In part two of “The EV Fleet Road Map” podcast episode on all things charging infrastructure, A.J. Palmisano, Director, EV Charging and Infrastructure, International® Truck and IC Bus®, brings in guest speaker Nick Grindrod, Director of Infrastructure at Quanta Services, to discuss power delivery, building out charging infrastructure, and working with utilities. You won’t want to miss this discussion on rate structures, utilizing off-peak and scheduled charging practices, and how to procure incentives for vehicle-to-grid charging.
In part two of “The EV Fleet Road Map” podcast episode on all things charging infrastructure, A.J. Palmisano, Director, EV Charging and Infrastructure, International® Truck and IC Bus®, brings in guest speaker Nick Grindrod, Director of Infrastructure at Quanta Services, to discuss power delivery, building out charging infrastructure, and working with utilities. You won’t want to miss this discussion on rate structures, utilizing off-peak and scheduled charging practices, and how to procure incentives for vehicle-to-grid charging.
Fleet Equipment Host Jason Morgan:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the EV Fleet Roadmap, a Navistar podcast on your fleet's path towards zero emissions. I'm your host, Jason Morgan. Joining me today is A.J. Palmisano, director of EV charging and infrastructure at Navistar, and Nick Grindrod, director of infrastructure at Quanta Services.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today.
Nick Grindrod, Director of Infrastructure, Quanta Services:
Thanks for having us.
A.J. Palmisano, Navistar’s Director of EV Charging and Infrastructure:
Great to be here.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah, we had a great time last time-
A.J. Palmisano:
So much fun.
Jason Morgan:
... and you brought a friend.
A.J. Palmisano:
I did.
Jason Morgan:
All right. Well, the more, the merrier. Nick, I know you're with Quanta. Can you just give me a little background on who Quanta is, what you do and what your role in the EV world is?
Nick Grindrod:
Sure. Quanta Services does all things in power delivery, so transmission lines, distribution lines, substations, construction of all that, as well as solar installations, wind installations and, more recently, we're getting into the EV space and installing those, so partnered with people like Navistar and other customers to build that infrastructure out.
Jason Morgan:
Okay. I see, so you're in the literal trenches then with this infrastructure going in, supporting the grid, making sure there's capacity and getting powered where it needs to go. Is that correct?
Nick Grindrod:
Exactly.
Jason Morgan:
Okay. Very good. Well, guys, help me with some of this EV stuff because I'm a truck guy, right? I'm in the diesel world. Horsepower, miles per gallon and all that is going out the window in EVs because now we're talking kilowatts and kilowatt-hours and energy usage and range. What math do I need to know here and what math do fleet managers need to know here to make this apples-to-apples comparison?
A.J. Palmisano:
I didn't know there was going to be a math test.
Jason Morgan:
Well, yes. Well, I'm an editor and I can't do it, so I'm hoping you guys are way better at math than me, but walk us through here. Let's start with kilowatt-hour and kilowatts. What's important to know when we're talking about this energy?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, so kilowatts would be volts times amps. If you have a 240-volt outlet and you have 80 amps through it, then that's a 19,200 watts or 19.2 kilowatts. That's how you get to the 19-kilowatt AC charging. That's where we get into the watts. If you're familiar with the biggest light bulb in your house, it might be a 100-watt light bulb, 10 of those would be a thousand watts, one kilowatt.
Jason Morgan:
Okay. Okay. Okay, so when we talk about kilowatts or we talk about megawatts, because these are big trucks with big batteries, so let's say I'm operating 80 trucks, what do I need? Am I into the megawatt world then?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, I mean, 80 trucks, of course, right? A normal truck like a medium duty, ours is about a 210 kilowatt-hour battery system. If you had 200 kilowatts for an hour, that'd be 200 kilowatt-hours. If you have five of those, now you're into a megawatt. You asked about megawatts. If you have 80 trucks, you're definitely into the megawatts. If you're trying to charge all these at one time, it can be a lot, and then, like I said, if you have a kilowatt for an hour, it's a kilowatt-hour, so a megawatt for an hour, of course, would be a megawatt-hour. It all works the same way.
Jason Morgan:
All right. Going back during the application, this is what I'm talking about when I'm looking for that charging capacity. If all my trucks are all plugged in all at once, let's say it's the end of the day, I'm going to charge them all overnight, this is how much energy I need at the site to do it. Is that correct?
