The move to zero emissions is one of the most important and complex changes that city and county fleet managers have had to tackle in generations.

A wave of state and federal support makes this change achievable. And vehicles and charging equipment are finally proving to be suitable to handle the job. Now, it’s on fleet managers to take action.

Here’s a quick guide on what to know if you’re a city, county, or affiliated fleet evaluating your next steps.

Most fleets need to act now

Ever since California mandated transit agencies purchase only zero emissions buses starting in 2029, municipal fleets of all sorts have been waiting to see what would come their way.

As of 2023, they have their answer. Through this year’s ACF regulations, all varieties of municipal fleets must have 50% of new vehicle purchases be zero emissions in 2024. And by 2027, all new vehicles purchased must be zero emissions.

With average municipal fleet replacement cycles hovering around 8 to 15%, this means that even smaller entities will be taking receipt of a dozen electric cars and trucks sometime within the next year.

The challenge is charging & operations

The good news is that between the F-150 Lightning, the Silverado EV, the Transit EV, and smaller vehicles like the Chevy Bolt, Mustang Mach-E and others, there are finally a lot of EV options that are affordable for government fleets. And with EV maintenance being far easier than ICE, your future fleet will be easier to maintain and longer-lasting.

The flipside is that keeping these vehicles charged up and ready to perform is no small feat. It’s not uncommon to hear of cities purchasing 1.2 or even 1.5 EVs for every traditional vehicle they are replacing, just because of the challenges in keeping the EVs charged and running to meet all the missions.

In some cases, this is justified – you just can’t refuel enough EVs fast enough to have them replace your gas or diesel trucks 1:1.

But in many cases, being a little smarter about how you manage charging and fleet operations can make this transition a lot less complex.

Operational excellence looks very different for EVs than it does for traditional vehicles. Having smart integration between your EVs, your charging depots, and your energy resources can be the difference between an affordable, smooth transition and an expensive or bumpy one.

One city in California that has taken a progressive approach towards building a smart solution is Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach’s director of transit and community services told the LA Times recently “obviously, you can go and buy an electric vehicle fairly easily, but the important thing is to have the charging infrastructure and the electric grid infrastructure backing it up, so that you’re able to effectively operate those vehicles and ensure that they’re able to be charged in the places they need to be charged.”

Without designing a system that fully integrates the vehicles, fleet operations & schedules, your charging infrastructure and the electrical resources you have available, even modest sized fleets will quickly run into problems.

Litschi added: “I’m very familiar with a lot of [municipal] agencies who have gone down that road and have dozens of buses parked that they can’t use because they have no way to charge them.”

Below are the two KEY questions you need to answer on the way to your fleet transition.

The “happy path” for municipal fleet charging

When a user manages to achieve their goals with basically no disruptions, product designers call that the Happy Path. Let’s look at what the happy path would look like for a hypothetical city in California – San BernDiego.

Decision 1: to build or not?

In all but the largest and most complex gas and diesel fleets, most refueling happens at the same fuel stations that are used by the general public. And it’s easy! Municipal drivers are given fuel cards, and they are able to fill up whenever they need at stations that are pretty widely available. Refueling today is so quick it doesn’t really factor into general fleet readiness or operational scheduling.

But because charging takes a long time, fleets need to treat public charging facilities as a backup, and instead invest in their own, dedicated charging infrastructure in their fleet’s parking lots.

The Challenged Road: In one scenario, San BernDiego might have waited to take receipt of the first vehicles to begin trialing the use of some well located public charging infrastructure before deciding if it needed to build its own. But in this scenario, they would have found their employees wasting time sitting at charging stops for upwards of two hours. And when the stations were full with public users, some city EVs weren’t reporting ready for the job.

The Happy Path: But San BernDiego built charging on its own municipal fleet parking lots to ensure that he could charge his vehicles when they were already parked and sitting idle, for the most part overnight. This ensures that the vehicles would almost always be charged and ready to go for the standard duty cycles.

Decision 2: to manage or not?

Filling up with gas was always a cost driver, but rarely an operational consideration. Electricity is the opposite: affordable, but operationally complex. And ultimately, saving a few dollars on gas doesn’t matter if your fleet operations grind to a halt.

It is likely that your parking lot might not have access to enough power to charge more than a few vehicles at a time. Also consider that most charging is going to take hours. Suddenly, if you have three or four vehicles coming back at the same time to charge, you have to decide which one to charge first. Sure, the “easy” solution is to get the utility to give you enough power to charge everyone at once. But you will likely have to wait years, pay a high price for grid upgrades and be susceptible to utility outages that are getting more and more common in California. This is why managing schedules and responding to events in real time is going to be a core part of running charging depots!

Even if the charge scheduling might seem simple initially, extrapolate it across dozens of vehicles and chargers and you’ll understand that managing the constraints around energy, charging speed, and charging spaces is complex – and critical to ensuring your fleet works.

The Challenged Road: In one scenario, San BernDiego might have simply installed the fastest charger they could afford with the goal of keeping congestion to a minimum. But when the grid upgrade to free up space for the next few chargers came back at 18 months, they faced a dilemma: while it charged vehicles in just 40 minutes, having a whole row of EVs charged overnight required someone to cycle the cars one by one. So the “most powerful” solution wasn’t actually the right one!

The Happy Path: San BernDiego didn’t do this. Instead, it constructed a series of lower-power chargers alongside a mid-range fast charger. While they don’t have the power to run all simultaneously, the fast charger can be used for opportunistic top-ups when a new mission comes out of the blue, while the row of slower chargers can run altogether overnight to charge up many vehicles ahead of the morning shift. Managing how all of these are timed is handled with almost no staff input – charging operations management software gives their drivers clear instructions as to when and where to plug cars in.

Bonus: how smart management can help your fleet shine

Managing complexity to keep your fleet running requires new tools – but, as in much of life, tackling these challenges might not necessarily win you any awards.

But EVs offer your fleet a chance to really shine. With the right systems in place, your fleet can begin bringing incentive cash flow to your municipal organization, or even become a cornerstone of your city and county’s resilience infrastructure.

The Challenged Road: In one scenario, San BernDiego managed its chargers manually. In the event of a power outage across the city, requests to draw power from either their stationary backup system or the batteries in their cars fell to the coordination of their staff – which meant it couldn’t be done in real time and wasn’t eligible for subsidies from the State or Federal government for resilience resourcing. And to claim LCFS credits from California, the accounting department was tasked with many hours of manual work reviewing metering & bills.

The Happy Path: But San BernDiego used charging operations management software to run their depots and fleets. This software automated the whole process making energy accessible for resilience purposes. It also cut down on standard overhead like reporting to get LCFS credits!

Port Power makes EV as easy as diesel

Port Power was founded by EV industry veterans to solve this exact problem. We are a full solution provider that partners with fleet operators and their real estate partners to solve the charging problem today and scale it to handle all future needs.

Unlike the EV charging infrastructure help that might come from an OEM, a charge point operator, or your local utility, Port Power is an independent player responsive to the specific needs of your fleet.

Unlike consulting firms and electrical contractors, Port was founded around a set of proprietary technologies that allow us to deliver solutions that are truly hassle-free and capable of scaling up in an economical way as your fleet adopts more EVs.

Whether you are a fleet operator buying your first EV trucks or a city administrator tasked with figuring out your plan, reach out to schedule a consultation with the team at Port Power for help with:

• Clearly understanding the transition timelines that apply to your business
• Getting the full range of options you have to manage this transition
• Having a soup-to-nuts, managed solution for all your charging needs
• Getting the government incentives your business deserves without the headache of manual reporting

Get in touch with us today: https://portpower.us/contact/