charging Archives - Port Power Enterprises

EV Fleets Need Smart Charging, NOT Fast Charging

October 20, 2023December 7, 2023
by Nadav Gur

Why it matters:

Because focusing on fast charging will cost you millions, delay your electrification – and it won’t solve the problem of electrification at scale.

You do NOT need the fastest chargers.

The Big Picture

Yes, we really want EVs to be just like ICE vehicles – when the gas runs out, you stop for 5 minutes, take a bathroom break, and drive on. But they aren’t, and won’t be anytime soon (more on that below). For the next decade or more, every stop is going to take 30 minutes, 40 minutes, maybe hours. So the question is not “what can I buy to make the stops the fastest”, but rather “how can I charge the vehicles when they would have been stopped anyway”.

It’s not “how can I charge the fastest”, it’s “how can I charge when the vehicles are parked anyway”

For consumers lucky enough to have their own garage – this means charging their car when they’re sleeping. Plain and simple. But if you have to charge a fleet of vehicles, you need to charge a lot of vehicles at the same time. Well, guess what? Your utility limits your power and won’t let you run many fast chargers concurrently – even if you wanted to (and you shouldn’t). And if you only have a few of those – it means you need drivers moving vehicles around all night.

In 99.9% of cases you can’t install many fast chargers even if you wanted to.

So the right solution is Smart Charging, where you have many vehicles connected to many chargers, and what moves around is the electricity – NOT the vehicles. What you want is a system that can split the power between your vehicles in an intelligent way – based on what they need, when they are leaving and where they are going. Such a system can manage the power draw, keeping it within limits, thus making it cheaper to install and operate your facility. It also manages charging speed so vehicle batteries stay healthy, and minimizes the amount of moving vehicles around needed – so that you waste less driver hours.

Smart Charging charges many EVs concurrently, optimizing power to fit the vehicles’ needs and the energy available.

Wait A Minute, So What’s The Problem With Fast Charging?

First, what we call “fast” charging is actually slow compared to refueling. Batteries are NOT fuel tanks. Physics dictates that pushing electrons into them too fast affects the materials, creating heat and deformation. Charge fast and you degrade your battery quickly. Charge too fast and it will catch fire. The on-board software in the vehicle will limit charging speed to what the battery can take – regardless of the fast charger output.

Battery technology does NOT change very fast. The batteries that will be installed in vehicles sold over the next 5-10 years will, at best, take 20-30 minutes to “fast” charge and if you do that too often they will degrade very quickly. And even 30 minutes is too long to just stop at an EV charging station every 300 miles. Think of the driver time overhead. Consider how many vehicles need to fit into a “station” at once.

So – the right thing is to charge your vehicles when and where they are already stopped.

You need dedicated chargers – in your parking lot.

Once you realize that it’s about charging the vehicles where and when they stand already – what you want is as many chargers as possible. So the driver dropping off just connects and leaves. For most fleets that means overnight charging. This allows you to charge slowly. How slow depends on how much your vehicles drive per day. But for most fleets Level 2 AC charging is fine, 99% of the time.

Unless your vehicles go hundreds of miles per day – Level 2 is fine.

So why does it have to be smart? This is where power constraints come in. If you try to put in a lot of chargers (that means a lot of “slow” chargers or a few “fast” chargers) you will quickly find out that your utility will take years to get you the service upgrade you need. Smart charging means that there is a system that manages the power such that you can stay within the boundaries of what you have – through a combination of scheduling / staggering when each vehicle is charged, and the use of additional resources like energy storage (batteries), solar or other power generation.

My vendor says the chargers are smart. Is that enough?

Every AC charger that can be controlled remotely (e.g. via cellular, WiFi etc.) is marketed as “smart”. But just because a charger can be controlled, it doesn’t make it smart. The intelligence resides in the software system that tells these chargers what to do, not in the chargers themselves. A smart charging system needs to know everything – which are your vehicles, how much energy they need (i.e. how far do they need to go tomorrow?), what are your sources of energy, what are the power limits and the costs per kWh, which chargers you have and what is connected to them.