A.J. Palmisano:
Right. Right. A good way, a basic way to look at it is if you had a 50-kilowatt charger and a 200 kilowatt-hour system. 200 kilowatt-hours divided by 50 kilowatts, and then you get into about six hours of charging. It's a little more complicated than that, but... or no, I'm sorry, that would be four. That'd be four hours. If you had 200 kilowatt-hour system divided by 50 kilowatt charging, that would be just a little over four hours of charging time.
Jason Morgan:
Okay. Okay. Great.
Nick Grindrod:
Yeah. Kilowatts is comparable to horsepower. They're both power. When you add in the time component, it's how long can you use that power for?
Jason Morgan:
Okay. I see, so then when you're talking about getting power to where it needs to be, so I'm a fleet, I have a location, I want to get into electric trucks like you all have, the EMV, international EMV that I'm going to be able to put the work here in medium duty applications, how do you work with customers to make sure that I'm getting the power I need and the ability to scale because I might start with one, two, three electric trucks, but I want to go to 50, I want to go to 80 in the next year, two years, three years? How do you work on planning that out and then being able to scale?
Nick Grindrod:
When you're looking to scale up to 50 trucks, you really want to be looking 10 years ahead. We don't want to go and install charging infrastructure for two trucks then go ahead one more year, do that again and keep doing this sequentially. We want to look ahead to the ultimate build out and build it for that because, if you just build with the first stage, you're going to under-size conduit, wire, all the infrastructure you need, it could be switch gear and transformers. You're going to end up almost going back and ripping that out, starting over. It's not cost-effective and it's going to take longer, so you really want to look ahead, potentially build out some of the infrastructure. You just have to go add another charger, but the backbone of your electrical system can take all of that load and you don't have to go back and rip everything out.
Jason Morgan:
When you're putting new infrastructure in the ground to get the power to your site, so let's look at 10-year, how you work with customers because that's quite an outlook if you think about the diesel world. I guess, it's like a five or six turnaround time period now for new trucks. We used to look at three or four supply chain. The pandemic being what it is, it pushed fleets into that five or six turnaround period. Now, when you're sitting down with customers and saying, "Okay, well, let's look at 10 years," you want to do electric trucks. You want to get them into your fleet. Yeah, you're going to start with one or two, but you got to plan for 10. How do you have that conversation? How do you get fleets to start thinking about that mindset?
A.J. Palmisano:
Sure. Yeah, it is important, as Nick said, to start thinking out several years out. I mean, think about it this way. If you were going to tear up your kitchen and you were going to put in one outlet and then go back the next year, put in another outlet and so on, you want to put all the outlets in at one time. Same thing, you want to run the conduit all at one time while the doors and everything's taken apart. You put all the outlets in. You don't have to buy every lamp right now or every fixture for your kitchen, but you do want to have the outlets available.
You want to do the same thing for the charging infrastructure, so we'll encourage people and say, "Think about what your fleet is going to look like two, three, four, five years out." It can be really tough to think beyond five years out, but some people can, so think about at least running the conduit in the ground, that type of thing, the infrastructure portion of it about five years out. You don't have to buy it all right now, but at least get what we call the stub-ups there. Get it ready to plug in down the road.
Jason Morgan:
Right. I like that analogy. That makes sense to me, too, because I've also been through that and, yeah, then you go months without a kitchen and it's terrible. No, you don't want that, right? I want to come back to that and specifically, too, in the charging equipment thing, but, Nick, from the utility side and then the project side, what do you see in terms of, "Okay. I'm a fleet. I have this kind of expectation for power?" Do you have any tips for working with the utility or working with you guys to make sure the utility can get the power that I need because I know, that relationship, it's new in the industry, right? Do you have any advice for fleets that are working in that regard?
Nick Grindrod:
Yeah, that's definitely a critical first step for these projects is reaching out to the utility and starting that process of determining do they have capacity now, can they bring in more capacity, what's the timeline on that going to be, what's the cost of that going to be because, oftentimes, getting that infrastructure in place can take years, could take a year to two years. It's a very long timeline and, if you don't factor that in and get that started late, it's just going to delay your project.
