[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Consulting Specifying Engineer podcast. I'm your host Amara Rozgus, and today we are talking to Brandon Reynolds and Eric Grettinger at Peter Basso Associates. We're digging even deeper into a discussion we had a couple of months ago about EV charging stations. So it's great to have you both back.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Thanks. Nice to be back.
[00:00:23] Speaker C: Thanks for having us.
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So according to a recent research study from Consulting Specifying Engineer, and we did this in late 2023, 70% of respondents said electric vehicle charging station projects will increase in the next 12 months.
And then when we asked to rank technologies specified the most, EV charging came in third.
So that makes me really happy to have two of the most knowledgeable experts to speak to today.
Let me give you a little bit of background about both of them. Eric is a VP with PBA and has been with the firm for more than 25 years. He serves as a technical resource for PBAs electrical engineers and designers and for the community.
Eric has owned multiple electric vehicles since 2017, giving him hands on knowledge with using charging infrastructure.
Brandon is a senior associate with pba based out of Michigan.
As electric vehicles began to evolve and charging stations became necessary design components to these projects, Brandon led the research on how EV charging works, who manufactures them, what types of connectors different vehicles use, and the requirements of the National Electrical Code.
So, Brandon and Eric, thank you so much for joining me to dig a little deeper into this topic and today we're talking about EV charging for free fleets.
So Eric, let's kick this off. What are the reasons for businesses to use electric vehicles for fleets?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: There are many reasons that a business or municipality or school district may look at using EVs for their fleet use.
We usually start by working with that client to look at the types of vehicles that they currently use, the miles driven per day, and the types of driving that they do.
For example, a municipality may have functions such as building inspectors or code enforcement that may not drive a lot of miles in a day because they're staying in city limits, but may spend a lot of time idling their vehicles.
So an EV might be a good replacement choice for those vehicles to decrease city maintenance costs for the vehicle and and decreased fuel use.
Many EVs come with an 8 year, 100,000 mile warranty on the battery and electric drivetrain. And the cities look at this as a potential way to decrease warranty costs on those vehicles and just generally reducing maintenance on the fleet.
Another example might be a bus fleet that does a lot of stop and go. Driving.
So EVs allow a lot of the braking energy to be recaptured into the battery.
So that provides additional efficiency for stop and go driving and reduces wear on braking components.
So you'll see that be the case also for fleet delivery vehicles that businesses may be using, or delivery vehicles of all kinds around the city.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Those all sound like really positive aspects to it. Are there any hurdles to electrifying fleets?
[00:03:44] Speaker B: The biggest hurdle seems to be installing the charging and identifying what types and how much to install.
Again, we start by looking at the usage.
Miles per day helps us determine how fast the charging needs to be installed.
We also look at downtime of the fleet. You know, if it's on the road 24, 7, like some municipalities use their police cruisers. EV option is tough to work through, but if it's a vehicle that can sit in charge overnight, that's a good EV opportunity. Possibly.
Sometimes there's a cultural or political hurdle too. We see this sometimes with the cities that we're working with. We're maybe most of the departments are on board, but there may be one department head or two that has just no interest at even looking at the pros and cons.
So that can be a little challenging sometimes.
So a department has to be willing to give it a try, or the people that are in charge of the fleet have to be willing to give it a try.
Once they're installed, the users have to get in the habit of plugging in a vehicle at the end of the shift or in some cases every couple of days.
So there's a little bit of change in a routine. But I think most of the time people find that's easier than refueling or going to a gas station with the vehicle.
[00:05:09] Speaker C: The other kind of more technical reasons why there might be some hurdles is that really just in how the EVs operate. So an EV, first and foremost, as we all know, they take time to charge.
And if you need to charge in the middle of a shift, that costs time. Even with the fastest available DC fast charger, you're still talking about, you know, 10 minutes or maybe even more to get to your 80% charge.
Now, these aren't, these aren't the end of the world, but it's just things to consider as well.
In addition, I mean, here in Michigan, you deal with a lot of extreme cold, and that really affects your EVs.
The heaters inside your EV to, to keep you at the, to keep a passenger or driver warm. They eat a lot of range.
Granted, there are some, there are some efficiencies in the more recent technologies that are coming out. But that is still a factor that comes into play.
The other thing, too, is that in extreme cold or even in extreme hot weather, EVs will take longer to charge.
And so the time that you're taking either out of a person's shift or the time that it takes to charge in between shifts, that suddenly increases in those extreme climates.
And then one last kind of hurdle is that EVs, they generally don't handle towing or heavy payloads very well.
