Fleet Electrification Strategy & Implementation Guide

Fleet Electrification Strategy Guide

Transitioning your fleet from ICE to EV is more involved than just swapping out old vehicles for new ones. You need to overhaul your entire operation. The process can take years.

If you’re starting fresh without existing vehicles it’s much easier as you don’t have to wrestle with outdated systems or retrofitting your garages that were built for diesel-powered vehicles. Unfortunately, most fleets don’t have that luxury and they need to transform an existing fleet. This means changing your systems, teams, tools, and vehicles.

In this guide, we’ll help you lay the foundations for a smooth transition to an EV fleet. We understand that it’s a big undertaking and implementation is complex, but if you follow the advice and guidelines in this guide, we’re confident that you’ll feel more prepared.

What is a Fleet Electrification Strategy?

Before you start electrifying your fleet, you need a strategy. There’s a lot of work to be done, so it might help to appoint an electrification manager or sustainability manager to lead the project.

Internally, you’ll need to convince and educate your team, reconfigure your logistics, and adapt your maintenance routines.

Externally, you’ll need to meet regulatory compliance and possibly negotiate with energy providers and infrastructure developers.

The potential disruption of fleet electrification is similar to overhauling an entire IT system – it’s challenging, but transformative. That’s why you need a comprehensive fleet electrification strategy that covers:

Vision and Scope

What is the company’s overall vision for electrification? This might already exist in a wider vision statement.
What is the timeline expected by the C-level or board?
What is the reason for the electrification (cost savings, sustainability, etc.), and what is the most important motivation? This will help to make better decisions later

Fleet Assessment (status quo)

Assessment of the current fleet: What is the list of existing vehicles, and how is the fleet operated today?
Who is responsible for the vehicles, and fleet operational tasks? These might be different teams, but decisions have to be made together
What is the environmental impact of that fleet?
What software platforms is the fleet using today? Does the electric fleet plan other new systems (e.g., telematics)?

Electrification Plan (goal)

What part of the fleet will be electrified (last mile, middle mile, certain geographical areas, etc.)
What software system is required to manage the electric vehicles and charging infrastructure? (e.g., energy management, charging management software)
Procurement strategy: how will you select the partners and vendors for hardware, software and services

Infrastructure Development

How many chargers are required to charge the vehicles at the depots? What chargers (AC or DC) are required?
Which vendor will you work with to supply charging hardware, charging management software, vehicles, and services?
Are facilities and sites ready for electrical upgrades? Where will you face grid constraints?
Will you require an energy management system or load management system?

Financial Analyses

What funding possibilities do you have in your country and state?
Can you benefit from LCFS credits or other carbon credits?
How can you reduce the energy costs of your electric fleet?

Operations

Who will be responsible for the uptime of the charging infrastructure, regular maintenance, etc.
Who will be responsible for the vehicles, charging infrastructure, and other operational tasks?
Who will be available 24/7 to monitor the charging sites?

Security & Risk

What are the security requirements for all decisions in the process?
Who has access to the charging sites and charging data?
Which stakeholders or regulators do you have to involve during the process?

How to Develop a Comprehensive Fleet Electrification Strategy

Typically, we suggest following the 7 steps outlined above and expanding each of these points with custom questions relevant to your company.

If you have a strict timeline, work backward to define certain deadlines for vendor selection, budget approval, training, etc. The main challenge is likely to be your utility approvals for grid upgrades and the delivery of chargers and vehicles.

To overcome both, you can do a more detailed feasibility study of your electrification plan and follow the detailed requirements for success as defined below

Evaluating the Feasibility of Transitioning Commercial Fleet to Electric Vehicles

The most common road-block for electric fleets is not having enough grid capacity on site to install the required number of charging stations. While charging stations are an expensive investment, the bigger challenge is to define a path for the installation and grid availability.

We believe the best way to succeed is to:

Define how many EV chargers you actually need for each site
Calculate the required grid capacity
Run various models to ensure on-time departure of the vehicles

Depending on your fleet, it’s not recommended to install the same amount of chargers as vehicles.

At Ampcontrol, we have seen last-mile delivery fleets using our product with three times the amount of EVs than AC chargers. Some logistic fleets aim for 5:1.

The main motivation to increase the ratio is to reduce CAPEX for their charging infrastructure and avoid expensive and time consuming grid upgrades.

This will define the feasibility of your EV fleet charging site. While some of the calculations can be done in Excel spreadsheets, our simulation tool provides much faster and more accurate results. It also enables us to easily run 10 to 20 scenarios per site.

