When a single charger is being planned, the calculation is simple: the device’s power is known, and a suitable connection has to be provided. The moment the number of chargers grows to five, ten, or twenty, the intuitive logic – add up the rated power of all chargers and request that much from the grid – leads straight into one of two costly mistakes. In practice, it is the site’s connection capacity that sets the framework for everything else.
Why Charger Power Should Not Be Added Up Naively
Suppose ten 22 kW AC chargers. A simple sum gives 220 kW and looks like a clear target for sizing the connection. The problem is that this scenario – all ten chargers at full power, at the same moment, with vehicles that can all accept 22 kW – almost never actually occurs. Vehicles arrive and leave at different times, many are limited by their onboard charger, and some are already sufficiently charged. Sizing the connection to a theoretical maximum that never happens means paying for capacity that sits unused for years.
Connection Capacity as the Real Limit
Connection capacity is the maximum power a site is permitted to draw from the distribution grid, defined by contract and protected by the main fuse. It is shared among everything in the building that consumes electricity – production machinery, air conditioning, lighting – and the chargers are just one, albeit significant, consumer within that total.
If the sum of instantaneous loads attempts to exceed that limit, the main fuse trips and the site loses power. This opens up a real choice: either upgrade the connection to a higher capacity, which is often expensive, slow, and sometimes technically unfeasible, or manage the available power so that the limit is never exceeded. The second path almost always makes more sense, and this is where load management comes in.
Static and Dynamic Management
The simplest approach is static distribution: the total power reserved for charging is fixed and divided by the number of chargers. Ten chargers and 100 kW reserved for charging means each one gets 10 kW, regardless of circumstances. The solution is cheap and stable, but wasteful – when only one car is connected, it still receives just 10 kW, even though the grid could easily handle far more at that moment.
Dynamic load management solves precisely this loss. The system measures the site’s total consumption and the available headroom in real time, then distributes power among the active chargers according to current needs. When one vehicle is charging, it receives everything available; when more are connected, the power is automatically reallocated, while the main fuse remains protected. The installation thus uses the maximum of what the connection already offers, with no risk of overload and no expensive upgrade.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Imagine a company with a fleet of delivery vehicles that return in the evening and charge overnight. The theoretical maximum of all the chargers far exceeds the site’s connection capacity, but here that is irrelevant – the vehicles have the entire night interval at their disposal. A dynamic system distributes the available power throughout the night, charging vehicles in turn and by priority, and by morning they are all ready. Instead of upgrading the connection, the site has solved the same task through smarter distribution of existing power.
The same principle applies to hotels, shopping centers, or office buildings, where the consumption pattern differs but the limitation remains the same: a finite connection capacity that needs to be shared intelligently rather than fixed.
Conclusion
Several chargers in one place are not the sum of individual devices, but a system sharing a common, limited resource – the site’s connection capacity. Naively adding up rated power leads either to an unnecessarily expensive upgrade, or to an installation that drops out of operation the moment the load rises.
This is why such installations are planned, not improvised. The right question is not “how many chargers will fit,” but “how to distribute the available power so that the installation is both safe and fully utilized.” The answer to that question often marks the difference between a solution that works for years and one that reaches its limit by the very first winter.
