Charging electrified commercial vehicle fleets with reduced grid capacity using low-capital-cost depot management strategies

Electrification of commercial vehicle fleets has become a mandate in states and countries around the world. Charging these fleets will require capacity upgrades by electricity grid operators. However, leading-edge jurisdictions have discovered that these upgrades can cause years of delay. To more efficiently use limited grid capacity, fleet operators have multiple strategies at their disposal. Two low-capital-cost but currently under-explored strategies are i) hiring valets to move vehicles onto and off of charging plugs and ii) sharing grid capacity between fleets. To quantify the potential benefits of these strategies, we ran charging depot optimization scenarios with and without them. Hiring one valet reduces grid capacity required (kW/vehicle) by 64 % on average for 30-vehicle charging depots [5th & 95th percentiles, 55 % & 73 %], while simultaneously reducing levelized cost of charging ($/kWh) by 13 % [8 %, 24 %]. However, we found that valets are only economical for larger fleets, so sharing grid capacity – charging plugs and power electronics – with another fleet can help smaller fleets gain access to a valet’s benefits. Hiring valets could reduce the upgrades that grid operators would need to accommodate commercial electric vehicle fleets. This, in turn, could reduce grid interconnection delays, speeding the adoption of commercial electric vehicles.