Fleet Efficiency: Is Data Your EV Fleet Blind Spot?

Overview

There is an important role for data when it comes to planning the next step in fleet electrification. It provides hard evidence and prevents important decisions being made on gut-instinct. In this blog, we discuss grid connection capacity and how to the calculate energy demand of your charging infrastructure.

Key points:

• Power capacity: Is your site able to sufficiently power your fleet?
• Three metrics: Make sure to measure the capacity, demand and spare power of your site.
• Three solutions: Will you need to boost the power on site? Are no changes needed? Or, do you need to look at some more innovative workarounds?

Fleet Data Blind Spot

Despite having an analytical approach to vehicle management, data can be a blind spot for many when it comes to planning the electrification of your electric fleet.

In our private and working lives, we are used to electricity being abundant, when in fact it is a finite resource with pressure from competing demands. The workplace or depot is part of a local network drawing energy from the same source. A site drawing down more than its fair share can cause the lights to go off in neighbouring buildings.

You could think of electricity filling a battery as being like water filling a bath. If you install 20 baths in your home and start to fill them all at once, your neighbour will get nothing when they turn on the tap. To prevent this happening, an energy provider will have set a limit on how much power a workplace can use – and apply surcharges if the agreed limit is breached.

It is also quite possible that a grid connection is not sufficiently high capacity to provide the energy needed to charge multiple EVs in a fleet all at once. To revisit the bath analogy, you could fill all 20 at the same time, but much slower than if you were just filling one. If you want to fill them faster, you need a bigger water pipe. Similarly, if your electricity connection is not high enough to charge your EV fleet and power all the other operations in your business, something is going to give when you plug in.

How to Get Started on Your Fleet Electrification Journey

Three key metrics help paint the full picture of where to start on your EV infrastructure journey.

Avoiding Data Blind Spots

The capacity question is relatively easy, as you can find out how much power is available from your distribution network operator (DNO).

To calculate peak power demand – how much power you use – check your energy bills or use data from your building or energy management system. We would advise using 12 months of data as an absolute minimum here. Equipped with this data, it should be a simple process to work out whether you have capacity for the chargers your EVs will need.

What is the next step?

From here you could find yourself in one of three potential scenarios

• You already have a grid connection that can support the number of EV chargers you want to deploy – you are good to go!
• You need a higher capacity grid connection and will need to pay your DNO for an upgrade. This can be costly and time consuming, so your business will need to factor this into the fleet electrification plan.
• Even with a higher grid connection you still can’t power as many chargers as you’d like – talk to an EV charging provider like Mer about using load balancing technology to overcome this.

Informed, evidence-based decisions about EV charging are only possible with the right data.