Dutch business-mobility company Shuttel published an analysis in mid-August 2026 of nearly 2 million EV charging sessions from its own customer base, over the past year, and the pattern is not what capacity planning usually assumes. Almost 20 percent of sessions start between 07:00 and 09:00, a second peak of about one in five starts between 16:00 and 19:00, and only 5 to 6 percent per hour start between 10:00 and 15:00, in the middle of the working day when a site has the most room to spare. A typical session needs roughly 27 kWh over 2.5 hours at 11 kW, well inside that quiet stretch.
Shuttel frames the figures as its own data, not a national statistic, but the shape is instructive regardless of scale: cars stay connected for most of the working day, and the energy a session actually needs fits easily into the hours nobody is charging. The peak a workplace site feels is arrival and departure overlapping, not a shortage of capacity across the day. Bart Horstman, mobility specialist at Shuttel, said using the available charging time more intelligently can cut peak load substantially without the driver noticing anything different.
The arithmetic
Take the typical session at face value. 27 kWh at 11 kW is about two and a half hours of actual charging, and a car parked at an office is connected for eight or nine. The same energy has three times the window it needs.
Spread across a full workday, the average draw per vehicle falls to somewhere near 3.5 kW instead of 11. Nothing about the driver's day changes, because the car leaves with the same charge either way. What changes is whether twenty cars all pull 11 kW between eight and half past nine, or whether the site takes the same total energy at a third of the instantaneous power. The number that follows is not how many chargers a site needs. It is how much connection capacity it can avoid buying by using hours it already has.
Two caveats travel with the figures. Every report of this traces back to a single Shuttel release, and the data is Shuttel's own and unaudited. The period is described only as the past year.
That reframing is what load management on any OCPP backend is built to exploit: shifting sessions inside the connected window rather than adding capacity for the arrival rush. Plugchoice smart charging runs that scheduling regardless of which charger brand is installed at the site.
Sources: Automotive Online, "Shuttel analyseert: grootste netpieken ontstaan door gelijktijdig laden", August 13, 2026. Mobiliteit.nl, "Werkgevers hebben meer invloed op laadgedrag dan vaak gedacht wordt", August 13, 2026.