Key results of the simulation are to define the following KPIs:

Required power capacity for the site
Total number of chargers
Average charging session duration
Risk of delays

The data gathered from the simulations allows us to define the feasibility of electrification. You can request your own simulation for electrifying your fleet here.

You’ll also get some additional data from these feasibility studies, such as the total energy costs per year, the charging speed of your EV chargers, and the readiness factor for the planned trips.

Infrastructure Requirements for Successful Fleet Electrification

After completing your feasibility analysis and simulation above, you’ll need to prepare your site electrification.

As each site, warehouse, or bus depot is different and will require its own feasibility study, it’s best practice to build a separate electrification plan and infrastructure selection for each. Below is a brief summary of the equipment necessary for your EV depots.

Charging Infrastructure

The simulation will tell you if you need AC, DC, or a mix of chargers. Typically only cars and delivery vans will use AC chargers. Buses and trucks need DC chargers due to their battery size. However, you can also decide to have DC chargers for vans and cars. This allows a higher throughput of vehicles.

Select only a very small number of hardware vendors, but don’t limit yourself to one single brand. If you electrify all your sites with one single EV charger brand, you’re likely to face supply chain problems, vendor reliability issues, and support issues. Having 2 or 3 hardware suppliers for your EV chargers will reduce the risk, while increasing the complexity of procurement and O&M. Overall, the benefits of multiple vendors outweigh the problems of only using a single vendor.

Source your chargers carefully. While running a formal RFP process is good, we always recommend running live tests or lab tests with the charger and one of your partners. We often run these tests for customers to ensure compliance, security, and interoperability. Running tests before buying chargers is critical, we can’t stress this enough.

Electric Infrastructure

Find a developer or electrical company that specializes in electrification projects early on. You can pick large companies that have nation-wide coverage and experience or you work with your local firms.

You’ll typically need a variety of new equipment, including panels, transformers, cables, utility-grade meters, switchgear, and more. Everything you need will need to be ordered with sometimes over 12 months delivery time, so make sure you start as early as possible.

Since fleet electrification is a time consuming project, you should try and think 10 years ahead. If you already know that your company is likely to double the number of vehicles and chargers, make sure you design and build the site for that second phase. Your ROI will be much higher if you get all the equipment in place sooner rather than later..

Communication Infrastructure

Try not to rely on one single internet access point. Instead make sure you have at least one more router as fallback. For example: your primary connection might be a wired LAN connection and your fallback are the SIM cards in your router. This will give you very good coverage.

If you use cellular connections only, don’t rely on one single SIM card. Always work with dual-SIM routers to have backup connectivity when needed.

Some EV chargers don’t have ethernet connections for LAN and might require Wifi connections. This is also possible. It’s not the ideal connectivity strategy, but is reliable if you use industrial-grade routers and have SIM cards for secondary connections.

If you have a large number of sites, use routers with remote monitoring functionalities, advanced firewall settings, and other security functionalities like VPN.

Remote Monitoring Tools

Your charging infrastructure is as important as the vehicles you’re operating. It requires maintenance, monitoring, and needs frequent attention. All of the successful projects we’ve seen in the market have selected a fleet-focused charging management software to centrally monitor and optimize charging.

Key functionalities are:

If you plan for half-public or public sites, you’ll have to implement payment solutions for EV charging.

Energy management or site controller

We already mentioned energy management above, but we want to highlight this separately. It’s important to explain when a cloud-based energy management system is sufficient and when you need to use a local site controller.

In many cases, cloud-based energy management software is sufficient for fleets and provides a very cost-efficient method to reduce peak demand, demand charges, and energy costs. Since it also uses route data and vehicle telematic data, it helps to ensure on-time departure of your EVs. It’s much easier to install and maintain than hardware-based controllers, therefore it should always be the first consideration.

For the following reasons, you might need to consider a local controller to load balance your charging infrastructure:

You have battery energy storage on site
You have cogeneration such as solar panels on site
You have large buildings or machines on site
You have a poor and unreliable internet connection

Number four should first be improved with the right routers and connectivity options mentioned above. The local controller should not be the first option, as you should always ensure a decent internet connection.

Fleets have benefited from AmpEdge to help operate under those circumstances and in microgrid environments.

‍Security and safety measures

Most financial or cyber damages happen due to lack of security on site. Apart from hacking routers that don’t have a firewall, the easiest way for hackers to access information is to access your physical chargers.

The best way to protect your data is to gate your sites with 24/7 security guards. This is expensive, but you could combine this with your charger uptime strategy. Your staff could be trained to do simple physical inspections such as checking lights, displays, and plugs.

