Commercial Electric Fleets: Devising Your EV Charging Strategy

Overview

There are plenty of reasons to consider electrifying your fleet such as:

• Meeting sustainability targets
• Reducing your organisation’s environmental impact
• Reducing running costs and ULEZ charges
• Compliance with new regulations

However, just blindly starting the switch with no proper planning or strategy can lead to disaster and a wasted investment. You may end up with the wrong EVs for the task, inadequate charging infrastructure or downtime due to operational delays. It’s a complex process with a lot of considerations and important decisions to be made, so this post offers some practical advice for fleet managers working on the transition.

Understanding Why a Commercial EV Charging Strategy is Important

Having a proper strategy for the transition is important for several reasons:

Getting the right people on board

From the very start of your project, it’s important to get the right people on board. A solid strategy and plan of action will help inform decision-makers and ensure buy-in. These include:

• Facilities manager(s): These will support planning and developing the charging infrastructure that is crucial to fleet electrification.
• Finance department: Finance managers and directors will help with key decisions around the investment required for the transition.
• Potential charging providers: Charging infrastructure can be complex so involving expert consultants and providers early will help avoid costly mistakes.

Knowing your “why”

Knowing why you are embarking on your electrification journey will help contextualise and support you in increasing your team’s confidence in the process, as well as convincing management and other stakeholders of the value of the investment.

Understanding the numbers

Mapping out the key details and reviewing the feasibility of each stage in the process will help structure your project – as well as give you an understanding of how many and which vehicles need to be electrified, and their associated charging requirements. All of this helps determine projected costs.

Setting your goals

Having a desired outcome and timeline in mind will help you measure the progress and success of the project, prevent project creep, and ensure all stakeholders are clear on their responsibilities.

Choosing The Right EVs For Your Business

Depending on their role in the business, some vehicles may be more suited to electrification than others. The first step is to evaluate your current vehicle usage to understand the suitability of switching your fleet to electric. For example:

• How far do they travel? This will affect the range requirements for any proposed replacement EVs.
• Where is the vehicle based? Do they return to a depot or central location at night, or are they used around the clock by staff? This will affect both the required range and charging infrastructure needs.
• How many passengers or how much load does it need to carry? Is it a passenger vehicle, a commercial light van or an HGV? For the latter two, maximum load carrying capacity is vital.

You may wish to electrify your entire fleet eventually, or you might transition a few vehicles to gather the data and learnings necessary to support the long-term strategy. Creating a timeline for when you will aim to switch each vehicle in your fleet can be a sensible approach.

As the commercial vehicle market expands, fleet managers will have significantly more choice to introduce into their fleet. The greater flexibility will enable them to build electric fleets that are well suited to their operations; there will be no need to fit the mold or concede to a ‘one size fits all’ approach to vehicles, as vehicles with different payloads and charging needs can be mixed and matched.

This is great news for fleet managers, as is the fact they will benefit from flexibility with their charging solutions as well. By creating bespoke solutions that charge points operators can design in collaboration with them, fleet managers will be able to incentivise EV adoption.

When you understand all of this, you’ll be able to find the vehicles that match your requirements.

Determining Your EV Charging Infrastructure Needs

Choosing the right charging infrastructure to power your electric fleet is as vital as choosing the vehicles themselves. However, as with vehicle decisions, there are some questions fleet managers need to consider before installation begins.

Charging Location

What location will work best for your fleet’s driving habits? There is no correct answer to this question, as it is always unique to the fleet you are electrifying and your business model. Ultimately, this will inform where they will charge.

If your vehicles are stored at a particular facility or depot overnight, they need to be ready to go when the drivers arrive the next morning. Charging infrastructure would therefore be best positioned in the places where they are parked.

On the other hand, the vehicles may be parked overnight at drivers’ homes, in which case you might consider home charging infrastructure for your staff, as the AA did.

Choosing The Most Effective Form of Charging

EV chargers come in a range of power outputs, and there is no ‘right’ solution for everybody – it all depends on your fleet. Whilst rapid and ultra-rapid charging is suited to quick ‘top-up’ chargers, fast charging is best for longer, overnight charges where time is not of the essence. If your fleet vehicles return to base multiple times during the day, they might only need a top-up charge, compared to slower charging which suits return-to-base fleets.

DX Freight, for example, chose the latter, providing 7kW fast chargers for their drivers to plug in at the end of the day so their vehicles would be recharged overnight.

If you are transitioning a fleet of vehicles for your staff, such as pool cars which are used during the day but travel only a short distance, you might also wish to charge on a gradual basis throughout the working day.

Read more about the different use cases of EV charging for electric fleets here.

You may wish to consider starting with a few chargers before incrementally upgrading and expanding as you better understand usage patterns and future needs. However, if you have a robust strategy and know your requirements, you could save time and budget by installing your infrastructure all at once.

Don’t forget that you may be eligible for a range of EV Charging Grants & Incentives as well.

Do You Have The Power Supply?

The power of your chargers will place different demands on your power system alongside existing energy requirements, so you need to determine if your existing power supply can cope.

This will require investigations and possibly new grid connections. This is where a site survey can help. Not only do surveys help you plan for future infrastructure, but they can also help you deduce whether you have the right capacity on site for the chargers.

If the power availability on your site currently cannot cope with the demand of your planned EV chargers, there are a couple of solutions.

The first is to pay a district network operator (DNO) to upgrade your infrastructure. However, if you don’t have the budget for this, you could take advantage of load balancing technology, which automatically distributes the available power to multiple vehicles.