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Electrifying Fleets for Sustainable Transportation

August 30, 2023

This blog post is fascinating since it is critical to Australia’s powerhouse. Fleets are what move our country, but especially our goods and services. This includes buses, trucks, vans, and passenger vehicles.

Today, one-fifth of carbon emissions in Australia come from transportation. Thus, we need to accelerate the uptake of Electric Vehicles (EVs)  in Australia. However, we are in a “chicken and egg dilemma” in Australia. To see broader private investment to roll out EV charging infrastructure, we need to see more EVs in the country to see financial feasibility from operators, but from the consumer side, they want to see more charging stations to charge our vehicles. Some trends we see these days families purchase EVs as secondary cars and use them for short distances (Low emission trips). However, they also own an internal combustion engine car for long distances trips (high emission trips) because they are no infrastructure in route off main freeways.

As of today, we believe the most critical part of tackling this dilemma is the electrification of fleets in Asutralia as they are 40% of all the vehicles sold in Australia, and these vehicles will be:

·       Driving further distances than individual passenger vehicles

·       Parked in-house fleet warehouse, parking or employee homes.

These make adopting electric vehicles for fleets slightly more straightforward and more efficient in tackling carbon emissions in the medium term. Additionally, these vehicles will eventually be sold in the 2nd hand market to users who cannot purchase a brand-new car.

We will need to touch to ensure EV adoption on the fleet is made properly.

Access to renewable energy to charge the vehicle. It is key to ensure EV adoption in fleets is made correctly. There are several ways to adopt renewable energy for charging purposes, and they are heavily dependent on the fleet size.

For small and medium-sized fleets of 10 to 25 vehicles, Solar energy in warehouses, office buildings and depots is essential, and the implementation of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) to store the excess solar during the daytime could be done via in-house battery or community battery systems or zero emission agreements with Energy distributors.

Large-scale fleets of 30+ vehicles or heavy vehicles. Solar energy and BESS on site are critical, zero emissions agreements with energy distributors and a Power Purchase agreement (PPA) is a long-term contract between an electricity generator and a customer, usually a utility, government, or company.

I want to end our blog is a report made by KPMG, “Accelerating local electric vehicles uptake where it matters“. It does provide information about where EV fleets and individual vehicles should be implemented the most.

On our next post, we will share some frequent questions our clients ask us about implementing the electrification of their fleet and some of the current solutions we are implementing.

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