As you can see a lot of information online about how, like the Ford Lightning, the Rivian, even the Tesla Cybertruck, their range, it almost goes down to a third of what its rated range is.
But there are ways we can help mitigate these issues, but mostly it will result in some form of compromise, whether it's additional chargers, changes in expectation, or even just changes in how you operate.
These aren't deal breakers, but they are important considerations to keep in mind, especially as you're going into these.
You don't want to sell yourself something that you know has downsides. You want to be aware of all of the downsides so that you can go into an electric fleet as an informed person. That way, when these problems arise, then they are easier to handle if you have a plan in place and, and you know how to, how to work around these hurdles.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Brandon, so you just talked about charging. If a business does want an electrified fleet, what kind of charging do you usually see? Are we looking at level one, level three? What's the typical option?
[00:07:56] Speaker C: The answer to that is it depends. These are very highly customized solutions, as these are owned by businesses. The charging system needs to be properly sized and designed to ensure that vehicles have just enough range at just the right time without having to oversize your system, which would then just inflate costs.
So we're trying to play that balancing act.
Typically, you want to ask yourself a few questions before you start to size your system.
These questions are typically how many miles are driven in a shift?
How long will vehicles be able to charge between shifts?
And will vehicles be towing or carrying heavy payloads?
You then take these answers and compare them against the EV you are planning on purchasing.
These will help determine the quantity of destination chargers and opportunity chargers that you will need.
Destination chargers are the chargers that you will use to charge vehicles between shifts.
The exact size will depend on the range you plan on using and how long they'll be able to charge. Basically, the first two questions that you are already asking yourself, if a vehicle is using 80% of its range in a shift, but only has two hours to charge, you're going to need a good number of DC fast chargers. Now think of like the like police fleets.
If a vehicle only uses 20% of its charge in a shift and has 12 hours to charge, then you'll probably be okay with just installing regular 32amp or 48amp level 2 chargers.
Now these are extremes, but really just kind of show the reason why these questions must be answered first.
On another note, if you're more in the realm of the second scenario where you're only using 20% of your charge and you have a long time to charge between shifts, you would still probably want to consider installing a DC fast charger. And that's just in case a vehicle wasn't plugged in at the end of the previous shift, or in the case of the extreme weather scenario to where the vehicle took longer to charge because of the extreme cold weather.
Another thing to consider for destination chargers is trying to plan for future changes to your operations.
Is there a potential for shifts to increase in time, and that way you can't charge as much in between shifts.
Will the routes get even longer over time?
If so, you want to make sure that your destination chargers are flexible enough to accommodate that.
Now that doesn't mean you need to oversize your electrical service.
There are other options in regards to that.
So in a scenario where you only need 32amp or 48amp level 2 chargers, you could always consider installing all 80amp level 2 chargers. But size your service based on the 32amp or 48amp load.
In this case, you would install an automatic load management system.
This system would monitor the output of all your chargers.
And as more of the chargers are used, it will slow down the charge rate to prevent your system from being overloaded.
Now, what this allows you is to have the capability of the faster 80amp level 2 charging without having to install an electrical service to support that faster charging for every single charger.
The scenario in which every single charger is being fully utilized at 80amps would be very unlikely.
More often than not, you'll find that there is a natural diversity in how much these chargers operate.
Even if every vehicle is plugged in, not every vehicle will be charging at the maximum charge rate. This will fluctuate based on battery temperature, how much charge your battery has, and even things like accepted charge rate.
But even if in the worst case scenario that the planets align, you will just have a situation to where the charges will charge a little slower than what you had originally hoped but even then, if you size your system to charge at 48amps all at the same time, then that's basically right where you're planning at originally.
So, just things to consider.
Now, the other thing, the other chargers to consider are opportunity chargers.
These are typically DC fast chargers, located in the middle of a route in case the vehicle can't make its complete trip.
These chargers are not just for extra long routes that exceed an EV's mileage, but they could also be used for unforeseen scenarios such as extra cold days, unusually heavy payloads, or even just only getting a partial charge from the shift before.
For instance, in school districts with electric buses, you might consider installing a DC fast charger at a centralized school.
Even if they can't make a complete route on a single charge, they're able to stop in the middle of the route, probably on their return trip, sit there for 10 minutes, get enough charge to make it back to the storage lot.
Now, not every business has property in the middle of their route to where they can install one of these.
Or some people may not be able to front the cost of having expensive DC fast charging. In this case, you can utilize public DC fast chargers.
The only thing is that you'll have to be at the mercy of whether or not these chargers are working or whether even available when you need them to be.
