Cooperation, centralization and communication key to growing commercial fleet electrification

Commercial fleet electrification is likely to continue to grow as sustainability, lower costs and regulations motivate companies to decarbonize their operations, utility and corporate experts in electric vehicles said this week.

A panel discussion on preparing for commercial fleet electrification was held as part of the 2020 National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Annual Meeting, and featured remarks from Sara Forni, senior manager of Clean Vehicles at Ceres; James Ellis, senior program manager of Fleet Strategy at Amazon; and Katie Sloan, director of eMobility and Building Electrification at Southern California Edison (SCE).

“Fleet electrification is happening and it’s happening very quickly, and we as utilities need to be planning for it now,” Sloan said.

Panel moderator Maria Bocanegra, a commissioner with the Illinois Commerce Commission, noted that some 15 million electric vehicles are expected to be incorporated into corporate fleets by 2040. By that same year, Amazon hopes to provide net-zero emissions. According to Forni, who cited a Ceres report from May called “The Road to Fleet Electrification,” a large part of this transition will be incumbent upon utilities, regulators and policymakers.

Companies, she said, are looking for streamlined ways to plan for infrastructure needs, for more upfront self-service planning tools and for flexible terms and contracts. They want flexible rates and policies designed specifically to encourage their decarbonization of the grid by incentivizing charging when electricity is available. Greater system interoperability and emphasis on back-end systems could help as well. Such conclusions were backed in the report not just by Ceres, but by the California Trucking Association, Amazon and Navigant.

Ceres is one of the companies helping to push such changes, by expanding production of new EV models, accelerating EV market growth and economies of scale to reduce immediate costs and pushing adoption of supportive policies and the removal of regulatory barriers. It works with companies on clean energy, transportation and other areas, and has members that include Amazon and Uber.

On the Amazon side of things, Ellis backed that call for upfront information. While the company is doubling down on fleet electrification, and intends to lead the way for other fleet operators, he noted, it’s important to include medium and heavy duty fleet options in EV readiness planning. Fleets will play a large part in any future goals, so policies should be developed that reflect this, and provide the necessary reliability. This is especially true for a giant like Amazon, which is building hundreds of sites simultaneously.

“We’ve got to have reliability or our customers suffer, and we’re not willing to have our customers suffer,” Ellis said. “We’ve got to have resilience in our planning.”

Capacity, timing and cost should be bundled together and shown up front, in Ellis’ estimation. Companies need to be able to see what these efforts will cost, what’s required and how long it will take to incorporate them into larger planning processes. Utility partners also need longer lead times to align systems to their needs.

“From a policy perspective, we’re looking to send a signal that it’s coming,” Ellis said. “That’s probably one of the biggest challenges, just making sure everyone’s prepared for this.”

Utilities like SCE are already moving to address such issues. SCE oversees a vehicle and building electrification program and services budget of over $1 billion and intends to get 7 million EVs on the road in California by 2030. To do so, it has needed to think years ahead – and Sloan encouraged other utilities to do the same.

In SCE’s case, one method to achieve this included greater centralization. Originally, companies like Amazon would have to talk to different service managers for different districts, each offering potentially different experiences. SCE funneled all of that into one reference point.

“That really has helped customers to have consistency and to be able to plan,” Sloan said. “It’s important to be quick and to adjust expectations of what the timelines will be and have those expectations be met regularly.”

Ellis pointed out that companies like his have no interest in being experts in utility work – they just want help regarding how fast they can go and how they can get there. A single point of contact streamlines that.

Another point all agreed on was the critical nature of multistate planning. As Sloan pointed out, different states have different priorities, and with increasing loads and larger deployments to consider, multiyear planning will have to be undertaken by multiple parties, lest maps and plans become quickly out of date. Or consider commercial freight carriers, which Forni noted tend to operate in regions, not single states.

For freight carriers and utilities alike, cooperation will likely be necessary to accelerate development of chargers along transportation corridors and expand availability of EVs across geographies.