Two CQ450s were delivered on 7 July, one to Filton in Bristol, the other to Edgbaston in Birmingham. Both were commissioned before the day was out.

NHS Blood and Transplant collects, tests and distributes blood for the whole of the UK, and coordinates organ donation and transplantation. When one of their vehicles cannot charge, someone at the other end is waiting.

As that fleet electrifies, the charging has to be as dependable as the diesel it replaces, at sites that were never built to supply it.

Martin Hunt ran the programme for NHSBT. He put the problem plainly.

You can buy electric vans today. A grid connection big enough to charge a depot full of them takes an application, a quote, a reinforcement programme and a wait measured in years. For a fleet that cannot stand still, the connection queue sets the pace.

Two sites at once

Two sites, but really one job that had to land twice.

A depot electrification project usually goes site by site for good reasons. Each location has its own supply, its own layout, its own constraints, and doing them in sequence lets you learn from the first before committing to the second. That sequencing is also what makes the programme long. For a fleet that does not pause, that means running the old way at one site and the new way at the other, for months.

Doing both at once removes the wait, and the safety net with it. Both units had to be right before either one moved, because there was no first site to learn from.

Testing

Which put the weight on testing. Final testing on the NHSBT units was completed at our own site, with a 100% first-time success rate across the test programme.

A van driver from NHSBT joined the team during testing. She found it simple to use, and said it would make a difference to getting blood and organs where they need to go. Of everything said during testing, that is the line we remember.

With the units proven, the delivery was mostly logistics. Both units went out on 7 July and were commissioned that afternoon, one at Filton, one at Edgbaston. A CQ450 arrives as a complete system in an ISO container and is designed to be commissioned within a day, which is what makes a same day, two site delivery realistic at all.

What came next

The brief was electric vehicle charging. The discussions since have widened to energy resilience, solar integration, backup for data centre loads, and future megawatt charging for electric HGVs at both locations.

We see that progression often. Rarely this fast. Once a site has a large battery on it that is already integrated with the electrical system, the question stops being "how do we charge the vans" and becomes "what else can this do". A unit sized for a fleet is also a unit that can hold a site up when the supply does not, or soak up solar that would otherwise be exported, or provide the headroom that heavier vehicles will need later.

For an organisation running critical national infrastructure, the resilience question was always coming. It came sooner because the hardware to answer it was already there.

The rollout

Filton and Edgbaston were never meant to stand alone. They are the opening pair in a national rollout across NHSBT's estate, and the next unit is already identified: a CQ160 for Colindale in North London.

Colindale is a different site with a different duty cycle, so it gets a CQ160 rather than a CQ450.

No two sites on the estate are alike, so each gets a unit sized to what it needs.

What it means elsewhere

Martin Hunt's point applies well beyond NHSBT. Most organisations electrifying a fleet are not choosing between a Charge Qube and a different charger. They are choosing between charging now and charging after a grid connection upgrade that has not been scheduled yet.

There was no room for disruption here, and no flexibility on timing. It worked because the hard engineering happened before anything reached a live site, so what turned up on the day was a finished system.

If your fleet cannot stop while its charging catches up, that sequence is the one worth copying.