Only a system that has all this information can make smart decisions regarding which vehicle to charge when and how much – and how to manage the energy and power at your disposal. We sometimes describe this as “air traffic control for charging” – you need to know who is where, what they need, and how to get it to them and direct the vehicles and the energy correctly.

Smart charging manages your EVs, your energy and your chargers in one place. We call it “Air Traffic Control for Depots”

So what are fast chargers good for?

In a site that is designed thoughtfully, a couple of fast DC chargers can handle the exceptions – those vehicles that did not have enough time to charge, because they got there late / had to leave early / weren’t connected in time – and by fast charging you can make sure they are ready for their missions the next day. Remember – fast charger costs 10 to 100 times more than a level 2 charger. Unless you’re powering class 8 trucks or large transit buses – you probably don’t need many of these.

Why is this so complicated?

Change is hard, and folks (and that include fleet managers) want things to be as they are.

But EVs are different from ICE, and if we are serious about decarbonizing transportation, we need to learn to operate them. The good news is that smart charging software systems coupled with well designed charging infrastructure operate intelligently automatically – taking the complexity out of the system. When we build it right, it’s as simple as park, connect, leave. The software will take care of the rest.

Shameless plug:

Port OS is a smart charging system that is built to do all of this and more.

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What EVs mean for F&B distribution fleets

July 13, 2023July 14, 2023
by Prescott Watson

Food and beverage distributors are a pillar of the restaurant and grocery retail industry – and today they’re some of the businesses most impacted by environmental regulations like California’s ACF rules (the law of the land that requires many distribution fleets to transition to EV now). While green credentials has been nice marketing for a while, adopting electric vehicles is quickly becoming a mandate, not a nice-to-have.

The bright side of this change is that light and medium duty EVs are finally becoming widely available – and affordable, too. The F&B distributor’s biggest challenge is actually different: keeping these vehicles charged without interrupting their missions, and without needing to hire new depot operations managers.

Lessons from the US’s largest food distribution center

The Food Distribution Center in Hunts Point of the Bronx is the largest of its kind in the US, with a massive fresh produce terminal, fish market, and warehouses for everyone from nationals like Dairyland to regional family-owned distributors like Katzman’s. Literally tens of thousands of restaurants, grocers, and corner stores are stocked weekly by fleets based in and around this distribution center.

You might be surprised to know that a comprehensive survey of the fleet operators here showed their distribution routes were hands-down achievable with the EVs available today from Mitsubishi Fuso, Daimler Trucks and others. In fact, in the case of Hunts Point, the average delivery route was under 60 miles – compare that to the eCanter’s 80 to 200 mile range options. Furthermore, while EV trucks remain more expensive, government incentives covered over 90% of the cost difference for the fleets who upgraded to electric, and the cost savings on fuel and maintenance easily make electric trucks more cost effective for most fleets. That’s why several fleets at Hunts Point have already begun adopting electric trucks on many of their routes. So where’s the rub?

The lack of charging infrastructure is proving to be the biggest challenge slowing fleet managers trying to integrate EVs.

While EVs get the job done just like diesel trucks, fueling them is quite different.

First, charging is much slower than fueling. Fleets can’t waste driver time stopping at a public charging station. Instead, fleets need to be charging when and where their trucks are already normally sitting idle. That means distributors at Hunts Point need charging for their vehicles at the lots they park at overnight or when waiting for pickups.

Second, charging takes a lot of power. So when fleets try to build charging stations on-site, they end up stuck in years-long queues for utility upgrades, or they have to start using complex electrical equipment to store and generate power on-site.

So how ready is infrastructure, really?

The infrastructure to charge commercial vehicles is ready to scale – in theory. The good news is that we aren’t waiting on breakthrough new technologies to make charging possible. The bad news is that the charging equipment out there is far too complex to build, operate and expand for the average fleet (if you want to know why, check out our longer explainer on how fleet charging works at warehouses & distribution centers).

Daimler Truck Charging Depot — Daimler Truck’s demonstration charging depot

Katzman’s distributors in Hunts Point were early adopters – and reportedly spent 10 years going through the design, permitting, installation and adjustments to their various electrical systems to keep their zero emissions refrigerated trailers running. In other locations throughout the US, fleet managers are having to become experts on managing conversations with utilities on the one hand, and calculating what electrical load their fleet is forecasted to need when procuring equipment on the other hand. Fleet managers don’t have the time or resources to do this. They need a simple and effective tool to make EV charging easy to roll out and operate.

