Don’t make assumptions about what electrical infrastructure you need to electrify your fleet, says Lucy Electric’s general manager Tom Goodman. Instead, make sure your contractor takes the time to find out what you really need.
Here’s a message for freight companies considering what will be involved in electrifying their vehicles: “Think about your demand, not about the supply.”
Lucy Electric’s role is to design and install the electrical system, most of it in and around the depot, that carries electricity from the local network to on-site charging points. The company works alongside organisations including the local distribution network operator (DNO) to deliver the system.
Although there are now practical guides to help freight operators begin conversations with the electricity industry, such as the Electricity Network Association’s Connections Guidance Tool, which has received positive feedback, Lucy’s general manager Tom Goodman is keen that operators do not make too many assumptions about the electrical equipment they will need. Instead, he believes specialists should be allowed to assess each depot’s operational requirements before specifying infrastructure.
He points out that chargers for smaller vehicles are becoming increasingly powerful. “We have seen some pretty big chargers out there for passenger vehicles,” he says. His concern is that operators considering eHGVs may search for the biggest chargers available and quickly conclude that electrification is unaffordable.
Such searches can produce charging equipment costing £60,000-£80,000 before connection costs are even considered. Once network upgrades and associated lead times are factored in, the numbers can become daunting. “A lot of operators, especially smaller ones, may look at that and think they are getting a bill for hundreds of thousands of pounds to create a new connection for the site. Then significant costs for a new vehicle and it is way too cost prohibitive to turn electric.”
Instead, Goodman advises operators to begin with how their vehicles are actually used.
“Look at the vehicle and look at your use-case.”
His starting point is understanding what the fleet really requires in terms of charging. Although an initial instinct may be to specify enough capacity to charge every vehicle simultaneously at maximum power, that is often unnecessary.
“More often than not there will be some cost-effective and more economical ways to get these fleets converted to electric in a way that will be fit for purpose for these customers.”
That principle also applies to fleets with a variety of vehicles and contracts.
“Slow down and tackle your low-hanging fruit first,” Goodman says. Some operations will inevitably be easier to electrify than others. “Learn some lessons, get some return [on the easier options], understand your risks and then look at the next most challenging ones to work your way up.”
A simple example is a fleet replacing diesel vehicles with electric models over several years. Charging demand may begin relatively modestly before increasing as more vehicles arrive. Operators can therefore agree an import capacity with the network that reflects expected peak demand rather than the maximum physical capacity that could eventually be installed, helping to reduce initial connection costs while retaining the option to expand later.
Looking more closely at how vehicles operate can reveal further opportunities.
“Do you really need a one MVA package substation? And do you need really 3000amp to 4000amp feeder pillars?” Goodman asks. “Probably not, in many scenarios… if you look at the demand for your fleet and incorporate the demand for your charging and the speed at which they need to charge.”
He offers a couple of recent examples with lessons that are relevant to freight operators.
One involved a company operating three shunt vehicles. At first glance, the site appeared to require three chargers. In practice, however, the vehicles operated in rotation. “They needed one very high-powered charger used by whichever vehicle wasn’t running between two sites, [which] filled up as quickly as possible to get back out on the road.”
Another example involved a refuse collection company purchasing 12 electric trucks.
“They had a quote of over £1 million to get a new connection,” Goodman says. However, the vehicles could complete their collection rounds on a single charge before returning to the depot for around nine hours overnight.
That meant charging could be staggered using optimisation software, which is becoming increasingly common. “In the end we were looking at a mix of high-powered AC chargers and small DC chargers at a fraction of the cost originally quoted.”
Freight vehicles will not always enjoy the long dwell times available to refuse trucks, but understanding real operating patterns can still help determine whether a smaller grid connection, combined with smart charging, represents an acceptable commercial trade-off.
As the market develops, Goodman is seeing more ambitious installations that combine charging infrastructure with other technologies.
Some operators are considering rooftop solar PV to offset part of their charging demand. Others are assessing battery energy storage, which can be charged when electricity prices are lower before supplying vehicles when they need to recharge. While the economics will vary from site to site, battery storage can, in some cases, also reduce the size of grid connection required.
“We are incorporating a lot of battery technology to be able to work with our infrastructure so that our customers do not need such a big supply from the grid,” Goodman says. “They can take a small supply, which is far more cost-effective, and then trickle-charge the batteries from that feed when the vehicles are not being charged.”
To support that approach, Lucy Electric is incorporating solar and battery connections into its feeder pillars alongside software that manages and optimises electricity flows and vehicle charging.
Technology is not the only area changing rapidly. Goodman is also seeing innovation in commercial models.
“In the bus space, the charge point operators are saying we will fund putting the infrastructure in and we will charge you at a rate for using the chargers. There are lots of different financial models that are being exposed in the industry now to work for different customers and their needs.”
Goodman recognises that infrastructure costs remain a major influence on electrification decisions.
“The cost of the infrastructure that we provide has a significant impact on the appetite that the company may have for converting their fleet.”
Although Lucy Electric continues to look for ways to reduce costs, wider economic pressures remain.
“The sector is facing increasing costs in the supply chain, the cost of copper and aluminium raw materials. There are increased costs of fuel and shipping—we see increased cost across the whole supply chain. We are very much trying to balance that and look at better ways of working, because the electric vehicle charging industry is in the majority an investment-driven business. We have to remain cost competitive.”
Nevertheless, Goodman believes demand for electrification will accelerate, driven as much by customers as by regulation.
“It will come quicker than we think,” he says, because organisations increasingly expect suppliers to contribute to their own carbon reduction targets.
“Now they look at their supply chain and say ‘we need to decarbonise our supply chain fleet, as well as our own’. If you look at tenders that are coming out now, they stipulate you must have 30 per cent of your fleet running as electric vehicles… it is forcing the supply chain.”
He believes the technology itself is following a familiar trajectory. “The general idea of electric vehicles has been around for 15 years and we have hit a real peak for passenger vehicles in terms of technical efficiency and everything else. We have gone from a Toyota Prius to modern EVs capable of extremely rapid charging under the right conditions.”
For freight operators, however, the immediate lesson is less about headline charging speeds than understanding what their own operation genuinely requires. As customers increasingly ask suppliers to decarbonise their transport operations, the companies that assess their charging demand carefully, rather than simply specifying the biggest available connection, may find electrification arrives sooner, and at considerably lower cost, than they first expected.
