Golf has the single best dwell-time profile in UK destination charging, and almost every club is ignoring it. A round takes four hours before anyone reaches the bar. A 7kW socket in that window puts roughly 28kWh — over 100 miles of range — into a member's car while they play. No queuing, no range anxiety, no behaviour change. The car park does the work.
Compare that with the sites everyone fights over. Supermarkets get 45-minute dwell. Coffee shops get 20. Motorway services get drivers who want to leave as fast as possible. Golf clubs get the same paying visitors, in the same spaces, for four to five hours, week after week, on a membership model that guarantees repeat visits. If you designed a venue from scratch for low-power, high-margin destination charging, it would look like a golf club.
The demand side is not hypothetical
Two numbers matter here.
First, golf is growing. England Golf's latest membership figures put club membership at 750,071 in 2025 — up 2.66% on the year, the highest in over a decade, with junior membership up 34% to 61,483. That is three-quarters of a million people in England alone with a standing reason to park at your venue every week.
Second, the cars are arriving. The UK passed 2 million EVs this year, and the growth is concentrated exactly where golf memberships sit: company-car drivers and salary-sacrifice professionals, where tax treatment makes an EV the rational choice. Your car park on a Saturday morning already contains more EVs than it did last season. Next season it will contain more again. The only question is whether they charge at your club or notice that they can't.
What the numbers look like for a club
Be conservative. Two dual-socket 7kW pedestals — four sockets. Assume just four charging sessions a day across them, averaging 25kWh each, with a margin of around 20p per kWh between your commercial supply rate and a fair member tariff. That's roughly £7,300 a year in gross margin — before you count a single new visitor. It's the same arithmetic we ran for retail sites, where two chargers cleared £7,116 profit in year two, and golf's dwell time makes the utilisation assumption easier to hit, not harder.
Then add the second-order revenue, which for most clubs is bigger than the electricity margin:
- Society and corporate days. Organisers comparing venues now check three things: the course, the catering, and increasingly whether the car park can charge twelve visiting EVs. Chargers are a line in the winning venue's proposal.
- Visitor green fees. A destination charger listed on the public charging apps puts your club in front of EV drivers planning a day out. Some of them play golf.
- The 19th hole. A driver who wants to leave at 80% charge orders another coffee. Dwell time and food-and-beverage spend move together — the effect every hospitality destination-charging site reports.
The government will pay for a chunk of it
The Workplace Charging Scheme currently offers up to £500 per socket, up to 40 sockets across your sites, and it's open to eligible businesses, charities and public-sector organisations — which covers the great majority of golf club structures, whether proprietary, members-owned or CASC-registered. The current rates took effect on 1 April 2026 and the scheme runs until 31 March 2027.
On our conservative four-socket example, that's £2,000 off the hardware and installation bill before you've negotiated anything. Clubs that wait until the scheme closes will pay full price for the same kit. The wider funding landscape — including options for larger car parks — is in our 2026 grants round-up.
Where clubs get it wrong
Buying rapid chargers. A 50kW+ rapid charger is the wrong tool for a four-hour dwell. It costs multiples more to install, often triggers a grid connection upgrade, and finishes charging the car three hours before the golfer finishes the back nine. For golf, 7–22kW AC is right-sized: cheaper hardware, cheaper installation, and the dwell time does the rest.
Assuming the supply can take it. Clubhouses run kitchens, bars, irrigation pumps and a shed full of buggy chargers, often on a supply that was specified decades ago. Load management usually solves it without a costly DNO upgrade — but that's a survey question, not a guess.
Free-for-members forever. Free vend feels generous and quietly becomes a four-figure annual electricity subsidy as EV numbers grow. Set a fair member tariff from day one; members accept paying for fuel — what they won't accept is a charger that's always occupied because it's free.
Closed systems. Buy hardware that speaks OCPP, the open protocol, so you can switch management platforms without replacing the kit. We've covered how vendor lock-in happens and how to avoid it — clubs on tight budgets can least afford to buy twice.
The competitive clock
Golf clubs compete locally: for members, for societies, for weddings and functions. The first club in a district with visible, working, fairly priced chargers gets a differentiator that costs its rivals members to ignore. The third club to install gets nothing but parity — at next year's prices, possibly without the grant.
Hotels went through exactly this cycle, and the laggards are now retrofitting in a hurry. Golf has the better dwell time, the more loyal audience and a live grant. There is no version of 2028 in which your car park doesn't charge cars; there is a version in which someone else's clubhouse got three seasons of society bookings out of moving first.
What to do this month
Get the supply assessed before you talk to any hardware vendor. A proper site survey tells you what your existing connection can support, whether load management avoids a DNO application, where the cable runs actually cost, and what a phased install (two sockets now, ducting for six) looks like — so you buy once.
We survey golf and leisure sites across the UK, handle the Workplace Charging Scheme paperwork, and only recommend open-protocol hardware. Book a site survey and find out what your car park could be earning by spring.
Site SurveyRead this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/ev-charging-golf-clubs-uk. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.