Charging Electric Fleets (1/3)

Episode Summary

In the United States, nearly one quarter of national greenhouse gas emissions come from the 280 million vehicles that drive on the nations roads each year. And while fleet vehicles – including the ~5 million buses, garbage trucks, law enforcement vehicles and more that make up public fleets, and the ~6.5 million rental cars, taxis, delivery trucks, long-haul trucks, and more that make up commercial fleets – represent only a small fraction of those vehicles, they are an excellent target for early electric vehicle (EV) adoption, by virtue of their affordability through bulk pricing, their ability to demonstrate EV technology to a wide audience, and the outsized impact fleet electrification could have in reducing air pollution that stems from auto emissions.

But critical to the wide-spread adoption of electric fleets, is wide-spread development of charging infrastructure that will support those fleets, which have unique charging demands in comparison to the personal EV. In this first installment of a three-part series examining the state and future of electric fleet charging, Climate Now is joined by EV charging entrepreneurs Nathan King (itselectric), and Arcady Sosinov and Rob Anderson (Freewire Technologies) to explore the current EV charging landscape in the US, what makes fleet charging a challenge, and new strategies and technologies that are helping existing infrastructure meet the growing demand for EV charging.

Transcript

James Lawler: [00:00:00] Welcome to Climate Now, a podcast that brings together experts across industry, academia and the public sector to take our listeners to the front lines of climate change mitigation, adaptation, and the energy transition. I'm your host, James Lawler. This week, we're rolling out the first episode in an electrifying three part series, yes, we love a pun, co-hosted with our friend and Climate News Weekly regular Darren Hau.

Over the course of the next three episodes, we will touch on the unique challenges and solutions driving the electric vehicle charging landscape. Darren and I speak with people from companies leading the charge, we can't help ourselves, in tackling how best to serve different types of EV fleets, including those for commercially used municipal services and delivery purposes.

Darren Hau: We've specifically picked our guests to cover ongoing policy goals, future infrastructure plans, and technological breakthroughs that continue to shape fleet electrification. 

Before we get started, let's go over the current EV [00:01:00] landscape. The Department of Energy breaks vehicles down into three categories, light duty, medium duty, and heavy duty. Light duty EVs mostly include personal use cars, small trucks, and delivery vans. Medium and heavy duty EVs usually weigh over 10,000 pounds and move heavier loads. The types of charging equipment used to power different EV categories depends on factors like how fast a vehicle needs to be charged and how far that vehicle is traveling.

The DOE's Alternative Fuels Data Center outlines three types of charging equipment. Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3, or DC fast charging. Level 1 equipment is plugged into wall sockets and usually in private homes with standard 120 volt outlets. Level 2 charging requires 240 or 208 volt availability, charging vehicles faster than Level 1 chargers by providing around 25 miles of driving per hour. The faster charging speed and ease of making relatively small electrical upgrades to accommodate Level 2 chargers is [00:02:00] why many residential EV owners use Level 2 chargers.

 Level 3 DC fast chargers are built differently, providing EVs between 100 and 300 miles of range after a 15 to 30 minute charge. These incredibly fast chargers are ideal for any vehicle that wants a quick charge, but are significantly more expensive than their level 1 and level 2 counterparts. 

The EPA cites transportation as the largest greenhouse gas contributor across all economic sectors in the US, accounting for nearly 30 percent of all emissions. Of that 30 percent chunk, a whopping 81 percent of transportation emissions come from light, medium, and heavy duty road vehicles. With over 94 percent of transportation fuel still petroleum based, the demand and need for EVs is only growing. In 2023, the U. S. Energy Information Administration saw EV and hybrid car sales hit a record high, accounting for 18 percent of all light duty vehicle sales in the U.S. 

On top of soaring light duty EV and hybrid sales, the electrification of medium and heavy-duty EV [00:03:00] fleets will continue gaining momentum as government incentives and public infrastructure expand in tandem. To meet these demands, electrification companies have already started rolling out EV charging solutions in places where space and power are limited.