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 warehouse property manager whose clients have asked about supporting EV, 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/

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The 6 EV Charging Facts Every CRE Player Needs…

March 21, 2023March 30, 2023
by Nadav Gur

So you’re a commercial real estate owner or developer and the year is 2023. The Biden administration passed the IRA last year and the IIJA two years ago. States like California and New York are passing legislation to effectively ban non-electric vehicles, gas is over $4 a gallon, and Tesla is the most valuable car manufacturer on the planet. Likely as not, you know that your tenants are going to be replacing their gas-guzzlers with electric vehicles in the coming decade. Someone’s probably already hinted that you better start looking at putting EV chargers in your parking lot and solar panels on your roof.. But why? And how? And when? After all, you don’t have a gas pump there now, do you?

Well, electric vehicles are different from gas-powered ones, and electricity is different from gasoline. All that can work in your benefit, or to your detriment. And whether you are in multi-unit housing, retail or logistics, here’s what you need to know as you embark on your journey from CRE player to CRE and Infrastructure player.

The short story is:

Your tenants are getting EVs
EVs can and should be charged on your property
That amenity can make you good money
But it requires more than just planting EV chargers and hooking them up
To maximize your opportunity and create great service – you will need a “microgrid”, but the government will foot much of the bill
And to run it efficiently, you will need a software partner

Now let’s get to the brass tacks.

Your Tenants Are Getting EVs And Need To Charge Them

Whether you own residential units, offices, retail or logistics centers, your tenants are in the process of electrifying their transportation. If they are currently driving passenger cars, they are already eyeing a glitzy Tesla or an economical Chevy Bolt. If they are shipping parcels or dispatching technicians, they may be looking at the Rivian Prime van or the Ford F-150 Lightning. And if they are hauling containers across great distances, someone is already crunching the numbers on a Tesla Semi or Volvo VNR. Lighter vehicles will likely be replaced first, but both market forces and government sticks and carrots (e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act and the Advanced Clean Fleet regulations) are driving this transition for all fleets. Legislation has or is being passed over the country to ban the sales of virtually all fossil fuel vehicles by 2035. But the transition is occurring now, as consumers and fleets realize the practical and climate benefits of this technology, and want to grab the government incentives before they run out. And frankly, so should you!

Your Tenants Will Want To Charge On Your Property

Once they have them, your tenants will need to charge these vehicles. But charging is very different from refueling. Stopping at a gas station, or fueling at a depot only takes a few minutes. Charging a vehicle from empty, whether using Level 2 (“slow”) AC charging or Level 3 DC “Fast Charging”, takes between 30 minutes to hours. For that reason charging at home or a place of work is the best option for most passenger cars, and charging at the depot / terminal / warehouse is the least disruptive option for most delivery vans and trucks. This fact will not change for decades to come. EVs are not smartphones, batteries are not computer chips that double in speed every two years, and vehicles are not replaced with better versions every other year like smartphones.

A microgrid for charging – courtesy of microgridlabs.com

This means that tenants prefer charging where their cars and trucks are parked anyway. And if you can provide them the facilities and the energy there – chargers and electricity, then you are providing a much needed new service, which you can profit off of. In fact, for many tenants in the future this will become a must-have amenity. Delivery fleets will not be able to operate if the vans can’t be charged at night on the premises. Residents will not rent an apartment if they have to park the car a mile from home twice a week to charge it. Truckers will prefer routes where the truck can be charged while it is being unloaded because otherwise they will lose time and money, etc.

Charging will be a must-have amenity.

Charging Can Make You Good Money

This amenity replaces an existing expense – gas. Consumers and businesses spend trillions of dollars on gas and diesel, and this spending will be replaced by paying for electricity. It’s a service you can and should charge your tenants for, and as will be explained below – can be both highly profitable and relatively predictable. Your goal should be to be able to provide as much of this electricity as will be needed, which will require new infrastructure as described below.

