Workplace Charging Facts: Announcing Results from our pilot with…

October 8, 2024October 8, 2024
by Nadav Gur

Look at all the cars parked at your office or warehouse parking lot. Now imagine 20, 50, 100% of them are electric. And imagine that it’s your job to make sure they are charged. This is not sci-fi, it is already the reality in several states and counties and almost inevitably in most of them within ten years.

When you need dozens or hundreds of chargers in your parking lot – how do you get power for all of them? How do you get enough energy? How do you balance your resources so you can get the infrastructure and the energy cost-effectively? Most importantly – how do you do it such that no driver gets stuck, and no one has to waste time at public charging or getting out in the middle of the day to move cars on / off the chargers?

This was the subject of the pilot and study we ran with Hertz Israel’s leasing business this year, which has now concluded successfully. We built a microgrid-enabled, scalable managed charging facility that integrated grid and solar electricity and ran it with drivers for four months. We collected data about driver and charging behavior, ranges and issues, power and energy output, infrastructure and energy costs and optimized the system for different scenarios.

We will be posting some of the learnings here, but if you want to learn more – contact us to discuss best practices for fleet / workplace charging.

Depot

Announcing Port’s Workplace Charging Pilot with Hertz Leasing

July 3, 2024July 3, 2024
by Nadav Gur

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How to make your April 1st ACF reporting deadline

March 13, 2024March 13, 2024
by Prescott Watson

One of the first deadlines for California fleets to comply with the Advanced Clean Fleets law is coming up – by April 1st, 2024, nearly all* municipal, county and state fleets need to register and submit their first reports to CARB. If you are a state, county or local government fleet – this guide is for you.

If you are a drayage fleet, or a high priority or federal fleet, you should have already reported to CARB.

This is a “quick start” guide to what reporting by April 1st requires. For full, detailed guidance, you can watch the series of webinars on ACF reporting from CARB. We recommend starting here – a 2 hour Q&A session from March that is among the more condensed guides from CARB.

* If your fleet does not own, lease, nor contract to any third party fleets using vehicles over 8,500 lbs, then you may not be subject to ACF, and you may not need to meet the April 1st filing.

1 – Log into TRUCRS portal and update your fleet profile

If you are a public fleet in California, chances are that you’ve filed reports of some sort to CARB via the TRUCRS portal before.

If your fleet has had to comply with common CARB rules in the last decade like Truck & Bus regulations, Airport Shuttle regulations, or Solid Waste & Heavy Crane regulations, you will have used TRUCRS before. Log in here.

Some small agencies may not have used TRUCRS before. Create a TRUCRS account using the guidelines from CARB here.

Before continuing to the next steps, make sure your fleet profile is updated to include every vehicle in your fleet and the updated odometer or hubodometer reading, and the other fields the TRUCRS forms require.

Important: you may have already included vehicles subject to older CARB regulations such as buses or heavy equipment in your TRUCRS profile. However, starting April 1st, many vehicles in your fleet (including smaller cars that aren’t directly subject to the ACF) may need be logged and tracked in TRUCRS. If you continue on the default reporting (Model Year – see more in the next section), then you only need to register vehicles over 8,500 GVWR. However, if you elect to use the Milestone Option (again, see more in the next section), then you also must also register some types of vehicles that fall under 8,500 GVWR.

For large fleets, you can update TRUCRS in bulk using their Large Fleet Upload spreadsheet.

It’s important to note that some new fields of vehicle information have been added to TRUCRS as part of CARB’s new ACF reporting. In the TRUCRS portal where you can add a new vehicle or edit an existing one, you must fill out these new fields:

If you have already begun to replace an ICE vehicle with an EV, or if you have converted an ICE to an EV, then you need to identify the vehicles that have been replaced or converted for them to count towards this year’s compliance schedule. If you are already replacing vehicles under ACF, then we recommend you watch the full series of CARB TRUCRS ACF reporting guideline webinar – this Q&A from March 5th is particularly useful.

2 – Selecting your compliance schedule – Model Year or Milestone

One important step in your reporting is to select one of two compliance pathways that you would like to apply to your fleet. If you don’t select a pathway, your fleet will automatically subscribe to the ZEV Purchase Schedule, also known as the “model year schedule.”

This is an important point. For many fleets the default Model Year Schedule is going to be a more aggressive transition schedule.

The alternative option for your compliance pathway is called the ZEV Milestone Option, which may be more flexible for many types of fleets. You can read more about the details of the two options here.

Note: switching to the ZEV Milestone Option is a one-way door. You cannot return to the Model year Schedule once you opt into the Milestone Option.

To select a pathway, go to your “Company Info” tab in the TRUCRS portal. At the bottom of this page is the “Regulations your fleet is subject to” section. Here, you can opt into the Milestone Option.