Jason Morgan:
Right? Yeah. I mean, we've heard up to three years in some cases, depending on where we're at, too. If I'm a fleet working through you all in the e-consulting world, I mean, do I reach out to the utility? Do I go through you? You know what I mean? What's everyone's role in this and how do I stack the deck so that I can get some pull-through on these projects?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, it is a little different and it's not what people are used to. I mean, you can go and you can put gas or diesel in your vehicle. People have been doing that forever. This is a little bit different, so what we encourage people to do is come to us.
Let us walk you through it. We'll talk to you. We'll say what are your routes like? Which vehicles do we have that'll meet your routes? Then you can count up the number of vehicles in your fleet that can be electrified now or in the future and you start doing all the addition and so forth, and then once we get to the point where we say, okay, we've got a pretty good feel for how many chargers you need because we've talked about how long you have to charge, how many vehicles you have to charge, then we pull in someone like Nick on the Quanta side and we'll say, okay, looking at this holistically, they work with the power utilities every day, we would just encourage people not to try to do it on your own. Let us help you because it's what we do every day.
Jason Morgan:
Right. Well, Nick, to go back to the Quanta side, too, you have relationships across the country, right? You're working with many different utilities, and so, as a fleet, where I don't really have a relationship with my local utility, working with you all, you have that relationship and you can help pull from that side while I'm talking with them and talking with the Navistar group, right?
Nick Grindrod:
Exactly. Our company has over 330 companies underneath it. We work in all the regionalities and all the states. We've worked with all the utilities, and that's where a customer that may have multiple sites across multiple states, rather than them having to go through learning a utility at each of those, it's better to work with someone that does that and can know how to work with the utility right away.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah. I need an inside man, I think, to get these things rolling. Still, this can take a long time. It can take a long time to get infrastructure in the ground. Is there anything I can do in the meantime, anything that either I can educate myself on the EV side? We're hearing more about temporary power solutions. What are my options?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, so talking about the timing a little bit, normally, what we see is people say they wait and they wait and they wait and they finally want to pull the trigger and they're going to say, okay, now we decide we're going to buy five trucks and we need five chargers, and then you find out you can get the vehicles faster than you can get the charging infrastructure running, which is not unusual. A lot of times, people need something to bridge that gap, and there are options for that.
Depending on how much power needs to be brought in or whether the power is even available, we have a couple of options. One is to have chargers hooked up to generators, propane or otherwise. The other possibility is to have temporary drops. We call them pin and sleeves. Imagine a shop or the outside of a building. They're basically giant outlets that we call pin and sleeve. You just screw them in like a coupler, and you can power lots of mobile, look like R2D2, lots of chargers that you can scoot around and roll them around and plug those in, put them where you need. That's another good way to figure out where you're going to need chargers in the future. We do see people do that, to put drops in a couple different places, try the charging in a couple different places while they're waiting for the more elaborate infrastructure to be brought in.
We've done either one of those. For trade shows, we'll bring in the propane generator with the charger attached to it. That's a good way to do that. Yeah, and I know that, Quanta and Nick, their group has some things as well.
Jason Morgan:
Nick, what do you have over there?
Nick Grindrod:
Yeah, we've got some mobile battery units that can have chargers attached to those so that can be pulled in and out of sites and used temporarily. Those are a couple of different options. The other one would be looking at your current building and seeing if it has a little bit of extra power. When we're talking about a fleet installation of 50 trucks, you're going to need to get a new service. That's going to be a big project, but you may have the capacity within your building to add maybe one or two level-two chargers so you can at least do some overnight charging, get your fleet users comfortable with EVs and, in the near term, start the longer process of the big project. There is always the potential to have some capacity on your building, too.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah, and I imagine that, for customers that are moving this way, well, one, I mean, we're being regulated to some degree, but that's a different conversation for a different day, but then the other one is that sustainability portion, moving towards zero emissions and still having that conversation of, okay, well, if I'm going to have a temporary power solution, I want it to be zero or near zero or clearly less than what's coming out of the tailpipe in my diesel truck. I imagine keeping that top of mind is important as well.
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, and so that's one of the reasons we go into propane as opposed to diesel, for example. That's one of the things. We also worry about the noise, so we try to make it a little bit quieter as well. A lot of times, too, those will charge overnight so the generator is running at night. Our first generation didn't have baffles around it, for example. The second generation does. It's noise pollution, too, right?