Your goal should be to provide as much of your tenants charging needs as possible

From your tenants’ perspective, time is money. Time spent driving to a public charging station (if one exists) waiting and driving back is an unacceptable price to pay. Therefore they are a captive audience – if you have the charging equipment and power they need, they will pay a premium to charge on the premises. This means that your ability to provide the power effectively – a good customer experience for a consumer or an effective, manageable and time-saving service to a business customer, will make your customers happier and you richer.

To do so effectively and profitably, you will need to be able to provide a lot of power, when and where your tenants need it, and with as little hassle as possible. That requires new electrical infrastructure that goes beyond just sticking on some chargers and hooking them up to the electric panel.

Sticking Chargers In The Ground Is Not Enough

Close but no cigar…

You Need More Electricity At A Lower Cost

Let’s say your tenant has 20 vans to charge at night, and let’s assume you provide level 2 (“slow”) chargers at ~10 kW each. We are looking at about 20 x 10 = 200 kW of power that are needed during those hours with slow charging, and much more if you provide fast charging. For comparison – even this little fleet needs the amount of power required to run 60 homes or a 100 room hotel. If you have many residential tenants with EVs, or commercial tenants with medium to large fleets, you may need a lot more power.

Getting your local utility to commit to install this amount of power and actually deliver it could take years. Add fast chargers, more or larger vehicles, and the conclusion is that it’s not as simple as getting chargers and hooking them up. If you want this to work, you will need to be able to aggregate power, optimize how it’s used, and you will also want to get it cheaply. This introduces new elements to the infrastructure – beyond just chargers. You will probably want to add solar, because almost regardless of where your property is located, solar is the cheapest way to generate electricity – cheaper than buying it from a utility (factoring in the CAPEX, operating costs, and yes – the government incentives).

Solar frees you to some degree from dependence on the utility, and the numbers are quite convincing – especially if you can sell the electricity you generate at a premium, which you absolutely should be able to.

Another element you will most likely benefit from is stationary storage, typically batteries. Storage is useful in a number of ways. First, it lets you take cheap electricity – electricity generated during the day using your solar panels, and electricity bought from the utility during off-peak hours, and use it when you need more of it – whether it’s peak hours (so you avoid paying the higher peak tariffs), or when your tenants are charging most of their vehicles. This allows you to enable them to charge more vehicles at once than the power the utility provides you – because you can add the utility power to the power you extract from your storage. So for instance if your tenants drive all day and charge at night, you can collect cheap solar and off-peak grid power all day, and then use both the electricity in your battery and utility power in parallel to charge many more vehicles at the same time – at night.

Another function of battery storage is improving power quality. For some applications, for instance in manufacturing, even small spikes in power delivery can do a lot of damage. If you have tenants like that, most likely they will require these and benefit greatly from this kind of infrastructure.

And on top of solar and storage, you may want or need to provide back-up generators (gas, diesel), for instance for utility black-outs. This is especially needed if your tenants have fleets that need to continue operation during emergencies – e.g. technicians, first responders etc.

These energy resources that you control to generate or store electricity are offered referred to as Distributed Energy Resources (DER) that are installed “behind-the-meter”. Another term typically used is a “micro-grid”. It’s a grid that can operate independently of the utility grid.

Be The Master of Your Microgrid

When you have a microgrid, you can optimize your energy assets for your tenants’ use. For instance, you can prioritize resilience, by trying to keep your storage battery as full as you can so there is always power in case of an outage. In that case you charge it fully whenever possible. Alternatively you can optimize for costs, trying to only buy electricity from the grid when it’s cheap (e.g. in the morning), and when you have more than you need and the tariff is high – sell it back to the utility for a profit. Or you can try to strike a balance between these approaches, or even have a different policy every day depending on your tenant’s fleets behaviors, the season etc.

A microgrid controller is a computer system that monitors all of the elements in your microgrid and controls their actions. A microgrid management system, the software that manages the controller, allows you to monitor and control your system, implement policies, track equipment usage over time, create reports for analysis, financial reporting and billing and more. It’s the brain that ties your energy system together, allows you to understand what’s happening and respond / plan effectively. Most microgrid controllers will also allow you to control equipment from different vendors. For instance you may buy chargers from one company, storage from another and a generator from a third. A controller that can manage all of them is critical for interoperability. Planning, optimizing and controlling your energy resources is a critical part of giving your tenants good service – and optimizing the profit from these new assets.

