Building a depot demand profile from your telematics
Your telematics already hold arrival and departure times. Turn them into an hour-by-hour demand profile — the number your DNO actually needs.
Last updated 15 August 2026
A demand profile — how much power your depot draws hour by hour through the night — is the number that drives grid sizing and smart-charging design. Your telematics probably already contain what you need to build one.
What a demand profile shows
Rather than a single peak figure, a demand profile plots power against time: when vehicles plug in, how much charging is happening at each hour, and where the busy moments fall. It reveals the simultaneous peak — the highest combined draw — which is what must fit inside your grid connection, and it shows how much slack exists to spread load into.
Mining your telematics
Telematics systems log when each vehicle returns and departs, and its daily mileage. From that you can derive each vehicle’s energy need and its available charging window, then layer them to see the combined demand across the night. Even a rough version, built from typical patterns, is far more useful than a single worst-case number.
Why it matters
A good profile lets you design to the real peak rather than the theoretical maximum, which usually means a smaller, cheaper connection and a smarter charging schedule. It also gives your DNO a credible, evidence-based figure, turning a vague enquiry into a productive planning conversation.
If you don’t have telematics detail, a timetable-based estimate works too. Either way, feed the result into the Grid Capacity Estimator to translate your profile into a kVA figure you can take forward.