James Lawler: With EV charging access being a major challenge across vehicle types, fleet categories, and in public versus private spaces, this first episode in our series unpacks innovative charging approaches powered by electric grid and battery technologies. 

Our first expert guest is Nathan King, who is co-founder and CEO of It's Electric, a company ramping up curbside EV charging on bustling city streets nationwide by empowering homeowners to charge outside their front door. In the latter half of today's episode, we'll chat with the CEO and director of fleet sales at FreeWire Technologies about how their battery integrated EV fast charging systems represent a major opportunity for commercial and municipal fleets focused on fast charging.

Here is Nathan to start us off. Nathan, welcome. It's great to have you here. [00:04:00]

Nathan King: Fantastic being here. Thanks guys.

James Lawler: I'm joined by my colleague Darren Hau, whom you all know and love. 

Darren Hau: Hey, good to see you again, Nathan. Great to reconnect. 

James Lawler: So let's set the table here, Nathan. What's the journey been so far with the company?

Nathan King: I'm one of these founders that started a company to solve my own problem. I wanted to get a car for the first time in 20 years, but I live in a fairly dense neighborhood in Crown Heights, Brooklyn and of course, nobody has a driveway in our neighborhood. So looking into it, I was interested in getting an electric vehicle, uh, but realized that the closest charger to where I lived is about a mile away.

And so, talking to folks we realized that pretty much everybody who parked their cars on the street had the same kind of story. Wanted to get an EV but didn't see a way to charge. And that's sort of when the, the light bulb went off and we also saw that, you know, it's a problem, but also an opportunity.

The big EV charging companies out there were not really interested in cities, and even less so around this specific problem of drivers who lack access to off street [00:05:00] parking. 

Darren Hau: Just tell us how you're solving that problem. What is the It's Electric solution? 

Nathan King: So what we need to do is get chargers at the curbside, where people are already parking their cars. This is obviously a complicated area, curbs are owned and managed by the cities themselves and there's also the problem about working with utilities and getting interconnection agreements for the chargers. These two things are kind of the current barrier. What we're doing at It's Electric is to try to remove some of that friction.

Our basic business model is to install the chargers and power them with spare capacity at the adjacent privately owned building. So we're pulling out that spare power for the curbside, empowering a charger that anybody in the neighborhood can use. And what that does is it sort of eliminates the need for this interconnection agreement that we need to get from the utility.

And the host properties, what we say to them is, look, we're going to install this charger at no cost to you. We will share revenue from the charger back to you. So it's a sort of a way to lease that space on their panel and what that allows [00:06:00] us to do is actually speed up that sort of permitting process with the city as well.

Sidewalks are sort of a legal gray area. The city owns it, but the adjacent property owner has certain rights and responsibilities around it. So what we do is we secure a permit with the city, but through the property owner, that's agreed to work with us.

Darren Hau: You're basically plugging into the remnant power of a building that's next to the sidewalk. How do you get access to the electrical panel?

Nathan King: So we replicate the process that's happening in the suburbs already. When you get a EV and you have a driveway, you get a electrician to come in and install a level two charger in your driveway or garage. Usually you trench out from your house panel out to the garage to get that nice 240-volt connection. We are basically doing the same thing. We're installing a level two charger at the curb. We do need to dig into the sidewalk to make that connection back to the property. That process is actually pretty straightforward. 

Darren Hau: You mentioned before, there are some companies that are out there building infrastructure where you have to drive to these [00:07:00] charging super hubs in Brooklyn and elsewhere. Why does the need for It's Electric still exist? 

Nathan King: The EV transition, um, is going to require multiple solutions. So it's not to say that we don't need DC fast charging in cities, we do. There will be occasions where drivers will need to charge their battery up in 20 or 40 minutes and not overnight. That is going to maybe work in certain contexts, especially the commercial areas.

What we're really focused on are what we call like narrow residential areas where people are parking and charging overnight where we don't need to have the same kind of robust hardware configuration and, again trading off the complexity of dealing with the utility for working with multiple different property owners.