Managing Your Charging Assets Requires Advanced Software

OK, so you got the power assets, and you got the chargers. Your tenants have vehicles, but they also have their particular needs and schedules. These may be relatively simple if it’s just consumers (e.g. residential tenants, office-building workers) or quite complex if they are managed fleets like delivery or transportation fleets. They will have particular times they want to charge at and have the vehicles ready at, they may need to be able to prioritize particular vehicles according to their missions or who’s driving them, and so forth. Again – charging takes time, and therefore you can’t necessarily simply adopt a “first-come-first-serve” policy.

If your tenants are simply residential or office workers, you are losing money and goodwill if some of them are denied and need to drive somewhere else to look for public charging because they need a full battery tomorrow morning. You may want to have different priorities and pricing, e.g. monthly chargers get priority access and bulk pricing. You may want to restrict charging by guests, or enable reception to allow it. You may want to charge the tenant who’s hosting the guest (like “validating parking”) and so on and so forth. There will be different requirements, and you will want to be able to easily identify the vehicles, associate them with the tenants, and apply your policies – all based on your available energy and charging resources.

If your tenants are commercial and their fleet activities are critical and scheduled, there will be more integration required, such that vehicles that need to be ready at particular times can get priority at these times – reserving a charger, reserving energy and so on. These services carry a premium, and they require integrating tenant systems data (e.g. from their fleet management system) with your charging system control. This article can provide you more perspective on what fleet managers need from their charging infrastructure.

These needs mean that to optimize the value from your energy assets, you will need a software system that has the ability to accommodate these different charging schemes, pricing and billing schemes, tenants’ fleet information system and your facility management systems. Such a system works best if it is directly integrated with all of your energy assets – your chargers as well as your microgrid assets. Integrating systems from separate providers can be a losing battle. The system you use should be able to manage your physical hardware that was probably sourced from different vendors, and create interoperability between different vendors’ equipment. That is a critical requirement in the long term, as you may want to expand, upgrade and replace components over the decades that these assets are useful for. Being tied to a specific vendor could become very restrictive over time.

Electrification – It’s Your Long Term Growth Play

Electrification is the name of the game for the decades to come. The combination of climate-change regulation with the improvement in the quality and cost of the assets – from vehicles to solar panels, means these assets are a great add-on to your real-estate portfolio. But to optimize utilization and profit you need to have a whole system built, operated and maintained. That system should serve your tenants’ evolving needs, and grow with them as they go through the process of transitioning their vehicles to electric over the coming decade. Having a strong partner by your side, that is able to assist in planning, operating and expanding your systems while optimizing the financial and energy yield is paramount to getting your dollar’s worth. You can choose to be a leader and corner the market, or you can choose to be a laggard. More about why it makes sense to get in early in a subsequent article.

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Fleet Manager: Why You Need More Than Chargers For…

January 25, 2022April 4, 2023
by PortPower

So… you need to deploy some electric vehicles to your fleet. Whether that is because your company wants to become more sustainable, or because of new government regulations, or because your CFO realized that electric vehicles are actually cheaper to operate – electric vehicles (EVs) are in your future. As you plan for this transition, here are some critical things to consider.

Charging Takes Much Longer Than Refueling

With your current vehicles, the time it takes to refuel has little effect on your operations. Stopping at a gas station, or fueling at your depot normally takes a few minutes, and that short break is actually helpful for the driver as well. But even under the best circumstances, charging an electric vehicle takes hours, not minutes. For passenger cars, the equivalent of, say a 15-gallon gas tank is a 70 kilowatt-hour (kWh) battery. The equivalent for a class 5 truck with a 40 gallon tank is around 200 kWh in battery capacity. A commercial Level 2 AC charger is typically in the 10 kilowatt (kW) range – which means it takes 7 hours to charge a passenger car, or 20 hours for that truck. Even with Level 3 DC “Fast chargers” rated for 50-350 kW – we are looking at at least a 30 minute stop, and likely twice that or more. Obviously your vehicle can’t stop for hours in the middle of the route, so these stops have to be planned, and between that and the scarcity of public chargers, you will want to do most of the charging in the off-time, when your vehicle is parked, and your driver is off duty.

