Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar, Smart Charging Your Electric Municipal Fleet, featuring industry leaders from The Mobility House, Epic Charging, and Ameresco. Today, we'll explore key strategies for planning and managing EV infrastructure for municipal operations. That includes. Am I still on mute?
We can hear you.
Okay, good. So that includes. Lost my place. So that includes mixed fleets, multiple site deployments. Our expert speakers are Trevor Smith from Ameresco, Adrian Gomez from Epic Charging, and Bernardo Raymundo from The Mobility House. We'll provide valuable insights into everything from project financing and integrating renewable energy, to optimizing charge management, and opening fleet charging to employees. So we're excited to share real-world examples and best practices to help you navigate the future of your muni fleets and the electrification of them. So we're gonna begin with, Trevor Smith from Ameresco.
Thanks, Sam, for that warm introduction. Let me share my screen quickly. All right. You see my screen?
Yes.
Okay, perfect. Yeah, EV infrastructure planning: navigating the path to efficient, reliable EV charging. I'm Trevor Smith from Ameresco, Director of EV Infrastructure. For those maybe not familiar with Ameresco, we're a leading and comprehensive clean tech integrator and renewable energy asset developer, owner, and operator. We were founded in 2000, went public in 2010. We have a pretty comprehensive portfolio and wide depth of in-house technical expertise. We operate across multiple verticals and do a lot of work kind of within the public sector, K through twelve space, and municipal sector as well. Done about $14 billion in energy solutions since our company's inception. We have offices all across the country, in Canada, and parts of Europe as well, providing local expertise.
I think just overall, we kind of embrace innovation just as a company ethos through tailored solutions that are specific for each client. Next, just we're a true kind of full-service energy partner with the unique ability to finance any opportunity. We finance, you know, kind of roughly, and have over $14 billion of energy solutions, you know, across different models, and markets, and technologies. Really innovative when it comes to the different funding mechanisms, contracting options. Again, different wide bench of technical expertise, and long-term partnerships throughout these engagements. Now getting into kind of more of the why everyone's here, and fleet electrification for municipal fleets. Always like to start...
I'm not sure if this bar is hiding some of it, but not sure using this slide to scare anyone, but I think it's always important to talk about, you know, kind of the barriers initially, and kind of be transparent and open upfront, right? What's challenging about getting EV infrastructure installed for your fleets? And so it's a complex journey. It requires navigating a wide range of disciplines and vendors. I've really boiled it down to, you know, four specific buckets. You know, one is the time, right? So from the planning to the implementation, conducting feasibility studies, you know, even in some markets, right, it could be three to five years to get a new utility service brought in.
You know, it's a complete paradigm shift within the industry, right, for fleet operators and going from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles, right? I always like to use a $1 per kWh does not equal a $1 per gallon of gas, right? The time you're charging, the rate you're charging, the season you're charging in, you know, kind of has a huge impact in terms of the cost. And then risks, right?
It's a relatively new market, although you know, been in this space for now 10 years, which you know ages me a little bit, and it's exciting to see how much it's grown, but still have a long way to go to achieve you know kind of the goals I'm sure everyone on the call has as well as you know kind of the country as a whole, but there's a risk associated with you know kind of new technology always, and you have you know kind of a high upfront cost, and so it is very kind of capital-intensive, and that can present a financial barrier to adoption.
So, you know, kind of the blueprint for EV infrastructure, I kind of boil it down to, you know, five key buckets, that we'll dive into a little bit deeper. One is your fleet assessment, and your charger selection, site and infrastructure assessment, charging optimization, and then your reliability assessment. So for, you know, step one, your fleet assessment, it's always, you know, important to look granular at, you know, your current fleet and then the fleet that you're gonna be and potential models of electric vehicles that you'll be replacing those ICE vehicles with. So getting into the details regarding what do those new kind of EV specifications have, including kind of the battery capacity, the charging compatibility, you know, what are their energy consumption rates?
You know, stepping away from there, you then, you know, kind of want to look at specifically what is the duty cycle of those vehicles. So how many miles a day are they driving? What's the operational, you know, pattern? And understanding kind of what the demands and utilization are gonna be, you know, for your, you know, for your fleet and for any specific site where you're putting in infrastructure. And the tables below kind of show, you know, two kind of distinct buckets of information that, you know, we always like to look at, you know, when performing fleet assessments. One is, you know, kind of very high level, you know, what vehicle do you currently have? What are you gonna be replacing it with? What is the anticipated, replacement, timeline?
And even if you don't know the vehicle you're gonna be replacing with, we can always, you know, overlay and put in a replacement vehicle that has similar, you know, capacity. You know, that matches with the, in terms of, you know, cargo storage, et cetera, that has the, that matches with the duty cycle and the vehicle that you're replacing it with. And then getting into the weeds of more of the granular, you know, kind of daily mileage, annual mileage. I know not every fleet has telematics, but it's always helpful to get as granular into this detail as possible, and providing, you know, estimated and exact, you know, departure times from the depot. How many miles they drove on that, you know, first trip.