James Lawler: How challenging is it to go from we should put a charger here to actually there being a level two charger outside of my apartment building? 

Nathan King: The first thing that we're going to do when we get in touch with you is take a look at your property and make sure there's [00:08:00] no fire hydrant or something that's going to block us installing a charger.

And then the second thing is we would evaluate how much spare capacity you do have on your panel. From there, we have our electrician take out a permit on your behalf. We schedule the installation time, pull that conduit out to the curbside, and install and commission the charger. And as soon as it goes active, that's when you'll start to see revenue from the charger and that goes up or down depending on how often that charger is being used. 

James Lawler: Got it. And no upfront cost to doing all this? 

Nathan King: No upfront cost.

James Lawler: Nathan highlighted that building owners partnering with It's Electric can expect to make between 800 and 1,000 dollars a year when their curbside charger is used at roughly 20 percent charging capacity, meaning profits fluctuate depending on how often the charger is being used.

Nathan King: EV charging is still a brand new, still in its crib kind of industry. The thing that's limiting EV adoption is charging availability. So I think we're going to continue to see growth in the suburban [00:09:00] areas, especially as more affordable models start to come online. And that's going to overlap with the deployment of the infrastructure investment and jobs act starting to actually like give money to states to put in intra city charging.

James Lawler: Just a note for our listeners. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, was approved by Congress in 2021. The trillion-dollar piece of legislation was designed to create jobs and award local governments with funding related to renewable energy projects. Funding is included for infrastructure and grid updates focused on reliability and resiliency. The Department of Energy reported a 7 billion investment in battery technologies.

Nathan King: Once people start to see more chargers on the road, more EVs on the road, I think that that adoption is going to continue to increase fairly steadily. I'm less optimistic about cities, I think we're really behind in our urban areas. 

Darren Hau: You described a lot of the challenges specific around installing chargers in municipal areas and so on, [00:10:00] but if there was one thing you could change about this whole sector, what would it be? 

Nathan King: Right now, EV charging is oriented around putting chargers where it's easiest to install them and not necessarily where they're most needed.

We need to be smarter about where we're putting the charging, not just sort of saying, well, here's a parking lot and it's relatively easy for us to put a charger there. That for me is where I would like to take the conversation. 

James Lawler: Well, Nathan, this was really very interesting and looking forward to seeing how It's Electric evolves over the coming months and years.

Nathan King: Thanks so much for this opportunity, we love getting the word out. 

James Lawler: To deepen our understanding of how battery storage has evolved with the rise of EVs, we're joined by Robert Anderson, current director of fleet sales at FreeWire Technologies. After our chat with Rob, we'll hear from founder and CEO of FreeWire, Arcady Sosinov, to round out our understanding of the gaps the company's battery integrated EV fast chargers are filling within an [00:11:00] expanding industry.

Rob, welcome to Climate Now. It's great to have you on. Thank you for having me. So Rob, when did you get involved with FreeWire?

Robert Anderson: I've been at FreeWire since 2016, so basically the early days of EV. Prior to this, I was working for a power supply manufacturer. When, you know, the EV thing started getting more momentum, at the same time my friend, Arcady, founded FreeWire while he was an MBA student at UC Berkeley, and I had this background in power supply, so I really understood the technology. 

Back then the landscape was so different. The Bay area was where pretty much all of the EVs were sold and these companies like Google, Netflix, LinkedIn, Microsoft, they were starting to put these chargers in as an amenity. For example, Google back in 2016, put in 300 charters on their campus. If an employee drove an EV, they could fuel their car for free at work. And what happened was those 300 chargers that Google had weren't enough to fuel all the vehicles on their campus. All of a sudden, the power is maxed [00:12:00] out and they can't add any more chargers, but there's more and more employees driving these EVs to work every single day.

So FreeWire invented the solution, this mobile battery that you could drive around these work campuses, and it would recharge on the existing infrastructure overnight and then during the day, these mobile batteries would be deployed and can charge up to 8 cars per mobile battery. 

