How-to guide

Transitioning to electrical power is an important decision for any fleet. It requires research and planning, to ensure money is invested wisely and that implementation is as seamless as possible.

This guide leads you through the most up-to-date market information and relevant fleet experiences. It is designed to give your company step-by-step guidance, taking you through the basics of EV technologies to the early adoption and evaluation of your own corporate fleet transition plan.

Evaluate & adapt

Analyze the data

Evaluate metrics to scale and innovate.

Understanding the practical benefits of an electric fleet and the real-world considerations of ownership enables internal buy-in for further electrification programs. Calibrate your initial assumptions with real world data.

  • What are the actual OpEx costs?
  • Mainly electricity costs. Management platforms can keep these as low as possible via load-balancing, or by scheduling charging for low-cost times or in response to grid-balancing markets. Analysing this can help identify areas for efficiency improvement.
  • What are the environmental benefits?
  • Some management platforms will be able to time charging to renewables generation. This will reduce your GHG emissions.
  • What is the minimum range requirement?
  • Analyzing EV owner charging patterns, user experience feedback, distance traveled between charge sessions, and energy consumed per charging session, can give you better insights on the sweet spot for EV range and cost.
  • How flexible are EV driver demands?
  • Most chargers installed at home or the workplace can deliver daily energy needs in just a portion of the time they are plugged-in. Analyzing the difference between charging time and plug-in time can give you insight on how to optimize the charging solution.
  • Are your employees satisfied?
  • Understanding the level of employee satisfaction can also indicate how well the vehicle transition has been executed with employees. Depending on the feedback you may need to reengage employees by educating, training and exciting them again (section 3.2).

Engage Industry

Share learnings with vendors and stakeholders.

Help industry evolve and position your fleet efforts in front of leading industry suppliers who may have solutions for any initial deployment issues.

These are just a few selected examples of prominent global events.

Innovate

Industry stakeholders are keen to see specific EV technologies commercialized, because they promise benefits for grid utilization and efficiency, reduced emissions and a more sustainable EV cycle life. Some critical areas for research and development that may attract government grants and funding are bi-directionality, renewables integration, and 2nd life batteries.

Bi-directionality – some automakers and charging companies are commercializing technologies and systems to discharge power back into infrastructure. This has multiple advantages for stakeholders such as increased grid efficiency and grid resiliency. For the latter, EV power is aggregated in service markets to reduce grid balancing costs, for the former, EV power is used to support islanding of local grids during grid outages. As such governments and industry stakeholders have been keen to fund research and development pilots.
Renewables – EVs have significant potential to increase renewables penetration via charging that is scheduled to occur when intermittent renewables like solar or wind are generating power. Timing charge sessions to renewable generation times will decrease the costs for renewables, and may present additional revenue streams or funding as governments look for ways to decarbonize the electric power sector.
Storage: Second life batteriesbattery recycle and disposal is an area that is seeing increased focus as the first generation EVs come off the road. Between the end of the battery in-vehicle-life and its recycling/disposal, there is an opportunity to reuse its energy storage potential for purposes like grid-balancing or buffering EV charging. This has been demonstrated with many of the pre-commercialization EVs. Given its multiple positive implications for environmental concerns; it is likely governments will fund research and development here as well.

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