Electrifying Fleets: Going From Pilot Scale To Full Scale

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For motorhomers it looks like larger BEVs and hybrids are moving forward at a rapid pace. We may never see a Battery motorhome, or might see them next year!

This article has some interesting perspectives for fleet managers.

Excerpt:

"Start Planning Now for Fleet Electrification

For this blog series, we are partnering with The Mobility House, who we worked closely with in 2019 to assess the US market for managed charging. We leveraged insights from our work with The Mobility House for our new report and we discussed the challenges for fleet EV charging at scale in sections 4 and 5 of the report. For this blog series, The Mobility House provides case studies and simulation results from their extensive experience working directly with fleets to provide insight into the challenge of charging electric fleets at scale.

The bottom line from our research is that fleet managers need to begin planning immediately for how they will electrify their fleets. Most fleet managers expect to adopt electric models for the majority of their light-duty cars, trucks, and SUVs over the next decade and many fleets have already implemented pilot programs. However, electrifying a fleet at scale involves much more than just adding more EVs and chargers incrementally each year. For many organizations, it will mean restructuring their internal business processes, collaborating proactively with their local utilities and city and county officials, and developing a cohesive, integrated strategy across the organization.

One of the first decisions a fleet manager must make is whether a vehicle in their fleet is suitable to electrify, in terms of the duty cycle for that vehicle as well as its cost and availability. Our interviews revealed a wide variety in requirements for how fleet vehicles are used, including the need for significant towing capabilities, performance in all types of weather, operating 24/7, and powering external equipment. Today, most EVs available are light-duty vehicles but we expect that over the next five years, EVs will become available in nearly all vehicle classes and will be able to meet fleet requirements.

Although EVs are generally cheaper to own and operate than internal combustion engine vehicles, this is not automatically the case and depends on the local utility tariff and when the EV is recharged. The main challenge today is that EVs have a higher upfront cost and are sold by a limited number of manufacturers and dealers. This poses a challenge for many organizations’ procurement processes which rely on bid lists (where multiple dealers and manufacturers must submit cost-competitive bids), replacement budgets that anticipate that a replacement vehicle will cost the same as a current vehicle, and no way to apply operational savings against capital cost.

Charging infrastructure is frequently an afterthought for fleet managers as they electrify, often purchased after vehicle procurement and without a long-term plan for how many and what types of chargers the fleet will need. This approach works today when fleets only have a handful of EVs but developing a long-term plan for charging infrastructure will become critical to controlling costs and managing overall charging load. This challenge is discussed in greater depth in the two blogs that follow this one."

Source with related links: https://cleantechnica.com/2021/01/15/electrifying-fleets-going-from-pilot-scale-to-full-scale/