5 Ways Your Routing Data Can Help in Electrifying Your Fleet
If you’re planning on taking the next steps to incorporate electric vehicles (EVs) into your fleet, you could be closer than you think. From planning routes to calculating CO2 savings, your data plays a crucial role in enabling you to visualize the most efficient way to plan EV charging infrastructure, whether you’re starting from scratch or scaling an existing electric fleet.
At Terawatt, we’ve been using our analytics toolkit to help customers understand and plan for a smooth EV transition using their real-life operational data. To achieve this, we ask our clients to provide either point-to-point data (start and end locations of routes) or telematics data (frequent location pings from the vehicle). This data is then processed using our in-house tools that assess routes, create map visualizations, and quantify charging demand in order to generate valuable findings.
Based on these insights, we can begin planning right away or make recommendations for pilot EV projects, where we’ll assist you in charging a small number of vehicles over a brief period, with the aim of scaling up later.
The results of our approach speak for themselves:
- We demonstrated to a major retailer how to electrify 98% of their southern California routes using a combination of Behind the Fence charging at their own facility and one of Terawatt’s Multi-Tenant sites.
- We helped another shipper to identify areas for huge cost savings by shifting charging to off-peak times without disrupting its current operating schedule.
- We showed a carrier how they could save 2,800 metric tons of CO2 by electrifying routes in and out of one of their biggest facilities.
For operations teams seeking rapid decarbonization, your real-world data contains all the information necessary to kick-start the journey to electrify your fleet.
Here are five key ways your data can provide indispensable insights
Calculate how much power your EV fleet will need upfront
Heavy-duty fleets, or large light-duty fleets, require significant power for EV charging, even for smaller-scale pilot projects. For example, charging 10 Class 8 trucks requires a site with at least 2 MW of power. We use data to calculate the estimated charging demand to determine the power a utility needs to provide to a site and the number of chargers and charging sessions required to support current operations. These calculations also illustrate how the demand can grow over time with improved vehicle ranges — going from 200-mile round trips to 500-mile round trips, for instance.
For one major retailer, Terawatt was able to determine that a combined network approach of one charging site behind their fence paired with access to one of Terawatt’s Multi-Tenant en-route charging locations would provide sufficient power to electrify almost 100% of their Southern California drayage routes.
Determine where to leverage existing EV charging sites
Currently, en-route public EV charging is still in its nascency. That’s why we incorporate Terawatt’s charging sites and fleet facilities into our map visualizations so that you can see how close vehicles travel by our sites. This enables you to do two things:
- Utilize Terawatt’s charging locations en route for quick opportunity charging, with limited impact on operations.
- Understand how an integrated network of charging stations could work — for example, using a combination of Terawatt-owned locations and installations behind your fence.
Calculate how much CO2 you could save
With the nationwide effort to reach net zero underway, coupled with increasingly aggressive corporate sustainability goals, cutting carbon in significant and measurable ways has never been more important. Using your telematics or point-point data, we can predict the CO2 emission savings you’ll achieve by electrifying certain routes or vehicles. For heavy-duty vehicles that travel long distances, the savings are often huge.
Pinpoint how your EV operating schedules could work
Data can be used to create sample operating schedules that help make electrification more tangible, especially when considering en-route charging, which is still considered new and just starting to gain traction. Quick, easy wins result from good planning — for example, vehicles with back-to-base routes that have long-dwell times can be served with cheaper, lower-power L2 charging on your own property in the early stages. Another benefit is the ability to plan where to avoid charging during peak utility times.
Identify the best routes to get started on
For some fleets, the best way to get underway is to begin with a trial route or pilot journey. Through data, we look at things like route length, trip frequency, and the number of vehicles running the route, which enables us to identify the optimal routes to switch to electric. From there, we can gather crucial insights about how overall operations would be impacted. Typically, pilot journeys would utilize a Terawatt charging site that is already live or under development so that operations can get started as soon as the vehicles are delivered.
So, as you can see, data is where commercial fleets start the journey to successful electrification.
By grounding your plans on solid data, you'll be able to:
✔️Quantify carbon savings
✔️Get going quicker than expected
✔️Plan time and cost-effective routes
✔️Develop a scalable plan of action
To start making your data work for you, contact Terawatt.