So during that time frame around 2018, BP approached us and said, that mobile battery thing you guys make is interesting, we have this issue where we have all these gas stations. And in the UK and the US, we need to install DC fast charging at them and we don't have power at these sites. So, could you modify your mobile battery, make it stationary, and instead of doing level 2 charging off it, can you do DC fast charging off it?

So, we did just that. We made what we call the Boost Charger today. It's a large battery system. It can operate on a low voltage system, so it can - you can trickle charge our battery and then when a car comes up to it, you can do a high power [00:13:00] DC fast charge.

James Lawler: So FreeWire comes along and says, we're going to install a battery system at your site so that when you're not actually charging any vehicles, those batteries can be filling up and then when you plug in, boom, you get a much higher amount of energy that flows right into your batteries and you're not taking it from the grid, you're taking it from this bathtub of energy that you filled up when you're not using it. What happens then when you have all these batteries backed EV chargers?

Robert Anderson: Basically, we deploy these battery systems under the guise of EV charging. But 160 kilowatt hours, if you have your four of them, all of a sudden you're getting close to a megawatt hour of storage and we do have an inverter on there too so we can output power back to the grid. 

James Lawler: There's a world in which you guys have enough of these batteries deployed and you see an RFP come along from some utility. It says, hey, we need a contract for X amount of storage. You'll have a very strong chance of winning that because you've effectively already built that storage.  All you need is grid interconnects at these various sites, potentially, right? [00:14:00] You have this built in potential position to sort of go after this whole other market once you reach a sufficient scale, which is super interesting.

Darren Hau: I'm curious what you have heard from other building owners. Are you seeing a lot of demand out there from retail stores or apartment buildings or parking garages? Where does the other demand come from?

Robert Anderson: Retail customers are very, very similar to the traditional gas station customer. They want to bring customers into their store to buy goods and DC fast charging is one way to do that. There's metrics behind that. Your traditional EV driver, when they're charging at your location, they're spending 1 dollar per minute. Retailers are taking notice of this, and they also want to install charges for this exact reason. 

Darren Hau: So zooming out, what kind of unique challenges do different fleets face when it comes to electrifying their vehicles?

Robert Anderson: So I like to break fleet out into different segments. You have light duty and you have heavy duty. The light duty fleet has been around for a few years now. The early [00:15:00] adopters of it were cities. City vehicles are really easy to electrify, and they traditionally do about 30 miles per day. Now you're starting to see other light duties, like Amazon, the FedExes. Again, that's not the hardest application to electrify because those trucks typically go like 70 to a hundred miles per day, they don't have huge batteries and they're not used overnight. So you can slow charge those vehicles overnight.

Autonomous fleets are more challenging. I like to call them highly utilized, light duty. When I say highly utilized, they're basically used 24/7, seven days a week. And they only have small breaks to charge those vehicles. So you might have like a one-hour timeframe. And to do that, you need high power DC fast charge. 

James Lawler: So that was sort of passenger fleets. Can we talk about some of the heavy-duty requirements and challenges with charging?

Robert Anderson: Absolutely. This one's an interesting one. So there's different types of heavy-duty customers. You have your fleet, like drayage companies, a drayage company is a company that has [00:16:00] a drayage license and they can go into the ports. There's a big push to electrify that application and it's really, really difficult for these drayage companies because majority of them are running 100 percent diesel.

And they run three shifts, one shift and go in and out of the port, getting rid of the goods at the end of that shift, don't fuel it really quickly. And then a new driver will come in and then that will happen again for the 3rd shift. So they essentially run those things 24/7 with not much time to refuel. So if you start introducing EV into the mix, they really, really, really need high power DC fast charging to run those things. 

James Lawler: So, Rob, you've been part of this company since the very early days. 2016 was really not that long ago, and I'm curious to hear you reflect on what that journey's been like. 

Robert Anderson: In the early days, we were just fueling cars and early docker vehicles.

And we knew it was going to get big, but to think that heavy duty fleets were going to transition their vehicles to EV was [00:17:00] nowhere near on our radar back then. And to get there in this amount of time is really exciting, it was unfathomable. 

