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

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and other big fleet operators are moving fast to replace their vast fleets of exhaust-spewing delivery trucks with clean electric vehicles. It’s a win for the environment, but keeping tens of thousands of heavy EVs powered up brings new challenges, including installing lots of chargers and only plugging in when electricity rates are cheap. Oh, and don’t drive them too hard or until they’re nearly out of fuel if you want the batteries to last.

“Just like with your cellphone, you don’t want to get to less than a 20% state of charge. The battery’s happy between about a 40% to 80% charge,” said Roland Cordero, who runs maintenance and technology for Foothill Transit, which has 31 battery buses in a 350-unit fleet that ferries commuters between downtown Los Angeles and suburbs in the San Gabriel Valley. “If you’re depleting the energy off of your vehicle below that regularly, you’re gonna cut down the life of a battery.”

Cordero knows a lot about that as his pioneering transit agency has tried to go all-electric for the past 12 years. He’s learned that battery buses don’t work for every Foothill route and that reliability can be a problem. “Out of our entire fleet of battery electric buses right now we have about 53% availability,” Cordero tells Forbes. “So just imagine if our entire fleet was battery electric with only 53% availability. There’s going to be a lot of people not making it to their doctor’s appointment or getting a ride to work.”

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 with new federal incentives is spurring tens of billions of dollars of investment in new U.S. battery and vehicle production capacity and a scramble for lithium and other raw materials vital to making them. But it also means fleet operators have to learn how to keep all those vehicles fueled up, factoring in hours of charging time per day for each; how they maintain them; and avoid charging them at times that stress the grid or when power costs the most.

Going electric is “not the same as buying a very well-known, well-understood conventional diesel vehicle and just dropping it into operation,” said David Scorey, head of North America operations for Paris-based Keolis, which helps transit fleets around the world.

“You need to understand the duty cycle on which you want to use the vehicle, the operating characteristics of the network, train maintenance technicians and train the operators to use these vehicles because they operate in different ways,” he said. “And then there’s all of the back-office stuff around how you monitor battery health, wireless service, how you optimize the energy efficiency of the vehicle, how you make sure you’ve got the right charging arrangements in place.”

A lot of companies will be learning these lessons in the coming decade. Retail giant Amazon is putting 100,000 electric Rivian vans into its fleet over the next few years and will also begin using battery-powered Ram vehicles from Stellantis in 2023. FedEx also has thousands of electric delivery vehicles on the road and is adding many more, including hundreds of BrightDrop delivery vans from General Motors’GM
new electric truck unit. Likewise, UPS has over 1,000 battery-powered trucks and is waiting for 10,000 more from U.K. startup Arrival.

One major question these fleets face: how reliable is the grid going to be? California, the top market for EVs in the U.S., had a scare that its electrical grid might fail in early September when an intense heat wave triggered a surge in energy use as homes and businesses tried to stay cool. Power continued to flow but the experience underscored the need for more robust electrical infrastructure as climate change creates hotter, drier conditions as well as more intense storms and hurricanes that also take out power lines.

“We have teams working with local utilities and policymakers to help evaluate where it is feasible to add charging stations at our facilities given current and future grid capacity,” said Bill Cawein, FedEx’s manager for technology & integration and U.S. vehicle maintenance. “Grid capacity will need to grow to support the rising number of electric vehicles—commercial and otherwise—on the road in the years to come.”

Grid Concerns

Grid concerns are less of an issue at the moment for individual car owners, especially those able to recharge their EVs at home overnight, but it’s something commercial and transit fleets have to contend with now, given the number of EVs they’re adding.

“We are exploring a variety of options,” Daniel Gross, director of Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, told Forbes. “One thing to keep in mind, particularly with respect to our last-mile fleet, is that we don’t deliver packages overnight and in the middle of the night when the grid is not strained. Therefore it would be safe to assume that a significant amount of our recharging is at a time when the grid is not taxed.”

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

A recent Stanford University study estimated that in a state like California, where EVs account for about 6% of vehicles on the road, there’s plenty of grid capacity to keep them charged, especially overnight during off-peak hours. Still, by the end of the decade, when EVs may rise to about a 30% market share, it will be necessary to shift charging habits to other times of the day, such as the late morning or early afternoon, when solar power generation is at its peak, as nighttime rates likely will no longer be so cheap.

“The grid will always be ready. The question is how much do we want to pay?” said Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford and one of the study’s authors. “Amazon will be fine to charge at night on the grid in 2035, but electricity will be a lot more expensive at night versus during the day.”

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 recharging when demand drops, that’s not likely to be a meaningful option anytime soon, according to Rajagopal. Occasionally powering your home with a Ford F-150 Lighting when there’s a blackout is one thing. Doing it every day is another matter.

“The worry is how much the battery gets aged by doing this,” he said. “A lot of people are trying to answer that, studying it in a lab setting. But in a real-world setting, where you have temperature variations, where you have a pack and vehicle used in different ways, I think this is a big open question.”

Another question is: How easy will it be for smaller businesses to go electric? Big-fleet operators like Amazon, FedEx and UPS will be able to invest in staff and technology to manage their new EVs, like software to monitor the state of charge of individual vehicles, and they’ll also have their own dedicated charging stations. Smaller players won’t always have these luxuries, said Rajagopal.

“There’s a ton of small and medium businesses that will be electrifying their fleets—your landscaping company, plumbing companies,” he said. “For a lot of these companies, they don’t really have the financial means and the people to set up chargers and manage it. That’s something they’ve never had to do in the past, and it’s a big deal.”

One answer to these challenges for some fleets might be taking an alternate path: hydrogen.

In the case of Foothill Transit, which works with Keolis, it’s decided that battery buses aren’t the best way for it to go electric, owing to issues with buses purchased from Proterra, including general reliability, battery performance and long charging time. Instead, it’s preparing to shift to fuel cell models that get their electricity from hydrogen. It’s buying 33 of the zero-emission units from Canada’s NFI and last month installed a 25,000-gallon hydrogen tank at its bus yard in Pomona, California, that will keep them fueled up.

Hydrogen will be about double the per-mile cost of either electricity or natural gas, the other fuel sources that power Foothill buses, but Cordero is looking forward to faster, less complicated fueling.

“We don’t have to change the way we operate our business,” he said. “It’s the same way that we run CNG. You fill up in ten minutes and it’s ready to go. It can do 320 miles and it can go on any route.”