Co-Authors:
Cherish Smith, Director of Electric Vehicle Strategy, Edison Energy
Simon Horton, Director of EV Design & Delivery, Edison Energy
Transitioning internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EV) is increasingly top of mind for corporate customers seeking ways to meet their decarbonization goals. From federal funding to charging infrastructure, many of today’s organizations are exploring the various options and opportunities that come with fleet electrification. But with all of the information out there, it can sometimes get overwhelming.
To ease the transition, customers can break down fleet electrification into three buckets:
- Driving buy-In
- Charging infrastructure
- Charging optimization
Driving Buy-In
There are many reasons organizations may want to start their fleet electrification journey, including lowering operating costs, reducing maintenance, improving performance, achieving decarbonization goals, and meeting sales mandates and regulatory standards.
Beginning the transition sooner rather than later offers a host of benefits, including capturing the most value from available incentives and getting ahead of supply chain shortages.
Though the challenges may be daunting, strong stakeholder engagement is key and often the first place to start within your organization. Engaging team members across executive leadership, sustainability, fleet management, facilities managers, and procurement will help ensure organizational buy-in, shared understanding, aligned decision-making, and faster EV and charging infrastructure deployment. It is also critical to understand national, state, and local policies alongside utility programs and incentives to help identify when and where to launch fleet electrification, while also helping to decrease upfront costs.
Because each electrification journey is unique, it is also critical to analyze your current fleet and research current and future technologies to ensure they meet individual company needs and use cases. Capturing learnings from similar companies, developing a phased transition plan with pilot sites, and building employee commitment can help avoid common pitfalls and create a relevant and tailored strategy.
Charging Infrastructure
Once there is internal buy-in and a fleet electrification strategy has been created, it’s time to start planning for the design and installation of the necessary infrastructure and equipment to charge your vehicles. Thoughtful design strategies can be employed in the early stages of infrastructure development that allow for scaling in phases until full vehicle electrification goals are reached and the associated charger buildout has been achieved.
It is also critical to study the operational needs of the fleet in addition to potential operational gains from EVs, while also understanding the necessary charging power levels and charging port counts. Typically, the lowest-power charger that maintains the full operating needs of a vehicle is the best choice from both an operational and cost-efficiency perspective.
Additionally, identifying charging cycles that allow for more than one vehicle to use a charger will greatly reduce the infrastructure needed to charge the fleet. A charger that serves multiple vehicles throughout a 24-hour cycle is far more cost-efficient than a charger that only serves a single vehicle once a day.
Designing charging infrastructure requires a thorough due diligence process to produce accurate project cost estimates and project development timelines, as well as to identify the required technology, equipment, and conceptual designs – all of which are necessary to guide corporate decision-making.
A successful charging infrastructure installation should include:
- Partnering with the utility early in the planning process to establish project needs and identify timelines. Utility rules and timelines can vary significantly from one project to another depending on the load being requested, existing utility infrastructure, regulations for new or upgraded services, and availability of funding, among other factors.
- Researching the relevant Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) for project permitting requirements and design review timelines.
- Clearly understanding the project approval process and requirements prior to initiating design so that any unique requirements may be incorporated throughout the engineering process.
- Ensuring that the necessary charging equipment is in place, particularly when considering extended procurement timelines. Electric service panels and breakers can take 30-60 weeks to deliver, depending on the panel complexity and current supply chain constraints. Charging equipment may have equally long lead times, especially higher-powered units.
- Implementing the due diligence process can help identify and engage suppliers in conjunction with engineering, permitting, and early construction activities, thereby reducing overall project timelines.
Charging Optimization
Upon successful charging infrastructure construction and commissioning, it is time to focus on minimizing disruption to fleet operations after shifting to a new technology. One of the most critical parameters to ensuring business continuity is the proper charging of vehicles to help meet operational needs, schedules, and routes. This requires a charging strategy to control the energy flow of the chargers to ensure that each vehicle meets the required State of Charge at the time of departure, for which a Charging Management System (CMS) is needed.
A CMS ensures that chargers dispatch the right amount of energy at the right time, detects charging or connection issues, monitors charger health, and provides self-healing and real-time alerts to fleet operators to help address problems in a timely manner.
Other key considerations and benefits of a CMS include:
- Charging site load capacity limits to properly control the charging load. The CMS must have visibility to all site loads (under the same point of connection) to properly distribute the charging load to meet all the operational requirements within the load limit.
- Demand charge avoidance can significantly impact charging costs and the total cost of ownership.
- Time of Use (TOU) rates can be leveraged to charge during the lowest energy cost and to utilize onsite generation from solar and/or storage to minimize charging costs. This can help build the business case for fleet electrification.
- Reporting capabilities to provide total emissions reduction and charging costs, providing visibility to the realized benefits of the electrified fleet.
To successfully transition to an electrified fleet, it’s important to think about the broader journey including securing internal buy-in, charging infrastructure best practices, and optimizing your fleet charging once operational. While each journey is unique, a thoughtful strategy and implementation roadmap will go a long way in meeting – and exceeding - your organization’s decarbonization and cost reduction goals.