Darren Hau: Who would have thought that reliability and infrastructure and just like good operations and battery storage would be so cool. So that's, that's really fun to see. 

James Lawler: To address how to move past challenges, hindering fleet electrification, while catching glimpses of what's to come for battery backed energy storage and EV charging as a whole, we end today's episode with the founder and CEO of FreeWire, Arcady Sosinov. 

So, Arcady, what is the longer-term vision for FreeWire? Imagine a world where lots of different fleet owner operator sites have FreeWire batteries and charging systems in place. What else could you do with all of that infrastructure? 

Arcady Sosinov: Ultimately, we're not trying to deploy the largest network of charging infrastructure. We're trying to deploy the largest distributed battery capacity. The grid as it works today, you have [00:18:00] to have a lot of supply in order to meet demand once a week or once a month, so you have to overbuild. And what we're effectively saying is by adding storage capacity in a distributed way, you no longer have to overbuild the grid. You can supply whenever you have high solar, high wind, whenever your existing infrastructure spins up and the sites will store all that and use it when needed and matching that supply and demand ends up lowering rates for all rate payers because you didn't need to overbuild, and you did not need to oversupply.

In many of the geographies were in were already the largest deployed battery capacity. As an example, we have about close to 40 sites live with a customer called Parkland in Western Canada, mostly in British Columbia, some in Alberta as well. When you [00:19:00] aggregate the battery capacity on all of those sites, that battery is embedded within our chargers. That's the largest distributed battery in all of Western Canada, and you use that storage capacity to disaggregate the needs of EVs from the supply capabilities of the grid, flattening the demand curve on the grid and when you flatten the demand curve, your rates are certainly cheaper, but at scale, everyone's rates will be cheaper. 

James Lawler: And this is very interesting because you do see requests for megawatt hours of storage, you know, in the 5 to 10 to-15-megawatt hour range. It's almost like this FreeWire solution and potentially other systems of distributed energy storage are dark horses in this race to clean the grid. To what degree have models that predict the pace we can fully decarbonize the grid factored in solutions for distributed storage that are beginning to crop up like FreeWire’s? [00:20:00] Because this could happen a lot faster having this larger aperture.

Arcady Sosinov: I would say that the goals that we have around deployment of energy storage capacity in the market are never going to be met unless you have interesting business models like ours.

So we talked about Parkland as an example a second ago. In total, we've shipped to customers about 96 megawatt hours. I just did the math. That's a significant amount of storage that we've put on the grid. What FreeWire has effectively done is we've said, well, hey, we'll put that charging on your site. The storage cost is effectively covered by you not having to put down and install new utility infrastructure. 

So we're deploying storage faster than most others in the industry, and it's going to take business models like these that don't sell storage for energy storages that use storage as a way to advance the other interest of that business. To make them money, to save them on [00:21:00] energy costs, to provide resiliency and backup for the site, to support EV charging, that's the only way we're going to hit our goals. I think the business model is you support other industries that are growing and forming. Electric vehicles, electric vehicle charging has to happen.

James Lawler: And with fast growing corners of the EV market in mind, where do you see new opportunities for EV charging developing?

Arcady Sosinov: So Hertz has over 47,000 vehicles in their fleet that are fully electric. Uh, Enterprise and Avis do have electric vehicles, but they'll all grow so that EVs are a majority of their fleet and they need both publicly available charging infrastructure, they need partnerships with public charging infrastructure so that their drivers have easy access to those chargers. Uh, but they also need their own charging structure at their depots because they're facing a scenario where most drivers are not going to return the vehicle charged up and they need to get those vehicles back on the road in 30 minutes or less. 

But [00:22:00] long story they need it all, right? And there is an overlap between rental car companies and municipal fleets. Enterprise, as an example, is actually the largest owner of municipal fleet vehicles. So a lot of those Ford F 150s or now Chevy bolts that you see are Enterprise owned, that is a big part of their business.