If they're making multiple trips in a day, you know, every time they come back, how long are they at the depot? You know, how much time do they have to then be able to make that trip? That's all the data we're, you know, looking to analyze and parse together to then be able to really build a robust infrastructure solution that's specific for your fleets, right? Because this isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. And then your charger selection, right? The second pillar. You know, determining the appropriate charger types. So when we're talking about fleets, generally talking about kind of two different levels, right? Level 2 and DC fast charging. And just, you know, kind of real quick, charging 101, level 2 charging is, you know, AC charging, right?
I think it's important to kind of fundamentally understand this principle. You know, when you're charging at a Level 2, you're taking AC from the grid, it's getting put into your vehicle, and it's actually going through the AC to DC rectification process via the onboard charger that's within every vehicle. Now, every vehicle has a different rating of their onboard charger. You know, some are only rated at 6 kW, and some up to 19.2 kW, right? So that's an important detail and technical spec that you want to kind of understand when right-sizing your infrastructure and selecting the charger.
You know, because Level 2 ranges you know anywhere from you know seven all the way up to 19.2 kilowatts, and you could be spending a lot of money and extra you know kind of capital on chargers that necessarily you know aren't the best fit for your duty cycle, right? You're not gonna put a 19.2 kilowatt charger in when your onboard charger is only rated up to you know 11.5. And then DC charging is you know similar. It's just the rectification you know occurs you know outside of the car.
So you're just pumping DC energy electricity straight into the battery, but still, you know, kind of similar principle in the sense of, you know, each car has its, you know, max input rating, and makes sense to kind of right-size the DC charger selection, that the vehicles you're gonna be procuring, match well with. And, you know, you wanna ensure that chargers are open, OCPP, Open Charge Point Protocol. It's really kind of an industry term to ensure that, you know, kind of your, you remain agnostic with the chargers, that if you change, you know, kind of certain vendors within the space, you can always. You're not gonna have equipment that's, you know, kind of in a walled garden, an isolated ecosystem, and they'll be interoperable. Site and infrastructure assessment.
So a few kind of key important pieces of this is, you know, kind of first, you know, really wanting to assess, you know, what is the existing, you know, power supply, I mean, capacity at your existing facility, and what potential upgrades are needed. You know, when looking at the location, you want to consider your visibility, your accessibility, safety, you know, and just importantly, what are your impacts to your current operations, right? And what are the seasonal impacts, right? You know, located here in Boston, we deal with, you know, inclement weather, right?
If you're walking a site and looking at it during the summertime, it could seem great, but without asking and really, you know, vetting a thorough vet of the location, you may not realize that, oh, well, in the winter they have snow removal that's piled there, and so is there another place for that snow removal, or should we look at a different location altogether for this charging infrastructure, then utility engagement. I think this is said on every webinar I've ever been a part of, and I think it's always important to echo, but you want to engage with your utility early and often, you know, kind of in the process, right, to understand, you know, kind of power availability rates, you know, any EV infrastructure programs they may have...
that can help shape, the program overall. As well as stakeholder engagement. Obviously, you know, important to engage early in the, process, not necessarily just, you know, kind of the, the decision-makers within kind of the stakeholders, but also, you know, end users, right? Fleet drivers, fleet managers, who's going to be, you know, utilizing this infrastructure, and these vehicles day to day. As well as kind of a quick regulatory compliance, reviewing local codes, permitting requirements, et cetera. So next, and, these are all important, but something that I think is even more important because it just highlights, you know, kind of the impact cost has on charging, is- you know, I think it's really important to work with a partner that can actually simulate, you know, these types of charging scenarios.
So utilizing, you know, the first three steps, the fleet assessment, the charger selection, and the site infrastructure assessment, to then create a simulation of what charging will look like based on your specific fleet's duty cycles, right? And taking into account, you know, any seasonal variations. And if you look at the graph on the bottom left here, this is, you know, a good example of a depot yard for a large municipality that we ran this simulation for. That showed, you know, kind of the impacts, actually, you know, kind of managing charging, you know, can have to their overall cost and to the overall infrastructure that's required for their vehicles.
So the dark blue graph shows an unmanaged load, which you can see kind of typical municipal duty cycle. Everyone's getting back, you know, around four in the afternoon, plugging in their vehicle. Unfortunately, that coincides with your kind of peak demand window, and it just spikes your peak in the worst, you know, time of day possible, and that's actually where most of your charging is going to take place, if you're not, you know, kind of looking at it through a managed charging lens. And so looking at, okay, how can we, you know, defer charging to the off-peak periods, and does it still fit within the overall duty cycle?
Really sets the client up for success and sets, you know, kind of the infrastructure up, you know, for success, and as well as sets the utility up for success. Because you can see within this simulation, through unmanaged charging, we need, you know, about 2.7 megawatts worth of capacity for this fleet. But if we manage this charging, that goes all the way down to 1.3, right? Which could make the difference between whether you need a grid upgrade or not, the timeline of the project, et cetera, and maybe important for everyone on the call, you know, kind of what is the overall impact then this would have on charging?