For most fleet managers, this involves installing chargers on their own premises, and charging most of the vehicles at the same time – during their downtime, for instance at night. Vehicles park at the depot off-hours, and each vehicle charges for several hours, or potentially some vehicles fast-charging for an hour or so, for instance if they need to be ready earlier or they came in with a really low battery (“empty gas tank”).

You Need Many Chargers – And Lots of Electricity

Let’s say you have 20 vans to charge at night concurrently, and let’s assume level 2 (“slow”) charging at ~10 kW each. We are looking at about 20 x 10 = 200 kW of power that you need during those hours with slow charging, and much more if you go to fast charging. For comparison – this is as much power as is required to run 60 homes or a 100 room hotel.

Getting your local utility to commit to install this amount of power and actually deliver it to you could take years. And that’s with 20 vans charging slowly. Consider fast chargers, more or larger vehicles, and the conclusion is that no, it’s not as simple as getting chargers and hooking them up. If you want this to work, you will need to be able to optimize how you use the power, and also where you get the power, so as to be able to ensure that your vehicles are powered up and ready for their missions. More on your options below.

Storage: Charge More Vehicles With Less Power

In the example above, as in most fleets one of the problems is that your vehicles are all charging at the same time – say at night. So you need all that power in the night time – we will call this “peak power”, and you use much less during the day. If you could draw power from the utility during the entire day, and use it all up during the night, even while the utility keeps providing you power, you will get the same “peak power” to your vehicles, but you never needed that much power from the utility. To illustrate, let’s say this was diesel, and you had a diesel tank on the premises. All day and all night diesel tankers come in and fill your tank. But your vans are only filling up during the night. So the tank is filling up all day, and all the vans can be refueled at night. When all the vans are gassed up, maybe your tank is empty, but it has all day to be refilled.

In the example above, say you need to charge your vans between 8 PM to 4 AM, and on average each van uses half its battery charge driving around each day – so 40 kWh per van . You need a total of 200 kW of power for 20 vans charging concurrently, and 800 kWh capacity. But the utility only gives you a 40 kW line. Normally you’d only be able to charge 4 vans at a time. But if you have a storage “tank”, which is actually a battery, you can charge it all day at 40 kWh – so 24 x 40 kWh = 960 kWh, and your vans charge from your battery during the night. The battery is mostly depleted, and recharges again during the day.

Stationary Storage Battery — A Battery System

Electricity Generation: Create Redundancy And Save

With internal combustion vehicles, it is usually safe to assume that diesel will be available in stations, and if it’s not, you can always drive to the next gas station. But when you’re relying on your own chargers, and they are fed by the utility, you are susceptible to power outages which unfortunately in this day and age are pervasive at least a couple of times a year in many areas. This means that sometimes having the ability to generate electricity yourself saves you from having your fleet operations grind to a halt. On the flip side, with the price of solar panels plummeting, generating electricity yourself can not just free you up from that dependence but also significantly reduce your energy cost.

So – many fleets choose to have one or more forms of generating electricity under their control. A gas or diesel generator can be used in emergency situations, typically hooked up to your storage battery. If you have enough space over your parking lots, your roofs or other areas, you can install solar panels to get “free” electricity from the sun. The low price and long lifetime of solar panels these days, coupled with generous government incentives means the amortized cost of that electricity is a fraction of buying electricity from the utility. You can even sell the excess electricity back to the utility if you have more than you can use. It pays for itself.

So by now you have chargers, a utility hookup, your storage battery, and a generator and / or solar panels.

Solar canopy with gas generator — A Solar & Gas Combo

Tying It All Together With Microgrid Control

When you have your own electric assets on premise that can operate independently of the utility grid, we say you have your own “micro-grid”. Within this microgrid you can optimize your usage for different purposes. For instance, you can prioritize resilience, by trying to keep your battery as full as you can so you always have as much power as possible in case of an outage. In that case you charge it fully whenever possible. Alternatively you can optimize for costs, trying to only buy electricity from the grid when it’s cheap (e.g. in the morning), and then when you have more than you need and the tariff is high – sell it back to the utility at a profit. Or you can try to strike a balance between these approaches, or even have a different policy every day depending on your fleet mission plans, the season etc. You might also want to control the charging this way – faster charging for vehicles that need to be ready earlier and slower charging for vehicles that don’t.