Lastly, we recommend testing your charging hardware security levels. Typically, modern chargers encrypt data and enforce an authentication between the hardware and the internet. When running hardware tests, as mentioned above, make sure to test the security profiles supported by the hardware.

Implementing Your Fleet Electrification Strategy

While it might have taken you only 5 minutes to read this article, actual electrification planning will take several months, unfortunately.

The implementation will take you years of dedication. The good news is that it’s enjoyable and rewarding. Your team and company will learn a lot and find a lot of support within the organization, as well as government organizations.

It’ll all be with it when you see the first electric trucks or buses driving from your depot! When you’re also monitoring and optimizing your chargers through Ampcontrol, it will feel like a great accomplishment.

No matter who you end up using as partner on the hardware, software, and service side – try to establish long-term partners. Both sides, not only you as a customer, will spend months of effort and pre-investment in these projects. The only way to make this work in the long run is true, mutually-beneficial partnerships.

Some companies that did a great job of implementing their electrified fleets are WattEV, Electrada, and Revel.

What are The Challenges of Fleet Electrification?

Firstly, fleet electrification is not the same as normal public charging sites or a charger at Starbucks. If public chargers break – it’s annoying, but it won’t create a mess for the transit operator or delivery service. Drivers would simply use the next public charging site. However, fleet depots are critical infrastructure for firms that rely on vehicles.

Secondly, electric fleet sites are big. You’ll see 40+ DC chargers or sometimes 80 AC chargers per site. Even small fleet depots are often twice as big as public charging sites. The power requirements and electrical infrastructure are equivalent to skyscrapers.

Thirdly, your utilization is very high. Fleet chargers are used 4-8 times per day with the exception of some smaller fleets. This means your chargers need more maintenance and more monitoring. They will also break more often and need fixing.

Companies that previously identify themselves simply as bus operators or transportation companies now define themselves as energy companies too. This is not only an electrification strategy, but also a drastic company change.

Integrating Renewable Energy Sources for Charging Electric Vehicles

Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal power make charging more environmentally friendly, and are often necessary to achieve the higher power demand of EV fleet charging sites. Old depot centers only need 100-300 kW power and use this power for packaging machines, cooling towers, or other appliances.

Charging infrastructure requires 300 kW-5MW of power. If you build large sites for trucks, you might end up with up to 10 MW sites. These power requirements cannot be achieved solely with standard utility interconnections.

Fleet operators combine the interconnections with renewable energy resources and batteries. This requires local power management to ensure uptime and a reliable power flow. A possible path is to use an AmpEdge local controller in combination with building meters and inverter data. In some cases, you can also combine AmpEdge with microgrid controllers.

Optimizing Fleet Operations Through Telematics and Data Analysis

For your depot electrification, the charging equipment is important, but should not be your only concern. Since your main goal is to ensure fleet reliability your plan has to cover this tool. To ensure on-time departure of your fleet and high uptime, consider the following:

Integrate your telematics data to your charging management system (CMS)
Integrate route data to your CMS
Train your schedulers how the CMS works
Feed your optimization software with vehicle and route data
Setup fleet management alerts and escalation policies

We’ve done several integrations, and it's always interesting to see that electrification strategies benefit the environment, as well as modernizing company IT systems and strategies.

Measurable Benefits of Fleet Electrification

For companies, profitability is more important than anything else. Only with a good profit margin can their leaders grow the business, reinvest, and make shareholders happy. However, costs are not the only benefit when electrifying vehicles:

Lower greenhouse gas emissions

This is probably the most obvious, but it’s also the most important one. By switching from combustion to electric vehicles, fleets become more environmentally friendly. While some of the electricity in the grid is generated from fossil fuel-based power plants, the greenhouse emissions are often 60% lower than those from ICE vehicles. Also, the pollution is not in dense areas like cities but in areas where it affects less humans though polluted air.

Lower noise pollution in cities

Anyone who has visited New York, Bangkok, Mexico City, or Madrid, understands what we mean. Noise from vehicles is still one of the most stressful things for residents or visitors. EVs are not entirely quiet but typically 80-90% quieter than combustion vehicles. This is a big benefit and will help us develop a modern and friendly society.

Higher reliability when done well

This might not be true for your first projects, but once the operators, drivers, and others in the supply chain are trained and all systems are fully implemented and functional, you can hit new records of fleet reliability and uptime. Vehicles, in the future, will be easier to maintain and have less spare parts.

Discover how Ampcontrol can help you plan and implement your fleet electrification – get in touch today.