And on a, you know, per vehicle basis, annualized, you know, it almost, you know, cuts in half, you know, kind of the cost to actually fuel your fleet, just by, you know, managing and shifting kind of when you're charging these vehicles. And lastly, a reliability assessment. So this is really, you know, kind of important to, you know, first establish your baseline charger uptime goals. And you want to do that, you know, kind of in conjunction and parallel with, you know, kind of what is the historical charging performance data, right? So, you know, everyone wants 100% charger uptime, but what's realistic, right?
I think it's something, you know, many may be familiar with, you know, different incentives and grants, and funding programs that are available now, requiring a certain minimum uptime. I think it's always important to remember, even at 99% uptime, you're still talking about 88 hours in a year where that charger is not operational, right? So what are your contingencies? What are the programs and practices you have in place, right? And what's the mission requirements of that fleet? Maybe you can accommodate that, you know, 98%-97% uptime. Maybe that's a non-starter, and you need, you know, 100% uptime no matter what, no matter if there's, you know, a grid outage, et cetera. So you need to look at, okay, what is the strategies that's gonna get you there?
and so matching, you know, charger and labor warranties is important. You know, implementing, you know, remote system monitoring is important, as well as evaluating, you know, kind of any, the opportunities for on-site renewable energy. and so some key considerations kind of within this is looking at, in its entirety, you know, kind of the varying environmental conditions, right? So you could have right-sized infrastructure for a certain part of the year when it's 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, but what happens in the winter when it's, you know, 10 degrees Fahrenheit out, and you still need to kind of make that same drive and get back to the depot and make the second route of the day? Are you right-sizing the infrastructure for that worst-case scenario and building in buffers into your model?
And there's, you know, kind of rapid technology advancement. So how are you future-proofing, you know, kind of your infrastructure? Are you putting in potentially stubbed-up conduits to then easily, you know, kind of expand the capacity and future-proofing? Are you, you know, kind of evaluating, you know, how the increase in demand and usage patterns as your fleet grows will really impact, you know, kind of the overall stress on the system you're putting in? And so to talk about a little bit briefly, kind of distributed energy resources and, you know, kind of I think parlaying that a lot into the reliability aspect, they can really serve as a great complementary investment, you know, for many different reasons, and some may be specific to all projects.
Some, you know, aspects may be specific to only a few. But, you know, generally, they're optimizing energy usage, you know, kind of reducing costs and enhancing, you know, sustainability, right? This load profile that's on the right, you know, kind of shows from that graph before, kind of what the unmanaged and managed load, you know, is. In some cases, right, through even managing your charging, you know, through an intelligent charge management software solution, you're still, because of your duty cycle, not gonna be able to shift, you know, your charging outside of that peak window, so in that environment, you know, it unfortunately, for that fleet, that wasn't the case.
But in that environment, you know, does it make sense to incorporate on-site generation to kind of lower that energy cost during that, that peak period? And that just, you know, kind of speaks to the importance of that, you know, kind of simulation, developing that digital twin charging load profile even before you have, you know, kind of the fleets, you know, in your facility. And then lastly, you know, kind of the level of risk transfer and control. So you really want to align, you know, kind of your financial approach with sustainability goals, available funding sources, budget constraints, and long-term fleet electrification plans. And I know I'm going a little bit over, so I'm gonna breeze through this.
Happy to take any of this, you know, kind of offline, but you really kind of want to evaluate, you know, kind of what level of risk and control do you want, you know, within your fleet charging infrastructure. 'Cause there's different, you know, models out there from, you know, design build to as-a-service models that can really dictate the amount of control and risk you need to, you know, have within the project. You know, kind of just lastly, plug, you know, Ameresco, as I stated before, we're a true turnkey energy partner that's, you know, develops innovative financing solutions. We have, you know, kind of a holistic solution with charging as a service that really simplifies, you know, kind of all these steps in the journey for you, to kind of make it...
You know, simplify it to have a more predictable cost, and to have smart and reliable operations. And so if there's a few takeaways to have, it's, you know, I'd boil it down to conduct a thorough fleet and site assessment, you know, plan for scalability. You know, address your knowledge gaps upfront. Consider the total cost of ownership, which is an important one. A lot of times people just look at the capital expenditure, not and saying, "Okay, I'll go with the charger that's $2,000 less, or the software that's $5,000 less," and not realizing that your operating costs, you know, throughout the life cycle of these assets, is typically five times higher than your capital.
So evaluating that total cost of ownership is key, and then just aligning on key metrics from the beginning, right? You know, kind of what's the uptime requirements going to be, et cetera. So appreciate the time, and turn it over to the other panelists.
Thank you, Trevor. Before I hand it over to Bernardo, we're gonna run a quick question, and also, if anybody has questions, we will do a Q&A at the end, and if you write your question in the chat with a question mark at the end, it will come up, and we'll be able to read it, so I'm gonna launch this question. Not sure if it's gone up. Okay. Run this just for a minute, and then we'll have Bernardo start.
