the sustainability credentials of the infrastructure it supports.
A smarter approach: standardise, store, deploy
We manufacture low-carbon foundations using computational design and robotic production. The geometry of each unit is optimised to carry its specific loads with the minimum possible material – typically using up to 60% less material than conventional alternatives, with a corresponding 40% reduction in embodied CO2. Every unit is Eurocode-compliant, manufactured offsite for consistent quality, and arrives on site ready to install with no curing time.
The cost impact is significant. Lighter units mean lower transport costs across dispersed networks. No formwork means no formwork materials or labour. No curing means no programme delays, which directly reduces site prelims and plant hire. Fewer and simpler lifts mean smaller cranes and smaller crews. For operators deploying foundations across dozens or hundreds of sites, these savings compound rapidly – reducing the capital cost of each station and accelerating the point at which the site generates revenue.
Because the units are lighter than standard precast, they cost less to transport, need smaller lifting equipment, and are simpler to handle – whether that’s on a motorway service area or a residential street.
But the real advantage for network operators isn’t the individual foundation. It’s the deployment model.
We work with CPOs to develop a standardised foundation design for their network – engineered to their specific charger hardware, site layout, and structural requirements. Once the design is finalised, we manufacture in batches. The operator stores the units in their warehouse and deploys them on demand as new stations are built, wherever and whenever they’re needed.
This turns foundations from a site-by-site procurement exercise into a logistics operation: predictable, repeatable, and fast. Fastned, one of Europe’s leading rapid charging networks with over 380 stations across nine countries, has already adopted this model. We designed and manufactured 60 custom foundations for their charging stations, using 60% less material and reducing embodied CO2 by 40%. The design has since been standardised within Fastned’s internal deployment model, with units held in warehouse inventory and deployed on demand as new stations come online. Read the full Fastned case study
Where it applies across a charging site
The standardise-and-deploy approach works across the full range of concrete elements that charging infrastructure requires.
Charger pedestal bases are the most repeated element on any site, typically needing to accommodate specific bolt patterns and cable routing for different hardware manufacturers. Our design process customises each unit to exact specifications while maintaining automated production speed.
Canopy and shelter foundations support the roofed structures that are increasingly standard at premium hubs. These are where geometric optimisation delivers the biggest material savings, replacing the over-engineered solid blocks that traditional approaches default to.
Transformer and switchgear pads are among the heaviest concrete elements on a charging site. Lighter, optimised units simplify both delivery and installation.
Drawpits and cable ducting, at scale across a network, number in the hundreds or thousands. Highly repetitive and structurally straightforward, these are ideally suited to standardised offsite production.
For each of these, the proposition is the same: less material, less carbon, less weight, less programme time, and a standardised design that deploys across multiple sites without re-engineering every time.
The LEVI Fund and on-street rollout
The LEVI Fund presents a particular opportunity for this approach. Over 100,000 new chargepoints are being deployed by local authorities across England, primarily on-street in residential areas where residents lack driveways and off-street parking.
On-street installation demands foundations that are fast to install, low-disruption, and lightweight enough to minimise the scale of civil works needed. Lightweight, precast foundations that arrive ready to install – no curing, no formwork, smaller lifting requirements – directly address these constraints.
For CPOs winning LEVI contracts across multiple council areas, a standardised warehouse-ready model could significantly reduce per-site capex while accelerating delivery against funded timescales. Rather than procuring foundations site by site – with separate design, specification, and procurement costs each time – the operator maintains a supply of ready-to-deploy units that work across their entire portfolio. The standardisation itself drives cost reduction: one design process, one production setup, repeated across every site in the network.
Building green infrastructure on green foundations
There is something worth saying plainly. EV charging exists to decarbonise transport. The operators building these networks are in the business of reducing carbon emissions. Their investors, their customers, and their procurement frameworks increasingly reflect that.
Building green infrastructure on carbon-heavy concrete foundations is a contradiction the industry is starting to recognise. It will not be long before embodied carbon in charging infrastructure becomes a procurement criterion, just as it already has in energy, water, and data centre construction.
The operators and contractors who standardise low-carbon foundation solutions into their networks now will be better positioned when that shift comes. The question is whether to get ahead of it or wait until it becomes a requirement.
What next
If you’re building or expanding an EV charging network and want to understand how our foundation system could support faster, lower-carbon deployment, we’d welcome the conversation.
