Demand for energy in the US is trending up and to the right—with implications for everyone with an electric bill.
Growth in demand is coming largely from commercial and industrial users. A partnership between Ford and Atlanta-based energy provider Southern Company recently tested one potential strategy to ease grid constraints from a growing energy consumer: electric commercial fleets.
For six months, a fleet of more than 200 electric trucks Southern owns participated in a managed EV charging pilot program—and the results, according to Ford, demonstrate how this strategy can be used by vehicle fleets across the country to ensure as smooth a transition to EVs as possible.
“What we tried here isn’t unique to Southern or a utility or a fleet,” Ananya Gupta, a group product manager who works in Ford’s commercial division, Ford Pro, told Tech Brew. “We know every fleet operates differently with unique duty cycles, local utility rate structures, site-specific variables, but the lessons and the data from this pilot allow us to tailor-manage charging to each context.”
In fact, he added, Ford Pro is already “applying these learnings with a large national Ford customer.”
Piloting: Southern’s gas and electric operating companies serve about 9 million customers in seven states, including nearly 600,000 commercial users. The company reported that those commercial users have registered over 100,000 EVs, and its subsidiaries offer time-of-use rates and other programs that help offset charging costs for EV drivers.
With the Ford Pro pilot, Southern set out to gain insights not only for its own EV fleet, but that could be relevant to its own industrial and commercial customers.
The program yielded lessons “that can be applied to help us manage our electric vehicle fleets more efficiently and help us better advise customers who may approach our electric utilities for advice about managing charging for their fleets,” Tom Canada, fleet electrification project manager at Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power, said in a statement.
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Ford Pro’s goal was to address barriers to EV adoption and, in the process, aid the grid, according to Gupta. Using its software tools, the automaker employed demand-response and dynamic pricing strategies to optimize depot charging.
Ford Pro conducted demand response tests three times at different times of day and for varying lengths of time. Each test demonstrated “consistent and verifiable load reductions,” Gupta said.
“In one event, the fleet dropped demand by more than half a megawatt of power within minutes, the capacity which could be redeployed elsewhere or could ease just the strain on the grid,” he said. “On the pricing side, our Ford Pro software shifted charging behaviors to lower-cost periods without requiring changes to depot operations. We maintained operational continuity throughout the pilot, showing that dynamic fleet charging can respond to utility signals while protecting business-critical uptime.”
Assets: The idea behind strategies like managed charging is to optimize the process for EVs and the grid by using software to automatically charge when demand and energy prices are lower than during peak demand hours. Stakeholders in the EV sector say that such strategies can transform EVs from energy consumers to grid assets.
Managed charging is just one way Ford Pro is trying to help its fleet customers figure out whether electrification makes sense for them and, if so, to make it a seamless transition.
“This pilot fits into our broader electrification strategy. While this pilot was with Southern, the model is highly replicable,” Gupta said. “The biggest message is that we can help the team lower costs, manage complexity, and make EV adoption seamless. That’s our goal with managed charging.”