... Thank you for that, Trevor. I'm gonna share my screen here. Please let me know if you can see it. Just, I've been having a little bit of technical difficulty getting kicked in and out of the webinar, so if I stop for any reason, it is because of that. Can everybody see my screen okay?
I can see your screen.
All righty. Perfect. Thank you so much. My name is Bernardo Raymundo, and I'm on the business development team here at The Mobility House, and excited to have you all here, and excited to talk about smart charging for electric municipal fleets. So if you're not familiar with The Mobility House, we are a charge management solutions provider, and we were founded fifteen years ago in Germany. Think back to 2009, that's around when the first Tesla car was coming out. So we have been in this space for a long time and seen all the twists and turns and evolutions in the space. We have 250 people across five different offices.
Our U.S. headquarters is in California, headquarters in Munich, and then we have in Paris, Zurich, and Singapore, and we're actually opening up a new office in Canada, so very exciting. Our charge management solution, ChargePilot,, been deployed at over 1,700 sites all over the world, with over 100 of those being in North America. So we are by far the most experienced charge management company in this space. Here's a quick little snapshot of some of our projects in North America, pretty spread out all across the country and more going into operation very soon. Just this last month, we broke a record. We had more commitments in one month than we had in an entire year previously, so super exciting. For those of you that may not know, what is a charge management system?
Very simply put, a charge management system is a system to monitor and intelligently distribute energy to electric vehicles. Now, think about the benefits of a charge management system in three different facets. So the first, and what most people associate with a charge management system, is how to help lower your operational expenditures, saving your utility bill. And a charge management system is able to do this by actively managing load to avoid charging during when time-of-use rates are high, and also to help you avoid demand charges. The second facet of this is to help lower the CapEx of your project. Now, this isn't as talked about as much in the context of charge management, but I think it's arguably the bigger part of the conversation.
The part of what a charge management system can do is help you lower the CapEx by helping you right-size the infrastructure and really maximize the amount of power that you have available today, instead of automatically going to the utility and saying, "Hey, I'm two megawatts of power." Because the utility is gonna look at you and say, "Okay, that's gonna take one to three years and cost you $500,000-$2 million, depending on how much power you..." The last benefit, charge management system, is helping you smart charge fleet. An advanced charge management system should be able to take information, data from third-party systems, like scheduling software, to help optimize your fleet operations.
Ensuring that your vehicles are ready to go when they need to go, and ensure that they have enough state of charge in order to meet their routes for the following day. Charge management is something that's really, really overlooked in the electrification journey, and that I encourage everybody to think about engaging with charge management providers early on in your electrification process. Because charge management has the ability to impact every phase of a project: charger, charging hardware, procurement, architecture and design, installation and construction, and of course, when things are in operation, helping you manage those operational expenditures, and so keeping track of charger uptime and things like that. It is critical to charge management providers early, and I'll show you why. With a practical example, we work with the Peninsula Clean Energy, which is a community choice.
So a different choice for a utility, and essentially partnered with Opt to help Peninsula Clean Energy develop their fleet advisory program. So as far as The Mobility House was tasked with running charging simulations to help out what the managed and unmanaged charging scenarios were, how much expected annual savings by implementing a charge management system, reduction in peak, and things like that. So from the simulations that we've done, we've seen an average savings of $4,000, reduction in peak power used by 87%, which is dramatic, and a 46% reduction in annual charging cost. When we do these charging simulations for customers, this right here is an example of what you would get. There's a lot of other things.
There's a full written report comes with it, well. This is a pretty good demonstration of why it's important to engage with your charge management early. You could see this is for a 120 light-duty vehicle fleet that was electrifying. They wanted to put in about 100 chargers. If they were to put these chargers and look at the total load, you see that the total peak without any charging management would be almost 4.5 megawatts. With charge management system and spreading that energy intelligently throughout the day, you're able to lower that peak to under 1 MW of power. The implications of that, when you go to the utility and ask 4.5 MWs of power versus asking upgrade a little bit, is drastic.
You might not need to upgrade at all if you use some of the advanced features of a charge management system. One of these features is automated load management. Automated load management, or ALM, is not a term coined by us. It's in the National Electrical Code. I won't bore you with reading the definition. You can read it here on your own, but let's walk practical example. Say we ran a charging simulation for you, and we determined that in order to have your fleet operating with no disruptions, you would need one really high-powered DC charger at 150 kW , one lower DC powered charger, and then two lower powered AC chargers for the vehicle to have a longer amount of time to charge.
The total load of these chargers is 230 kW, but the problem is you only have 200 kW available of power. In order to deploy site safely, you calculate very quickly that you can only install 160 kW worth of charger, chargers. With automated load management, you can have your charge management system actively manage that limit, so it never crosses 160 kW and is fully to deploy. Without automated management, this site would not be possible. So this is a really powerful tool to help you accelerate your project deployments, instead of going to the utility, waiting a year, and spending $500,000. Now, in a practical example of this in practice, our customer at Long Beach Transit.
