Last month (December 2022) saw the opening of Wales’ largest EV charging hub to date. Denbighshire County Council are leading the way in EV charging in Wales by commissioning this project alongside other EV charging projects across the County.
In July of this year, we at Mega Electrical NW Ltd. were approached by Stuart Davies of SWARCO and Martin Griffiths from Denbighshire County Council and tasked with delivering the largest EV hub in Wales.
I must admit that at our first site meeting, the prospect of turning this car park into a showpiece for EV charging did look like a herculean task!
The brief was to build an EV hub containing sixteen double 7Kw chargers and two 50Kw rapid chargers. This would also require a 500KVA brick substation to be built for Scottish Power Energy Networks and an LV substation to house our distribution equipment for the car chargers. In addition to this, the car park would need resurfacing and marking.
First on site was our sister company A Parry Construction Co. Ltd. The primary job was to construct a compound and get the machines on site. The site was marked out and the digging of the trenches to carry the ducting was soon underway. Our skilled team of ground workers and machine operators were soon ripping through the car park and laying the ducting to carry the power and communication cables for the chargers.
As you can see from the pictures this wasn’t just a question of digging through sandy soil as you might expect, but also encountering old brick foundations and at one point they even found part of the old engine turntable that used to turn the engines round on the railway.
In the meantime, work had started on the brick built HV and LV substations. Local brickwork contractor J.H Griffiths and Dave Davies from Woolrich Joiners & Conservators worked together to build the substatations from the the foundations up. The HV substation was built to strict SPEN specifications and the LV sub followed along the same lines. We also employed local specialist contractors Lewis & Hunter Contracting of Ruthin to resurface the car park and North West Line Markings Ltd. from Liverpool took care of marking out the car park.
Once all the trenching and ducting had been laid, we then set about casting bases for the chargers and installing safety bollards and posts for the signs. On this job, because the chargers were situated back-to-back, we decided to custom build the bases as opposed to using EV blocks which often do on installs. Once the foundations were set, we installed the chargers to the bases. We pulled in over 1000m cable to supply the charging points on this project.
Our engineers fitted out the purpose built main panel board which was designed and supplied by B&S group, Chester.
This has been an amazing project to work on; to be part of the team that delivered the largest EV charging hub in Wales has been awesome and I want to express a huge thank you to all our people who have been involved in delivering the project.
Particular thanks to all those who took part in the project from Mega Electrical and A Parry Construction.
We’re now looking forward to tackling new projects for both Denbighshire and Flintshire County Council, instaling EV chargers in nine more car parks in Denbighshire and eight car parks in Flintshire.