Jason Morgan:
Right. Right. Right. Well, and when you get into the EV operation, the electric truck operation, you notice that a lot, right? You don't have the rumbling diesels around there. It's nice. It's a little calmer. You feel a little less stressed. Yeah, you don't want to add too much of that, but you still want to get the job done. You still want to get rolling with electric vehicles. I like the temporary power solution because getting that infrastructure in the ground can take time, but it's adding a layer of complexity now for me as a fleet manager. I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, okay, now we got temporary... How do you help fleet customers work through, I mean, the TCO on this? How do I break up or bundle these costs or figure out this roadmap for where I'm going and still get my ROI out of it?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, so two other things I'll touch on that you talked about was the noise. Our school buses, actually, when you're sitting in the back, you can hear the turn signals. Yeah, it's that quiet, and it does keep the kids a little more calm, and then you talk about the adjustment part of it. One of the primary reasons we have these temporary solutions is so that people can test drive. If I'm a fleet and I'm thinking about doing EVs, but I don't know exactly how it's going to work for my situation, we bring in these temporary solutions. Here, put this on your parking lot. You don't have to worry about running all the infrastructure right now. You can drive around your routes, your way for a week, a month, whatever it is, and then it helps take their reservations, their concerns about it and it helps alleviate those.
Now, when you talk about the cost part of it or bringing it back to the total cost of ownership, we talk through a lot of those options, now, feeding into that, a lot of people are like, "I have to charge as quickly as possible. I have to charge as quickly as possible," and you don't always have to charge as quickly as possible. There's something called demand charges. If you are pulling electricity and you pull too much for a period of time, you'll get into these demand charges. One of the things we really work with our customers to do is to make sure they don't get above these thresholds.
You realize you don't have to be quite as fast as you think. The studies we've done is, if you're pulling so much power at one time you're hitting these demand charges, your total cost of ownership really isn't any better than a diesel or gas because it's more expensive than just regular electricity to feed those vehicles. We work with people to right size the chargers, have the right number. It's less expensive to install them overall if they're smaller.
The other thing you can do is load management. You can schedule the chargers so that they charge at night typically when it's less expensive rather than during rush hour when it's more expensive. That's another way we try to reduce the total cost of ownership, and then, of course, just on EVs, there's fewer moving parts, and so there there's fewer parts going wrong, that kind of thing, but then also working with the utilities, as Nick and so forth mentioned, understanding from them what are the best times for us to do this, to charge these vehicles.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah, Nick, on that end then, working with the utilities and working through you all, do you have a sense for how fleets can work through that? I've heard about demand charging. It's like this thing that shows up or might surprise people, right? It's like a charging boogeyman, a little bit of demand charges, and what does it mean and how do I avoid it and that kind of stuff. From your point of view, working with the utilities, what's their perspective and how as a fleet do I navigate that and avoid those?
Nick Grindrod:
Yeah. During that initial outreach with the utility, they're going to be able to outline the different rate structures that you have as options so you can see what best fits your case. We talked about how we don't want to undersize our project. We want to be looking into the future, but, as AJ mentioned, we don't want to oversize it either so there is the opportunity for charge management where we're looking at opportunistically waiting to charge when the rates are lower, looking at which vehicles should be prioritized. There's a lot more we can do with a big fleet installation where you may have 50 vehicles where you don't necessarily need the biggest charger for each of the trucks. Some of them will be able to charge overnight so you don't necessarily need to put a fast charger in there.
Jason Morgan:
Right. Well, and that's not speaking to the software-driven capabilities of charging, too, right? It's very software-driven, very software-integrated, again, maybe a conversation for another time. Okay, so you have the school bus with V2G. I just like it. That's a new acronym for me. I already love it. In the commercial vehicle world then, if we're thinking medium duty trucks, heavy duty trucks, what would I want to look for in my application that would make maybe vehicle-to-grid an option for me?
A.J. Palmisano:
Sure. There's a couple of things where it makes more sense even on the school bus side. On the truck side even more so. It would be that you want to be in an area or it'll make the more sense in an area where electricity is much more expensive at certain times of the day than other times of the day. We see peak periods were 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM. Think of it as rush hour, everybody's getting home from work and that kind of thing. That's when an energy usage is up the highest, and that is when the utilities want the most help, if you want to call it that, for energy resiliency and so forth. That tends to be where, if you can be billed more during the middle of the day or that time of the day than at night, those are the areas where the total cost of ownership will make more sense particularly out west or the southwest or out east. Those are areas where it would make the most sense for V2G for commercial applications.