This customer delivery of 20 New Flyer buses, and they wanted to have a one-to-one charger ratio, which is very common. They didn't want to have anybody to come in and move the buses throughout the night, so they wanted to ensure that each vehicle had its own charge port. The total load of those 10, 180 kW Heliox chargers would bring the total load of the chargers to 1.8 MW. The problem, they only had 1.1 MW of available capacity.
So we engaged with Long , and we were able to run some charging simulations and figure out, "Hey, you can actually operate without disruptions under that 1 MW limit." Instead of getting less chargers and having to come in overnight, you are able to do automated load management without creating any of the chargers. The best thing is, if you do need an upgrade later on, you have the ability to do that without disrupting current operations. Now, another powerful, powerful feature of advanced load charge management system is the ability to do what we call site-integrated load management. And simply, is if there is another load on the, say, you have a building has a heavy-duty HVAC systems that uses a ton of power, an advanced charge management system should be able to adapt dynamically in real time.
So if the building load goes up, then the charging load will go down to ensure that the load stays stable. Another really powerful tool, and when you combine site-integrated load management with automated load management, you're able to take a lot of sites that, at first glance, seemed infeasible at all and make them possible. So I won't go through this full example in detail, and we have limited time here. But if you want to take a screenshot of this, this is a great example of what automated load management and site-integrated load management combined can do for you.
And basically, you know, if you have a building that has a peak load of three hundred and fifty amps and your main panel rated for four hundred amps, you would really quickly realize that you can't put in any chargers if you take into account the peak load there. But if you combine automated load management with integrated load management, you would see that it is possible to put in chargers in this scenario. So one of the reasons we can do this and dynamic management in real time is in part because of the architecture of how our system is set up, and it's the considerations that you should take in mind when you're electrifying your fleet, you're thinking about a charge management system to put in place.
Our system has a little controller, which goes on site and is connected to each individual charger via Ethernet port. But when an internet outage happens, we're still able to manage it and ensure that it never goes above the set limits that you have. This is particularly important if you're doing automated load management or site-integrated load management. If you don't have that local controller on site, you could face some problem, and if you lose internet connection, it could be problematic. So one of the other things to consider as you're on this electrification journey is to select system, whether that be your charger, your billing provider, your charge point operator. You want to ensure that these are built on open standards and use standardized interfaces.
An advanced charge management system should be able to third-party scheduling systems, telematics systems. It should be able to connect to energy meters, solar, energy storage, and take directions from a microgrid controller. This is really important to think about, because this industry changes quickly. Things are changing all the time, and you want to be able to plan scale. If you get a set of chargers that you don't like, and you get another set of chargers next phase, you want yourself the flexibility to do that by picking standards. So it's a really important consideration as you go on your electrification journey.
Doing this will enable you to have projects like this one in Montgomery County did at the Brookville Smart Energy Depot, where we are managing charging at a location that is a 6.5 MW microgrid, which includes solar storage and generators as well. When you choose open standards, you are able to have cool sites like this, where you are connecting different assets and everything works seamlessly. In closing, an advanced charge management system is important if fleet is on a schedule, if you have sites that have limited power, if you have high time-of-use rates or high demand charges, which I know is the case. I live in San Diego, and it is bad down here. If fleet has multiple sites, want to have visibility of all of the sites in one place.
If you have existing chargers and want to get ones, also important, and if your fleet has liability requirements, which honestly is every fleet. If a fleet is a part of your operations or your business, every fleet is mission critical. If there's one takeaway from this, it please engage with your charge management providers early, because it can really have a big impact in figuring out your infrastructure, and we can solve a lot of your headaches. Engage early, and thank you so much. I'll hand it over to the next panelist.
Thank you, Bernardo. I am gonna share the results of our question, and then we have one more question that I'll run while Adrian is gonna be presenting. It's kind of interesting to see where everybody is at and what they feel is important. ALM, site-integrated load management, which as well as solar and reliability. So I'm gonna quickly run that next question as Adrian's getting set up.
Hi, Samantha. All right, should I get started?
Yep, I think we're ready for you.
Excellent. Hello, everybody. My name is Adrian Gomez. I'm the VP of sales and marketing at Epic Charging. It's a pleasure to join you today, so just about us, Epic Charging is a software company, and we believe that you deserve an epic charging experience. Our company is a software platform. We basically integrate chargers, credit card terminals, vehicle telematics, and make it possible for you to get access to more features and more value for your existing EV charging infrastructure. We have thousands of chargers under contract across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and our mission is to provide you and your EV drivers with an epic customer experience. It starts with the way that our company behaves. It's part of our DNA, being responsive, making sure that, you know, we're addressing issues quickly, but it also shows in the software that we have.
It's simple. It's intuitive. A lot of the fleet managers that we speak with say they like that they don't need a Ph.D., or they don't need to spend a lot of time learning how to use it. Makes it easier to train new people as people join you. Some of the things that we're known for is payments and access, so, you know, we have this ten-second promise. There's no app required, although we do have an app. We offer high reliability, and we provide an epic customer experience. So what I'm gonna be talking about today are four points. Number one is we'll start with EV charging 101. So as a software platform, we've actually certified over a hundred brands of EV chargers. We work with all these different Level 2s and DC fast chargers, and so I'll talk about, you know, making your decision, helping you.