Now they lease these vehicles from Enterprise and others as well. Now they're saying, well, Enterprise, can you provide charging infrastructure as well as these vehicles in one leasing package? And so, the rental car companies actually see this as accretive to their business because these are defined routes, you can train the operators of the vehicle to know how to charge every single time, so you don't have the uncertainty of new drivers every time.

So I think that segment of the rental car market is more interesting and more defined and going to electrify faster. And so for us, they look like a channel [00:23:00] partner. For us, at the end of the day, we provide you hardware and software. And then also support services, installation services in some cases. Um, but we're a technology OEM and we want to work through these large organizations to get to the end customer.

Darren Hau: Do you see an interest in FreeWire to have more accretive services yourself? 

Arcady Sosinov: I think on both ends, both pre-sale and post-sale, there's an opportunity for us to provide accretive services. On the pre-sale front, It's providing the planning around how many vehicles you should attribute to each charger, meaning is it one truck to one charger? Is it seven municipal vehicles to one charger? I think it's something we're quite good at because we've been, frankly, forced to help many of our customers with while they don't have their own EV division spun up and their own talent internally hired. So we've done that in many ways already with retail customers, we're starting to do that more fleet customers and we can provide that service [00:24:00] as a pass-through channel partners.

And on the post-sale, what we'd like to provide is services to optimize your utility bill. One of the things that we launched recently, it's a utility tariff recommendation engine. So it actually looks at your utilization of that charging infrastructure and depending on the level of utilization, what utility tariff should you be under? Should you be under a small general time of use tariff? Should you be under a tariff that's more that that's actually higher demand charges, lower energy rates, because we flatten the demand curve? And it recommends to you which tariff you should sign up for today, and then as your utilization increases, typically, it recommends that you move to different rate tariffs to continually optimize your utility bill and lower your operating costs. So those 2 bookends are some of the examples of services we like to provide up front and we like to provide after the fact [00:25:00] and ultimately, we will provide them through these channel partners.

For many years, many of the fleet operators never thought about their utility infrastructure and their utility bill. It hasn't been a big consideration because it wasn't a big part of their operating costs, fuel was a big part of their operating costs. And, and believe me, they're very sophisticated around fuel and hydrocarbons and now to translate that to utilities and electrons, it's a tough hill to climb. 

Darren Hau: Well, as we wrap up, is there anything you want people to keep in mind? 

Arcady Sosinov: I think that more and more the industry should be talking about resiliency and with fleets, that's a, that's a very important topic. On the consumer level with aging grid infrastructure, climate events that cause grid outages, brownouts that seem to happen more frequently, resiliency is going to be very important. One of the main features that we're planning to launch is being able to leverage the battery for resiliency purposes. The logistics companies, the fleet operators, they're critical [00:26:00] infrastructure. We saw it during the pandemic, being able to deliver medicine and goods to people's homes is incredibly critical and so I would put them in the camp of critical and frontline and being able to add resiliency to these sites is an important aspect that the industry has just started to scratch the surface on.

I think we're probably in the forefront of that by including battery storage, you're able to, to really provide resiliency to these sites. And that's what you should expect to see from FreeWire in the next 12 to 24 months is more and more talk about resiliency and how the battery can provide that resiliency.

Darren Hau: Looking forward to seeing how FreeWire grows in the coming months and years. Thanks for joining us, Arcady.

James Lawler: That's it for part one of our three-part series on vehicle charging across fleets. Join Darren and me next time to learn about how experts are building out charging hubs and scaling up infrastructure from start to finish. We'll dive deep into the financing, design, and [00:27:00] strategies propelling full-service EV charging companies across fleets, touching on new technologies, and expanding on some of what we've already introduced here today.

Thanks again for tuning into this week's episode. We look forward to continuing this exploration into the world of fleet charging and vehicle electrification over the next few weeks. For a full transcript and a list of sources from today's episode, please go to our website, which is climate now.com. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, email us at contact@climatenow.com. Thanks for listening, and I hope you'll join us for our next conversation.