By Colin Murchie and Maria Neve, Inspiration Mobility
Understanding EV charging infrastructure is critical to the success of EV adoption, especially in fleet applications. As a leasing professional, it is important to understand how to address charging strategies to best meet customer needs.
While there’s rapid growth and improvements in public EV charging infrastructure, public charging is not always a reliable solution for fleet drivers. Publicly accessible chargers can be offline or broken, and do not have enough capacity to support widespread fleet use.
On-premises EV charging is ideal for fleets with predictable schedules or parked at a central location overnight. This provides a convenient, safe, and reliable location for fleet drivers with EVs to charge before their shifts.
Here are a few important considerations for building depot charging:
- Timing: Workplace or depot EV charging installations can take 12-18 months to build. Ideally, the depot should be online when fleet EVs are expected to enter service. If EVs need to be driven before deployment of on-site charging, temporary or mobile charging can be used to avoid downtime. These temporary solutions can be deployed quickly and are portable and adaptable to various use cases.
- Charging Speed: Understanding a fleet’s use case and driving patterns is important to install the right mix of chargers. How quickly and often will vehicles need to be charged? Level 2 chargers are slower – ideal for overnight charging – while Level 3 fast chargers can recharge a battery in under an hour.
- Growth Strategy: Charging infrastructure should be built with growth in mind. Understanding a fleet’s electrification expansion plan is key to ensuring the depot is rightsized for future utilization. While depots can always add chargers in the future, permitting and utility agreements can take much longer to secure.
Next month, we’ll cover multi-fleet charging and how that can change the ROI of fleet electrification.
As published in the NVLA February 23, 2024 issue of Leasewire