Utilities, policymakers, corporations need to work together to advance electric fleets

Published on July 21, 2021 by Liz Carey


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Large-scale electrification of fleets across the country will help governments and private entities reduce harmful emissions, but experts say achieving that will require coordinated responses from policymakers, utility companies and corporations.

A diverse group of stakeholders discussed the advancement of fleet electrification and how to ensure the electric charging infrastructure is ready to support the fleet EVs on a panel at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) Summer Policy Summit on Tuesday.

Jay Oliver, managing director of Grid Systems Integration at Duke Energy, illustrated the complexity of electrification for utility companies using the example of a single distribution center. Currently, a typical distribution center with 100 Class 6 trucks and 30 Class 8 trucks will use about 500 kilowatts of energy, he said, about the same amount of energy as a medium-sized grocery store.

“When they decide to electrify – and they will – that changes their energy needs,” he said.

Class 6 trucks will require about 100 kilowatts per day, which equates to 10,000 kilowatts in eight hours. The total change in energy needs would shift to about 4.5 megawatts, he said.

Complicating matters, Oliver said, is that many fleet service operations, like distribution centers, tend to locate next to one another. Serving all of those needs will be a challenge that utility companies will have to address, not only in terms of the amount of power those companies will need, but also in terms of land ownership, pricing, storage, and how long it will take to ramp up to meet a customer’s needs.

Tom Kamantauskas, senior director for Fleet Services at PepsiCo, said moving to electrification for PepsiCo’s fleets was part of the corporation’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and that in some places those trucks are already in place.

The billions of dollars in investment into electrification of fleet vehicles by major automotive manufacturers is driving the transformation of the transportation industry, said Yann Kulp, co-founder and head of Business Development at eIQ Mobility, and the time to start working on solutions is now.

While Oliver said Duke’s role currently is to be ready for companies with large fleets to switch to electrification, he estimated that the timeline for providing the necessary energy to a corporation moving to fleet electrification would be anywhere between 6 months to 3 to 4 years, possibly longer if there were complications with land usage or local policy.

While Duke tries to be proactive and look at solutions, the main issue will be time, he said. “We have an obligation to serve. We have to do it well, and we have to do it right, Oliver said. “But…, it’s going to take time.”

That timeline could be problematic for some companies, Kamantauskas said.

“We’re always looking for ways to reduce our environmental impact,” he said. “Two-plus years is a significant amount of time for us. If we’re a manufacturing company and we’re looking at sites, those sorts of issues are going to come into play in our site selection.”

Kulp said states and utility companies that already have policies in place or are working on policies and the deployment of charging infrastructure that support fleet electrification would be more commercially attractive to corporations.

But the reality, Kulp said, was that the majority of fleets that transition to electric would not be those on the scale of an Amazon or PepsiCo, but small- to medium-sized fleets. Those companies would need utilities to serve as a trusted adviser to help guide them in their decision-making process.

Additionally, Kulp said, companies can help utilities by having an idea of how many trucks they would be electrifying and their anticipated load profile, including considerations such as how much electricity would be needed at a certain time of day.

The panelists agreed that electrification is the biggest transition the transportation industry has experienced in a generation. And only by working together will utility companies, states, and corporations be able to accomplish their shared sustainability goals.

“We need to be ready for all of it,” Oliver said. “Because this is one of those things that’s coming.”