It piggybacks on Trevor's previous discussion and actually complements it really nicely. We're gonna be talking about some considerations for your fleet. And then I'm gonna talk to you about the Epic Pricing Engine, which is one of the features of our software, which we're very excited about, and we've actually partnered with The Mobility House to bring it to market for their customers. And then lastly, I'm gonna go through a case study because one of the things that I really wanna stress during this conversation is how you can make the most of your EV charging infrastructure. And we always encourage our customers and fleet operators, facility managers to consider using opening up EV chargers as an employee benefit as well, and we'll talk about what that can look like and why you should consider doing that.
So I always like to start with, you know, some very high-level early slides, right? How far can an electric vehicle drive? And what I have on the screen is basically a chart that compares different classes of vehicles on each row. The battery size of those vehicles, although now pickup trucks, they're, you know, some of them come with 200 kWhs , but it gives you a sense at 70 kWhs . And the driving range of the vehicle. And the reason I like to start with this slide is because it gives us an indication of what does it look like if you need to charge a vehicle from scratch. So, for example, a Class 1 pickup truck, you would need. If you had a 7 kW charging station, which is a lower powered Level 2 charger, it would take about 10 hours to fully charge your pickup.
Now, if you deploy a DC fast charging station, let's say 120 kWhs , then you'd be able to charge this vehicle in less than an hour. This is all relevant, and it relates to the conversation that Trevor was having earlier. It's important for you to consider how your vehicles are being used because that influences the power of the stations that you have and the cost of your equipment, both to purchase and install, but also to operate and maintain moving forward, and so we always like to start with a question of: How much energy is your vehicle actually consuming on a daily basis, and so what we did is we looked at the energy efficiency of various vehicles and the estimated driving distance per day.
You know, so for a city fleet, for example, you might see that a sedan or a light-duty vehicle drives, you know, about fifteen miles per day. Compared to, for example, a Class 3 transit van, you can see that it uses about twice as much energy. Energy is measured in kWhs . We threw in a Class 8 pickup truck, a Class 8 tractor-trailer there for fun, and just compared it to the average home. But what's important here is for you to consider how much energy do you actually need to supply to your vehicles? Because it's not just about the size of the vehicle, when you're determining the power of the charging infrastructure that you're going to deploy. And so going back to then, how long does it actually take to charge?
In our industry, there's sort of three different types of charging categories. There's a Level 1 plug, which is your standard outlet, where you, you know, what you would plug in your toaster oven to, and that is typically used for overnight. That's so, for example, that's what I use. I drive a plug-in hybrid, and I park it at home, and I plug it into a Level 1 outlet, and it's more than enough for me. You know, the battery is fairly small, 10 kWhs , so overnight, I'm usually good to go. This can be a great solution for employees who can park at home, for example.
Level 2 charging stations are AC charging stations, and this is what Trevor was presenting earlier, where the power conversion is happening in the vehicle, and you essentially can go from anywhere from seven to 19 kilowatts, but it's really constrained by the power of your onboard charger. And then there are DC fast chargers, and they can go from, you know, typically 25 to 90 kWhs, ranging to much higher power levels. Now that we've gone through the EV 101, and I really want to encourage everybody to ask whatever questions you have. If you're considering particular equipment, if you've heard certain things about Level 2s or DCs, this is a great time for you to post your questions.
I know that there's a lot of options out there and a lot of questions related to this, so please don't hesitate to ask. But let's move into, you know, some considerations for your fleet. Oftentimes, when we're talking to fleet managers, there's a strong focus on depot charging. So where are your vehicles being parked? We always like to have a bit of a more nuanced conversation because if you consider these three different types or categories of charging, you can start to think about it as a holistic program. So some of the vehicles, for example, that your employees can park at home, a level 1 or a level 2 charger, a lower power level 2, might be a great option for you.
What you can see here is we aggregated the capital cost to buy the equipment and install it across 1,000 charging port installations based on California and CALeVIP rebate stats. And so it gives you a sense that deploying Level 1 chargers is, you know, much cheaper and sometimes, you know, 10 times cheaper than deploying Level 2 charging stations. And as you move towards the right, and where you're looking at DC fast charging stations, those are typically best suited for depot charging, where you have vehicles that don't have a lot of time to charge or vehicles that are gonna be intended for public use as well. And you can see that the cost per charging station is much higher for DC fast charging stations.
So in summary, as you think about your whole program, we want you to consider that as you sort of expand and think about, okay, maybe there's a first five EVs that you purchase, and then there will be, you know, 10 or 20, and then at some point, you might get in the hundreds or thousands. It's helpful to think of it as a portfolio and to consider that there's a variety of options for you. There's a really interesting study. I saw this at a webinar hosted. It's an EV charging boot camp, hosted by PG&E. And the speaker was talking about the cost to charge your electric vehicles can range from as low as $3.20, compared up to $773.
