Those efforts include finding specific types of vehicles that fit customer needs, and managing the performance of the fleet to reduce costs. One-stop shopĭuke's new subsidiary eTransEnergy seeks to provide commercial and fleets as well as fleets of municipalities and school districts with "one comprehensive source for transitioning their fleets to EVs, from start to finish," according to a statement from Duke. Smaller utilities may find it more cost-effective to contract those services out to specialized companies with which they would otherwise be competing, he said.
Connecting enough chargers to power a fleet involves a long approval process with the local utility, which may need to build a new substation in order to accommodate the charging capacity, Nelder said.īecause the utility will be working with the company on EV infrastructure anyway, it can make sense to add on more services related to EV fleets so the utility can essentially become a "one-stop shop," according to Mazurek.īut some utilities may find that offering all of these services in-house is impractical. Often the first entity the company making the fleet transition has to turn to is the utility. "Major fleet managers in particular do not have all the knowledge and expertise and experience that they really need to electrify their fleets successfully. Without expertise guiding a customer through the process, a fleet going electric can become a "series of very costly errors," the report said, such as buying under-sized chargers that then need to be replaced as the fleet moves to larger EVs. Utility customers also have a strong financial incentive to seek help with EV fleet transitions, according to a recent report from RMI. "But if I'm a C&I customer and a major battery company offers me a solution instead… that eats at the utility's revenue," Bolino said. An EV fleet management program, for example, can incorporate related services as add-ons, like helping customers use battery storage to work in concert with EV charging to save on energy costs. On the stick side, with the use of EVs predicted to grow quickly over the next decade and beyond, if utilities do not take advantage of services unlocked by EVs, then others will, according to Greg Bolino, founder of DG Reimagined, a Michigan-based consulting company helping utilities and other companies make the clean energy transition. "Nobody has more perspective on a customer's energy use than the utility does," Mazurek said. On the carrot side, the utility has access to information about when and how much a company uses electricity - information that is key to devising a strategy for EVs. "There is going to be a significant amount of this effort going on as we proceed to widescale electrification," he said.īoth carrots and sticks are leading utilities to consider expanding into these markets where they have not ventured before. utilities, offering EV services like this is "all new," Chris Nelder, a manager with Rocky Mountain Institute's mobility practice, said. In early February, as the news of GM and the Biden administration's individual plans for vehicle electrification was still fresh, Duke Energy announced that it was forming a new subsidiary, eTransEnergy, that will provide fleet services to customers in unregulated markets who want to switch their commercial fleets to electric.įor U.S. "Who can really give me advice on the vehicle itself? Will there be a better version next year? What is the financing model?
"Currently there’s a gap in understanding - what is really happening in the EV market itself ? ” according to Mazurek. Several of the largest utility companies recently announced they are working together on a network of charging stations across the South, Midwest and Plains regions. So far, "utilities have been taking different pathways to growing EV demand,” he said, such as exploring private ownership of charging stations and conducting EV rate pilots. But given their close relationships with corporate customers who may be now considering taking their fleets electric, utilities are in a unique position to offer these services, according to Jim Mazurek, a managing director at Accenture who works on strategy for utilities. These opportunities, focused on services like vehicle procurement and helping customers use EVs as a distributed energy resource in concert with solar and battery storage, go outside the typical utility skill set.
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