Energy management will be key for electrified vehicle fleets.
Electric light-duty vehicles charge at an EV charging station site powered entirely by a microgrid.
Credit: ABB
Although there's been a whole lot of pessimism recently, electric vehicle sales continue to grow, even if it is less quickly than many hoped. That's true in the commercial vehicle space as well—according to Cox Automotive, 87 percent of vehicle fleet operators expect to add EVs in the next five years, and more than half thought they were likely to buy EVs this year. And where and when to plug those EVs in to charge is a potential headache for fleet operators.
The good news is that charging infrastructure really is growing. It doesn't always feel that way—the $7.5 billion allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act for charging infrastructure has to be disbursed via state departments of transportation, so the process there has been anything but rapid. But according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the total number of public charging plugs has doubled since 2020, to more than 144,000 level 2 plugs and closing in on 49,000 DC fast charger plugs.
There are ways to throw off a planned timeline when building out a station with multiple chargers. Obviously you need the funds to pay for it all—if these are to come from grants like the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, that had to wait for the states to each develop their own funding plans, then open for submissions, and so on, before even approving a project, for example.
Permitting can add plenty more delays, and then there's the need to run sufficient power to a site. "The challenge is getting the power to the points that it needs to be used. The good thing is that the rollout for EV is not happening overnight, and it's staged. So that does give some opportunity," said Amber Putignano, market development leader at ABB Electrification.
For example, ABB has been working with Greenlane, a $650 million joint venture between Daimler Truck North America, NextEra Energy Resources, and BlackRock, as it builds out a series of charging corridors along freight routes, starting with a 280-mile (450 km) stretch of I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
"They have funding to build out 100 massive charging sites for trucks. And they had some funding available, but it was for this year, and they needed to use it, but the utility couldn't give them all of the power that they needed immediately. Just by nameplate power rating for the chargers, they would need something like 12 MW of power," Putignano said.
"In practice, in charging, probably you know that you don't really need to consider full power for the name plate, because vehicles only charge at that power for a very limited time," she said. "But in this particular project, they think that they could survive with 8 to 10 MW, but they're only getting 4 MW this year. Meanwhile, they still need to use this funding and get as much of it installed."
That means digging all the trenching and building out all the electrical distribution equipment on site, if not all the chargers, with a microgrid that's capable of working as well in the future with 12 MW of power as it does with just 4 MW.
"I think this is the same challenge that all of these large sites are facing—it takes an extremely long time to get the power from the utility. Meanwhile, you don't need it immediately. So how do you create this sort of staged future-proof solution where you're not having to open the roads multiple times? You want one construction phase and you want that site to support the future demand," Putignano said.
For fleets that need their own private charging infrastructure, there are other things to think about, too. Energy management solutions are as important here—microgrids as well as battery storage and battery-buffered chargers will play an important role, for example. But not every energy management solution is charger-agnostic, and the collapse of charger manufacturers like Juicebox and Tritium highlight the perils of being stuck in a walled garden belonging to a dead company.