And this study was based on, essentially, a research institution that looked at all the electric utilities on the West Coast and then compared the average cost to supply, I think it was 30 kWhs . And what they did is they ran simulations for all these different utilities and their cost structure, and what they found is that, I mean, in summary, there's demand charges, and there's certain pricing considerations that mean your fleet can significantly benefit by ensuring that your charging stations are highly utilized. So essentially, you're spending all this money to deploy charging infrastructure. The more that you can keep these charging stations busy, the cheaper it is to actually power each of your electric vehicles, both for the fleet and for any other potential use case that you have.
This is relevant as we consider what you're doing with your charging stations. A lot of the times when we speak with fleet, municipal fleets, you know, it's sort of the conversation initially starts with, "This is what I need for my vehicles." There's, you know, I think that there's a consideration for how can I ensure that the charging stations are gonna be available for fleet consumption? But that's sort of where the conversation stops. What we want you to consider is that your charging infrastructure is actually unutilized for about 42% of the time. If you look at the typical municipal fleet vehicle, it's parked between six P.M. to eight A.M. That leaves about ten hours of charging that can be available for your employees.
This would be for charging stations that are behind a gate, for example, and I'm talking about level two charging stations specifically. Your DC fast charging stations probably have even more capacity. Some of the municipal charging stations are also deployed in places where the public can use them, and so that adds another element to consider for how you can get more out of your charging infrastructure... So I'm gonna switch over now and talk about the Epic Pricing Engine and what the considerations are for you. We have a technology partnership with The Mobility House that essentially allows us to turn on the Epic Pricing Engine for any of their customers. And so The Mobility House has this amazing solution to help you have, you know, very well-managed and reliable EV charging.
What you can do with the Epic Pricing Engine is to offer hybrid public-private charging, and I'll talk about what that means. It allows you to you know, offer our ten-second app-free promise, and we can help you create an end-to-end fleet management program. So what does it mean to offer hybrid public-private charging? Essentially, what it means is that you can use RFID cards for your fleet drivers to access charging stations. You can also use a QR code for your employees and the public to use the same charging station, and you can provide discounts for your employees, for example.
So you can have a variety of sort of tiered access and pricing to ensure that you can get the most out of your charging stations, reduce the cost of charging for your fleet, and also offer this, you know, a valuable benefit for both your employees and the public. What you see on the right is a screenshot of the software platform, and there's a variety of pricing functionality, and I'm happy to go into it with more detail if anybody wants to discuss this after the call or if you have any questions. But essentially you have a lot of flexibility. You can price per kilowatt hour, price per hour.
You can have idle fees, so if somebody stays at a station and doesn't move their vehicle, then you can have these sort of penalty charges to encourage the driver to move their vehicle. And what's really a unique feature is this PIN code password that allows you to protect the station during your important hours of operation. So you can ensure that no unauthorized use you know is gonna be allowed on the stations when you need them for your municipal purposes. Our app-free 10-second charging promise is exactly what it sounds like. It's not the most original name, but it essentially means that we're cutting a lot of frustration for public users and for your employees. So anybody can pull up to one of the charging stations running the Epic Pricing Engine and start charging in 10 seconds.
You just pull up to it, open your phone, scan a QR code, and you're essentially start charging. If you have Apple Pay or Google Pay, it's, I think, two or three buttons. We also do credit card terminal integrations, so you can even have a credit card tap to pay, and it makes the whole system even more convenient for you. And then the last point that I want to emphasize on the Epic Pricing Engine is the ability for you to run an end-to-end fleet management program. So, like I said before, deploying charging stations at home can be ten times cheaper than putting it in your depots.
And so with the Epic Charging, Epic Pricing Engine, your drivers can use the Epic Charging app to activate charging stations at home, to activate them in your depots, and to activate them in public. So they could, for example, pull up to a ChargePoint charging station and start charging with the Epic app. And the value of this is that your department is gonna be able to consolidate all of these different costs into one program, which makes it a lot easier to reimburse drivers and to keep all the costs in one place. So I'm going to wrap now with a case study, talking about, you know, why you should consider offering EV charging as an employee benefit. And I want to really start by just, you know, highlighting something that's important here.
As a municipality and as an employer, you actually have an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in the lives of your employees. About 30% of EV drivers across the U.S. don't have access to charging at home. They might be renters, or they might live in a building, and they rely on public charging and their employers to be able to offer equitable and affordable EV charging. So if you're a municipality that's, you know, dedicating internal budget to, you know, construct these charging stations and make them available for your fleet, you can take a simple step forward and also offer this as an employee benefit, and people really value it. So what we did with the Idaho Conservation League. It's a great nonprofit organization based in Idaho.
