Grid And Charging Speedbumps Ahead As Amazon, FedEx And Transit Fleets Go Electric

Amazon, FedEx and other large fleet operators are replacing their exhaust-spewing delivery trucks with clean electric vehicles. It's a win for the environment, but keeping tens of thousands of heavy EV powered up brings new challenges, like installing lots of chargers and only plugging in when electricity rates are cheap. If you want the batteries to last, don't drive them too hard or until they're almost out of fuel.

You don't want to go to less than 20% state of charge with your phone. There are 31 battery buses in a 350-unit fleet that are used to ferry commuters between downtown Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. You're going to cut down the life of the battery if you deplete it frequently.

Cordero's transit agency has been trying to go all-electric for the past 12 years. It has been learned that battery buses don't work for every route. Out of our entire fleet of battery electric buses, we have about half the availability. Imagine if our fleet was battery electric and availability was less than half. A lot of people won't make it to their doctor's appointment or work because of the weather.

Going electric is “not the same as buying a very well-known, well-understood conventional diesel vehicle and just dropping it into operation.”

The Biden Administration's push to get commercial and transit fleets to go electric is spurring tens of billions of dollars of investment in new U.S. battery and vehicle production capacity. Fleet operators have to learn how to keep all those vehicles fueled up, as well as how to maintain them, and avoid charging them at times when power costs the most.

David Scorey, head of North America operations for Paris-based Keolis, said that electric vehicles are not the same as diesel vehicles.

He said, "You need to understand the duty cycle you want to use the vehicle on, the operating characteristics of the network, train maintenance technicians and train operators to use these vehicles." There's a lot of back office stuff about how you monitor battery health, wireless service, how you maximize the energy efficiency of the vehicle, and so on.

In the next decade, a lot of companies will learn these lessons. Over the next few years, Amazon will put 100,000 electric Rivian vans into its fleet and will also use battery-powered Ram vehicles. FedEx also has thousands of electric delivery vehicles on the road and is adding many more. The U.K. startup Arrival is currently waiting for 10,000 batteries to be delivered.

How reliable is the grid? California, the top market for EV in the U.S., had a scare that its electrical grid might fail in early September when an intense heatwave triggered a surge in energy use. As climate change creates hotter, drier conditions as well as more intense storms and hurricanes, the need for more robust electrical infrastructure is underscored.

Bill Cawein, FedEx's manager for technology and integration and U.S. vehicle maintenance, said that they have teams working with local utilities and policymakers to help evaluate where it is feasible to add charging stations at their facilities. Increasing the number of electric vehicles on the road in the years to come will require a growing grid capacity.

Grid Concerns

Even though grid concerns are less of a problem for individual car owners at the moment, it is something commercial and transit fleets have to contend with.

Daniel Gross is the director of Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund. We do not deliver packages overnight or in the middle of the night when the grid is not strained. At a time when the grid is not taxed, it would be safe to assume that a lot of our recharging is at that time.

“The grid will always be ready. The question is how much do we want to pay?”

There is plenty of grid capacity to keep EV's charged during off-peak hours, according to a recent study. By the end of the decade, it will be necessary to shift charging habits to other times of the day when solar power generation is at its peak, as night-time rates likely will be.

The grid will be prepared. One of the study's authors said the question was how much to pay. Electricity will be more expensive at night than during the day, but Amazon will be able to charge at night.

Vehicle To Grid Energy Storage

Although many EV advocates say all those cars, trucks and buses can also serve as a form of distributed power storage, trading electricity back to the grid when it's needed and recharged when demand drops, that's not likely to be a meaningful option anytime soon. It is possible to occasionally power your home with a Ford F-150 Lighting. It's one thing to do it every day.

The worry is how long the battery will last by doing this. People are trying to answer that in a lab setting. I think this is a big open question in a real-world setting where you have temperature variations and you have a pack and vehicle.

There are questions about how easy it will be for small businesses to go electric. The big fleet operators will be able to invest in staff and technology to manage their new EV, like software to monitor the state of charge of individual vehicles, and they will also have their own charging stations. Rajagopal said that smaller players won't always have luxuries.

He said that there were a lot of small and medium businesses that would be using the new technology. A lot of these companies don't have enough money to set up a charging station. They have never had to do that in the past.

Hydrogen may be an answer to some of the challenges.

It has been decided that battery buses aren't the best way to go electric due to issues with buses purchased from Proterra. Fuel cell models that get their electricity from hydrogen are going to be the new ones. A month ago, it installed a 25,000 gallon hydrogen tank at its bus yard in California, in order to keep the zero emission units powered up.

The cost of electricity or natural gas will be more expensive than hydrogen, but Cordero is looking forward to a less complicated fueling.

He said that they don't have to change how they do business. It's the same thing that we do. It's ready to go when you fill it up. It is capable of going on any route.