3 – Applying for extensions and exemptions

Another important step is to apply for extensions and exemptions. To do this, email TRUCRS@arb.ca.gov and include your TRUCRS ID # in the email correspondence.

4 – Getting your compliance status certificate

After making all your fleet profile updates and adding or editing all your vehicles, you can get your compliance certificate.

Access the “Compliance Status” tab of your account. If you’ve entered all the information correctly, you should see a green note at the bottom of the screen saying “Fleet is in Compliance with Advanced Clean Fleets”.

So long as you see only green messages in this section, you should be able to print your compliance status certificate from that menu.

Reach out to Port Power to discuss your EV transition

Port Power was founded to make going EV as easy as operating diesel.

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:

Getting the full range of options you have to manage this transition
Having a soup-to-nuts, managed solution for all your fleet charging and operations needs
Visibility into grant and funding opportunities to help you with this transition

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

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Government Fleets: How to Know if the ACF Impacts…

February 13, 2024
by PortPower

The ACF is here… compliance for your government fleet starts today.

In April 2023, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) approved the Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule. It requires fleets to transition to zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs, such as EVs) and is changing everything about how fleets operate.

First and foremost, fleet managers must understand when the ACF will apply to them. For government fleets, the ACF impacts them today.

If you operate a government fleet in California, the ACF applies now and CARB requires you take action today.

This is the first in a series of short posts helping government fleet managers figure out what they need to do. Complying with the ACF is a big undertaking – but one you can manage if you take action today alongside the right experts.

So: does the ACF impact your fleet?

The ACF casts a wide net — nearly every city, county, state and federal fleet operating in California is impacted starting January 2024.

City, county, state fleets: if you make use of any vehicles over 8,500 lbs GVWR, the ACF applies to you.
Rent or hire – it still counts: even if you only rely on vehicles over 8,500 lbs temporarily through vehicles-for-hire or by dispatching work via a freight broker, it counts.
Federal fleets: all federal fleets operating in CA are affected this year. Your class 2b-8, yard tractors, and light-duty delivery vehicles are impacted.

Do you use any vehicles over 8,500 lbs? Then your reporting deadline is April 1st 2024.

Are there exceptions?

Transit agencies: if you’re already complying with ICT regulations for bus electrification, then ACF requirements only begin applying to your maintenance & support trucks in 2030. Basically, CARB wants to avoid distracting you from getting bus electrification finished.
Waste utilities: if your fleet is exclusively fueled by Compressed Natural Gas or Bio-Methane, you are generally exempt from compliance until 2027 or 2030.
Small population counties: Agencies who (1) operate fewer than 10 trucks AND (2) are located in a low population county in the map below are exempt from ACF compliance until 2027.

The bottom line: Most government fleets need to start purchasing and operating ZEV vehicles this year.

This means you need to plan your transition, and understand starting now how you will manage all your reporting to CARB.

Two ways to comply

Path 1 is straightforward, but difficult. This is the default path unless you elect for path 2 by April 1st, 2024. To learn how to elect for path 2 in time contact us.

50% of fleet purchases must be ZEV or NZEV each year in 2024-2026
100% of fleet purchases must be ZEV by 2027
For federal fleets all newly added trucks must be ZEV starting 2024

Path 2 gives you some breathing room to figure out procurement, charging, and operations.

Convert a portion of your fleet to ZEVs each year.
10% by 2025, 25% by 2028, 100% by 2035.
Extensions and purchase exemptions available.
Allows for compliant fleets with electrifying light duty vehicles – the easiest to manage.

What does this mean for you?

Compliance is a two pronged process: electrifying your fleet and reporting to CARB.

Fleet electrification is hard, we can help you:

Evaluate sites
Decide what vehicles to electrify first
Buy and lease ZEVs
Build charging
Work with utilities
Coordinate EV operations
Apply for incentives and grants like Make Ready

Reporting is time consuming, we can help you:

File and submit initial reporting by April 1st
Verify fleet compliance through TRUCRS
Purchasing and odometer reporting
Annual record keeping and reporting
Apply for special exemptions and extensions

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.

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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What ACF rules mean for your municipal fleet

July 21, 2023August 1, 2023
by Prescott Watson

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.”

Laguna Beach FD truck sits ready to respond to missions — Laguna Beach is one of the California cities that has recently taken control of its fleet electrification with a comprehensive plan that includes managing its own EV charging depots

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.

Aerial shot of a fleet of municipal parks & recs vans outside of a park with a city worker mowing grass — The easiest vehicles to start electrifying in your overall city or county fleet will be sedans and light duty trucks – including the trucks & vans used by parks & rec departments.

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!

Street sweeper — Eventually, all vehicles in your fleet will have to transition to electric. Some, such as street sweepers, are available already. The challenge is just setting up the charging depots to ensure you keep them up and running.

Port Power makes EV as easy as diesel

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.

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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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

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.