A microgrid controller is a computer system that communicates with all of the elements in your microgrid – your chargers, your storage, your generation, retrieves their current state and controls their actions. Using a microgrid management system, the software that manages the controller, it allows you to monitor and control them, implement such policies, track your equipment usage over time, create reports for analysis and financial reporting etc. It’s really the brain that ties your energy system together, allows you to understand what’s happening and respond / plan effectively. Most microgrid controllers will also allow you to control equipment from different vendors. For instance you may buy chargers from one company, storage from another and a generator from a third. A controller that can manage all of them is critical for interoperability.

SICAM Microgrid Controller — A Microgrid Controller is simply a computer

Managing Your EV or Hybrid Fleet

Finally, it is likely that you already have a fleet management system, probably connected to a telematics system, to manage and track your fleet – locate your vehicles, assign missions, track drivers and driving and so forth. Your EV fleet is another part of your fleet with special requirements (charging) and special advantages like cheaper energy, cheaper maintenance, less noise and pollution and so forth. Connecting your fleet management system to your microgrid and charging infrastructure through the microgrid management system allows you to control both sides in an informed way. For example, the charging control system will be able to tell which vehicles are arriving for charging and what’s their existing “state-of-charge” (i.e. what is their battery level and how much electricity do they need) and plan charger assignment and energy ahead of time. This can lead to further energy optimization if you have too much – or to getting an alert if you have less energy than your fleet needs, which means you may need to re-plan the missions or send a vehicle to a public charging station somewhere.

It is very likely that for the next few years you will be running a “hybrid fleet” – you will have both electric and internal combustion vehicles working side-by-side. Initially you may want to clearly segregate these fleets – different vehicles with different missions or different regions. Eventually the best outcome will result from full integration, where the EVs do the missions that they are best suited to (e.g. the drives with many stops within a limited range from your depot) and the ICE vehicles will fill the gaps where the EVs are stretched – like towing heavy loads to the top of some mountain or driving far beyond the reach of the charging infrastructure. A fleet management system that supports EVs and is integrated with your microgrid management system will be the best way to manage such a fleet.

Congratulations – You Are No Longer Managing “Just” A Fleet

In summary – running an EV fleet effectively and without disruption necessitates building electric infrastructure, that includes several components – a microgrid. Over the long term, this results in significant cost savings. But in the short term – it’s a learning curve. You will have to be involved in planning, managing and running this infrastructure. We at Port Power are here to help you with this learning curve – from planning through deployment and to effective operations. Port Power is a charging-as-a-service provider. We can take over planning, building and running your fleet charging infrastructure, and even help with funding it and getting government grants and tax incentives. The goal should be keeping your fleet running smoothly even as you go through the transition to zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV).

It’s A Long Term Play

Sure, your management’s initial plan may only be to deploy a limited pilot, only a small percentage of your entire fleet. But the right way to think about this transition is to consider the long term. Federal and state regulations, incentives and frankly market dynamics mean that in 5 to 10 years time, most new vehicles in most new fleets will be electric. You can expect practically all light-duty and medium duty vehicles, and eventually most heavy duty vehicles, to be replaced by zero-emissions cars, pickup trucks, vans, buses and trucks.

Your future fleet is virtually all electric and you need a system that scales to that

That means that stopgap solutions that will work for a handful of vehicles will become stumbling blocks in the future. While starting small usually makes sense, it needs to be with an eye to a future where virtually all the fleet is electric. What you build or buy now needs to be compatible with what you will buy in the future, and extensible to allow even more vehicles, more charges, more electricity and so forth. The best way to go about this is partnering with vendors who have an eye on the future and can grow with you. But whatever you choose, remember that this technology is the future, and your ability to operate effectively and stay competitive is going to be dependent on your fleet’s resilience and efficiency – your ability to orchestrate the electric vehicles and the electric infrastructure