They lead a series of, you know, really important wildlife conservation efforts. They've been highlighted and given awards for all the work that they've done to protect, you know, the salmon fish stock in their territory. We started working with them when they were looking for a replacement to their ChargePoint charging station. They had an EV charger that was located in a great place near the Illinois State Building. Unfortunately, public users kept parking at the charging station and blocking it from their employees and from their drivers. They came to us, and they asked if we could help them solve this problem. Using the Epic Pricing Engine, we were able to address their issues.
For starters, they password-protected the charging stations during work hours. Between the hours of 8:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M., nobody can use these charging stations unless they know the password, and they only gave the password to their employees. During work hours, they also and outside of work hours, they use RFID cards for their fleet drivers. Fleet drivers can pull up to a station and scan an RFID card and start charging. They don't need to worry about any payments or anything like that. It's seamless, and it's easy. They also decided to offer the charging as an employee benefit, and so employees, during work hours and outside of work hours, can get a discount. In their case, they offered a 100% discount on the charging stations.
Then, outside of work hours, so before 8:00 A.M., after 6:00 P.M., and during weekends, they opened up the charging stations to the public. Now this nonprofit has the ability to utilize their charging stations more, so that gives them the benefit of, you know, getting more value out of their stations. They're earning a new revenue source that can help to fund their EV charging operations, their fleet operations. Their team was, you know, we really love Aaron and the team at Idaho Conservation League. They were really happy with the work that we did, and so you can see on the right, you know, they sent us a thank you card, which I have a picture there of. That basically takes me to the end of the slides and my presentation.
I'm gonna hand this back to The Mobility House team. Thank you.
Thank you, Adrian. I am gonna see if I can share the results of that poll. If people can't see it or if it's not showing up, most people selected for who's responsible for charging uptime as operation and maintenance, or O&M, and then behind that would be charge point operators, and then behind that for third would be electric vehicle supply equipment and charge management system providers. I'm gonna open up for a Q&A if anyone wants to stick around. I know it is at eleven. So you can put your questions in the chat, and I will run one final question. I have a question, if either Bernardo or Trevor want to take this on.
It's, you know, what are some of the common challenges that municipalities might find when they're trying to start an EV infrastructure project, and maybe how they can overcome them?
Yeah, I can provide some thoughts on that. And then, similar to Adrian, I do have to hop to another call myself, so... but happy to take this offline, and I'll send my email here in the chat for anyone who wants to connect afterwards. So yeah, quite often, I mean, I don't think this is specific to municipalities. You know, I think it's everyone, but it's, you know, kinda, "How are we gonna pay for this?" Right? All of a sudden, this is, you know, a big capital expense. It wasn't in, you know, kind of your budget.
Even if you do, you know, budget some dollars, I see, you know, it not covering, generally kind of not covering more than, you know, a small pilot, and so how do you really kind of look to scale up the program? So one thing, you know, kind of we always look at is, okay, what are some alternative funding, you know, resources available? As well as what are some other opportunities, right, to, to drive overall, you know, kind of, operational costs down, right? So whether we're looking at a, you know, if we're looking at a large facility, are there other energy and efficiency measures that we can actually include as a part of the scope, to make the overall solution with charging kind of budget neutral?
But capital is, you know, always number one. Like, how are we gonna pay for it? And then second, you know, who's gonna be responsible for kind of maintaining the chargers? I think quite often you have a reluctance kind of within the market and vendors to kind of take on that responsibility. So those are just, you know, kind of two key challenges that I see often, you know, kind of within the municipal space.
... Thanks for that, Trevor. Yeah, I'll add a little bit of some thoughts to that. The number one thing that we hear from customers and seems to be personal is the lack of power availability. A lot of the site customers want to deploy charging infrastructure were not designed... You know, some of these were designed in the mid 1900s, and a lot of them just have the infrastructure to support the amount of power that some of these chargers can pull. You're looking at, you know, AC chargers, level one chargers, that's a bit easier, but once you start getting into the low-power DC and the high-power DC, yeah, power really becomes a concern.
So it's important to, you know, to think about solutions around that, because if you want to deploy something quickly, going to the utility and asking for an upgrade can often take a lot of time and cost a lot of money. So to look at different solutions, like leveraging automated management and things like that. So that's kind of the number one concern that we... And then, you know, another thing that we hear from municipalities in particular is the desire to open up to the public at certain hours. So, you know, that's something that would be facilitated with a solution, like billing engine.
Yeah, oftentimes, you know, there are things that municipalities don't necessarily think of, like, "Okay, if we open this up to the public, how do we ensure that the folks that are using from the public are not gonna utilizing it when we need ours to charge?" It's an important consideration for folks that are thinking about opening up to the public. There are challenges that come with that, so it's a concern that we've heard and something that really does need some thought. You're on mute, Teresa.
Yeah, I'm muted. Thanks. I wanted to say thank you for your insight. I thought they were pretty good thoughts. Because we're over time and our speakers have had to jump to other calls, I wanted to thank everybody for your time and for joining us today. As always, we do record these webinars. You'll receive an email in the next day or so, where you can watch the recording or share with somebody else. So I want to say thank you so much.
Thank you. Bye, everybody.
All right. Bye, everybody.