Fleet Manager: Why You Need More Than Chargers For…

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.

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.

 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.

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