Jason Morgan:
I see, and it probably goes back then to the relationship on the Quanta side, understanding those needs on the utility side and then being able to just be a good partner to open up that opportunity for me as a fleet, right?
Nick Grindrod:
Yeah, if you need to understand the different rate structures that each utility has and where that makes sense to try and do the V2G.
Jason Morgan:
There is one thing that I hear a lot about that I want to get your take on, maybe a little early, but bidirectional charging, which I love the idea of, okay, I'll charge, but then I want to be able to send energy back to the grid and the utility and get some money back for it to even out my costs. What's the reality of that? Where are we at with bidirectional charging and the benefits?
A.J. Palmisano:
Yeah, so it is very real and it's happening today. For example, if school districts commit to bidirectional charging or what we might call V2G, vehicle-to-grid, yeah, what'll happen is they'll get some money for their buses. In some cases they can get their buses fully paid for. The reason it makes sense for school buses is because they sit pretty much all summer long, so people are pulling their air conditioning all day long or all throughout the summertime. The buses in general aren't being used in the summertime. The buses are these huge battery packs. We could do 200 kilowatt-hours, up to 300 kilowatt-hours, so you can charge at night when it's less expensive.
That's pulling energy out of the grid, obviously, when it's cheaper and then the bidirectional part is sending the energy back to the grid usually during the times when it's more advantageous to do that because, if you can buy the energy at one price and then sell it back at, literally, double the price, then you can just sit there and do that every day and then you can actually make money with the school bus through the bidirectional charging of the vehicle to grid.
It can also be used for emergency purposes. We had one school district in places where you wouldn't necessarily expect them down in Mississippi. They said, what we want to do is our demand charges come on Friday nights. What happens on Friday nights? Football. Football is like religion in certain places, right? Everybody's coming in. We use more power at that particular time on Friday night than any other time during the school day. What we want to do is shut off everything except for our little grid, which is going to be the stadium, and we want to have all these buses lined up and feed energy back into the stadium and then just go charge them when the games are over and all that kind of thing.
You see, we're hearing people think very creatively not only just because of cost of ownership, but also it's just a cool thing if you think about feeding the energy back into the grid.
Jason Morgan:
Yeah, for sure. Got to power those Friday night lights, right? Well, very application-driven, too, you got to have the application that supports it. Nick, is this something from the utility perspective that they have an appetite for? Are they looking to do this? How or where on their side of the bidirectional charging?
Nick Grindrod:
I'd say it's in the early stages, but it varies by utility. Yeah, they're starting to do this. You've got the economic opportunity of arbitrage of the energy prices, but on the customer side, it's also resiliency factor where you've got backup for your building should the power go out.
Jason Morgan:
Right, right, or even some of those emergency situations or anything we've seen especially there in the south and southeast. Okay. Great. Well, we are a couple of months into 2024. We have some big events coming up here for the industry. What can we expect going into the year in the zero-emission space?
A.J. Palmisano:
Everything's evolving. It's evolving very quickly. It's interesting. You hear about things changing every two, three, four months. We have ACT Expo, which is probably the largest expo of its kind that we participate in. I would just say tune in, go to the website, look for us at ACT Expo. The new stuff will be there.
Jason Morgan:
Yep. Yep. Very good. How else can they get a hold of you and get involved? Where should they go? How should they contact you?
A.J. Palmisano:
As I said, we would definitely encourage people to talk to us first. Let us help you walk through it because it's something we do every day and we love to do it. You can go to our website, and so take a look at the website. There's information there about charging, consulting and everything else on the zero emission or the electric vehicle journey. We'd be happy to talk to anybody out there.
Jason Morgan:
Awesome. Well, I appreciate you talking to me because I learned a lot, had a lot of fun. Thank you both for being here.
A.J. Palmisano:
Thank you.
Nick Grindrod:
Thank you.
A.J. Palmisano:
Thanks for having us.
Jason Morgan:
Thank you all for watching. This was the EV Fleet Roadmap, a Navistar podcast about your fleet's path towards zero emissions, and we'll see you next time.