Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - June 2021 - 26

BOTH IMAGES: ELECTRIFY AMERICA
Q&A
Electrify America's network includes two Electric Vehicle Fast Charging cross-country routes
that were completed in 2020.
might support that higher load down the road - but we won't
activate it till later on. There are cases where we're limited to
power and we can't future-proof that site. So, if the demand
for charging in that area grows in the future, we'll simply have
to pick another location close by.
Is EA looking to add battery storage across more sites,
particularly as you expand into rural areas? Any plans to
integrate batteries with renewable generation?
The simple answer is, we're going to be adding battery storage
selectively over our full cycle plans because we're always going
into a new area, which probably already has demand charges
there. This is a convenient workaround, although it is expending
capital now on a battery asset and the systems that manage
it when you could have otherwise done another charger or
two. In Baker, California, we set up a fairly large site; we were
limited in the power we could get from PG&E [Pacific Gas and
Electric Company] there. So, we're actually bringing in a bigger-than-typical
battery to shore up our supply locally until
that new service can be developed to the level we need.
In terms of renewables, that same Baker site will have a fairly
large, robust solar panel. We're looking at more and more sites.
It's easier to do solar onsite, of course, but you're limited as to
how much power you can extract. Off-grid solar is a better
choice if we can tap into that. There are some exciting things
coming up soon from our company - announcements on how
we're going to become much more renewable at all of our sites.
Any unique considerations for charging heavy trucks and
commercial-vehicle fleets, like the new megawatt standard
that's working its way through the process?
That's a very different standard. It starts at one megawatt and
goes up from there. It is a new standard that was essentially a
collaboration between CCS [the SAE J1772-based combined
charging system] companies through CharIN and Tesla, and it
will be coming out in the next year or so. The charging standard
26 June 2021
The CCS protocol has a robust enough level of
encryption that the risk of hacking is fairly minimal,
Killen said.
and the power are different, but so too is the site design. If you
think of a typical over-the-road truck stop and the size of a
Class 8 truck, obviously the whole means of setting up the charger
and potentially how the charging gets to the truck itself, the
cab, that's going to be a fairly large port. It might have to be an
automated system. All of the challenges that we go through in
selecting a site and getting utility power for light-duty passenger
cars are magnified with heavy-duty. But there's a lot of
workstreams under way for that project, especially in the state
of California right now. And we'll have some announcements
soon on a related topic.
Is commercial fleet charging within EA's purview?
It is. There's been a nice coexistence in our partnership with
Lyft in Denver, Colorado, for example - those ride-hail fleet
drivers are actively using our public DC fast chargers. We could
have built special sites for ride-hail and other fleets' pending
need, but right now the location of our public sites and available
power were more than sufficient so we didn't have to go
to that next step. Ride-hail, specifically in terms of meeting
charging sites in the urban core and near an airport is really
important. We do put a little more emphasis there in terms of
differentiation, but the customer experience is very much the
same in terms of having a prominent station with the typical
hardware and access to a nice retailer close by.
Any concerns about hacking a vehicle while charging?
I can't address the vehicle itself, but I can tell you everything
from the CCS cable to our charger, to the backend, that has
been set up in a fairly robust fashion and the CCS protocol
already has a level of encryption that I would say the risk of
hacking is fairly minimal. I won't say nonexistent because I
don't know enough about that area. But I'm not aware of any
incidences yet where a vehicle in charger has been hacked or
overridden by a third party to take control.
Ryan Gehm
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING

Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - June 2021

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