Fleet electrification isn’t a single decision—it’s a systems transformation. That was the central message of Thursday morning’s session,
The Road to Fleet Electrification: Strategies for a Successful Transition, where industry practitioners laid out the unglamorous realities of moving from pilot projects to scalable programs.
Moderator Joanna Hamblin, senior marketing consultant at Iron Core Marketing, set expectations immediately: “This is not going to be a product pitch session. We’re going to focus on why fleet electrification is hard despite the strong momentum.”
The panel brought together Kristen Helsel, CEO of Liberty Plugins; Craig DaCosta, data scientist at Geotab; Jonathan Colbert, VP of marketing and business development at Voltera; and Russell Vare, VP of vehicle grid integration at The Mobility House. Their collective expertise spans school buses, autonomous vehicles, commercial fleets, and heavy-duty deployments.
Start with Data, Not Assumptions
DaCosta opened by addressing the biggest obstacle fleets face: the perception that electrification is too complex to start. Geotab’s analysis of medium and heavy-duty trucks across the contiguous United States revealed surprising opportunities.
“Over a quarter of heavy-duty trucks actually travel less than 150 miles before returning home to depot, and about 40% travel less than 250 miles,” DaCosta said. Dwell times averaged four hours for 150-mile routes and five hours for 250-mile routes—profiles that are “really perfect for electrification.”
The message: use telematics data to identify low-hanging fruit rather than trying to electrify everything at once. “Look at your data to assess your duty cycles, focus on the vehicles you can electrify first, and then build your infrastructure from there.”
The Overbuild Problem
A recurring theme was fleet tendency to overplan for worst-case scenarios, leading to unnecessary costs and complexity.
Helsel, drawing on experience from the 2008-2013 charging buildout when “we had about seven chargers per car,” cautioned against repeating past mistakes. “This transition to electrification is still in flux. Connectors are changing, things are evolving over time. Be careful to take one step at a time.”
Her prescription: start small, buy a few electric vehicles, see how they work, and build expertise either internally or through trusted partners. “Not over-building, not making it too hard, not over-buying, not buying the wrong equipment.”
DaCosta provided a striking example of how data prevents overbuild. One fleet cut their estimated peak loads by 50% simply by planning for the 90th percentile case rather than absolute worst case. “Fleets often overestimate how much their vehicles are driving and underestimate how much they’re dwelling. That leads to a really high vehicle-to-port ratio and immediate overbuild.”
Infrastructure Timelines: The 18-to-36-Month Reality
Colbert delivered perhaps the session’s harshest reality check about development timelines. While adding a couple Level 2 chargers at an existing depot might happen within a quarter, DC fast charging at scale is a different story entirely.
“If you are putting in DC fast charging at scale, what we’re seeing across the United States at depots that vary from 2 megawatts to 10-plus megawatts is everything from 18 months to 36 months,” Colbert said. “And that’s from actual design through construction and development.”
The bottlenecks are threefold: land use and zoning variations across jurisdictions, utility interconnection challenges, and project orchestration. “We’re bringing, in some cases, skyscrapers worth of power. That’s an unjust amount of burden on the utility to say we need that in 18 months. That’s not the way sites at that scale are typically developed.”
His advice: start planning six months before you think you need to. “The only way you can get around that timeline is having been in development for that site six months ago.”
Vare highlighted emerging solutions to timeline constraints, including flexible service connections that allow utilities to manage circuit constraints. “The whole goal is how do we reduce time to power? If we need this many megawatts and the utility says that’s going to be 36 months, can we use technology to bring that down to operating now and then increase the power 36 months from now?”
He noted California’s December 24 proposed decision on flexible service connections and ongoing pilots in New York and the Pacific Northwest as promising developments.
Smart Charging and Load Management
Technology can bridge the gap between available power and fleet needs. Vare described a scenario where fleets want to install ten 100-kilowatt chargers (one megawatt total) but only have 500 kilowatts available.
“You can use technology. I’m going to limit that load so you can at least get operating now and then run construction to add more power later,” he explained. Automated load management allows fleets to begin operations while infrastructure catches up.
DaCosta described collaborating with charge management providers to solve a customer’s challenge: their fleet data showed an estimated 20-megawatt peak, but site capacity was only 3 megawatts. “We brought in a charge management provider that could help them look at these dwell profiles and split that load across many hours.”
The Economics Question
With federal incentives disappearing, the ROI conversation has become more complex—and more honest.
Colbert noted that total cost of ownership discussions have evolved into “willingness to pay” conversations. “A lot of times the conversation isn’t, ‘I’m going to make X amount of dollars because I go electric.’ It’s, ‘How much is this going to disrupt my operations if I transition or not? Can I get to cost parity?'”
Helsel emphasized multi-use strategies for improving asset utilization and ROI. She described a California municipality using fleet charging during the day and opening chargers to the public at night, and school bus chargers repurposed for teacher and community charging. “We don’t need discrete buckets of chargers for all those different constituencies. Be thoughtful about the change occurring across the board.”
Vare outlined a four-step cost optimization framework: reduce capital expenditures through efficient infrastructure spending, minimize operating expenses through intelligent charge management, offset costs with distributed energy resources like solar, and eventually leverage vehicle-to-grid capabilities as the technology matures.
He pointed to Turlock School District as an example: “Right now, their school buses are running just all on solar, the way their solar production works based on that circuit. They’re operating just all on solar for the most part on sunny days.”
What Happens When Vehicles Arrive First
The nightmare scenario many fleets face: vehicles delivered before charging infrastructure is ready. The panel’s consensus was blunt.
“You’re behind paywall. There’s no other way around it,” Colbert said, describing infrastructure development’s “iron triangle” of cost, quality, and speed. “Speed is probably the hardest out of that whole triangle.”
Vare recounted one customer who needed to be online in two months: “The only way we could do it was with backup power. We had generators, we had diesel gensets, which, being an electric-first company, it’s not something we like to promote. But it was the only way to bridge the gap. Those kind of creative solutions are okay for now, but they don’t scale.”