There's no one size fits all solution out there, but going through this process will help make sure that your system is right sized, that it will be able to charge the vehicles properly and make sure that you keep your budgets in line.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah, Brandon, I like the first two words you used to. It depends. So totally.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. So Eric, you sound like a crystal ball kind of guy, so pull out your crystal ball and tell me, what do you think about fleets with semis or 18 wheelers? Do you see a world where these become electrified as well?
[00:14:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's inevitable and I, I think it's happening already.
The major manufacturers are all working on their electrified trucks. You know, in the case of Tesla, they're starting to roll theirs out.
The hurdle again is charging infrastructure.
It seems, you know, for at least a little while, the focus may be on a local delivery where trucks can stay in a metro area, return to a charging station, or charge along a route.
And then the over the road trucks are probably going to be limited to major highways along routes where charging infrastructure is established.
For example, I think California is probably a little ahead of most of the country as far as having better truck charging infrastructure. You know, along their freeway system. So I think that's where we're starting to see a lot of the electric semis start to roll out, but they're really limiting them to two routes where they have charging available.
I do see indications that the big truck stop companies are actively working on this as well or on their plans.
The really remote truck stops are going to need the support of the utility infrastructure too, because when we start talking about a truck stop and the number of semis that they potentially will need to service in the future, we're talking megawatts of utility power that are needed. And in many cases it's looking like it may be a megawatt per truck that they want to charge. So you can see that adds up pretty quickly when you have 40, 50 electric pumps and those rural areas just don't have that utility capacity at this time.
So I think that's a lot of the reason why the local delivery trucks probably make a lot of sense and then stop and go. Nature of local delivery is likely a really good place to start for reducing overall fuel use, while likely to be easier to support with the charging infrastructure in the short term as well.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: At the same time, too, you've seen in Detroit where they installed the first induction charging road.
And so that a lot of that emerging technology is really going to come into play whether or not these, these large semi trucks will be, will be feasible if they're able to charge while driving on major highway corridors. And that's going to provide that extra option to where they. That makes it a little more feasible than having to stop and charge for. For an hour or so.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:02] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely interesting technology.
Definitely.
So it sounds like you've both been involved in a lot of different things.
What's the most interesting project that you've worked on at Peter Basso Associates? Eric, I'm going to tag you first.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Okay.
So a recent interesting project for me was a net zero energy fire station.
We had to design the building in such a way to generate all the electricity on site that would be used in the building on an annualized basis.
Of course, the first step was to make the building as efficient as possible to reduce the amount of PV power that we needed to put on the building.
But an interesting quirk of where it is located is that the utility has agreements that don't allow you to be a net negative energy user over the course of the year. So you have to at least use some energy, which is, you know, very.
Makes it very hard to make a net zero energy building when you have to use energy.
So we had to be creative about the way we treated this building. And our creative way was to add EV charging for fleet staff and visitors in an adjacent park, as well as a future electric fire truck.
So with these EV charging, we said we'll use energy from the utility, but it's not used for the building operation. So we'll put that outside of our net zero calculation.
So this allowed the client to meet their net zero energy goals, but offset gasoline and diesel usage, which is, you know, another goal of this city, and really ended up kind of as a win win with a creative solution.
Project isn't built yet due to budget constraints, but they do expect to approve funding later this year.
[00:19:00] Speaker C: Cool.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: Very cool. What about you, Brandon?
[00:19:05] Speaker C: I've been involved with a lot of the site infrastructure surrounding the Michigan Central Station and one of the amazing things about it is it's such an iconic and historic landmark and to be to be a part of the transformation that the Michigan Central team is putting into Corktown is very rewarding, I would say.
Some of the things that are happening in the site is with that induction charging road that they put in.
There's potentials that we've been looking at and installing that elsewhere.
Nothing set in stone yet, but you never know.
But the other things that are going in are just other technologies, emerging technologies that the Michigan Central team is looking to utilize and even test with.
And just seeing the kind of innovation that they're trying to put into even just their site infrastructure has been really interesting and has really helped us learn more about some of these emerging technologies on our end.
[00:20:10] Speaker A: Yeah, super exciting and I'm definitely going to catch up with you in a few months to hear about these projects.
[00:20:17] Speaker C: That sounds great.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:20:18] Speaker C: We'll love to update you.
[00:20:21] Speaker A: Good, good.
Well, that was Eric Grettinger and Brandon Reynolds from Peter Basso Associates talking about EV charging stations specifically for fleets.
For more information on electrical engineering topics related to renewable energy and EV charging stations, visit consulting specifying
[email protected] csc mag.com to learn more about this topic specifically, I suggest you go back and listen to our other conversations.
Thank you so much for listening and catch you next time. Bye bye.
