The electrification of trucking fleets will require utilities to adopt smart grid technologies and design new rates, says a representative of one California utility already pushing ahead with EV charging programs to meet the state’s goal of 5 million electric vehicles on its roads by 2030.

Natasha Contreras, San Diego Gas & Electric’s (NYSE:SRE) EV customer program manager, made the case for a slow, steady and smart buildout of EV charging infrastructure rather than massive projects during a webinar Monday sponsored by the D.C.-based Smart Electric Power Alliance.

“At the end of the day, it’s not all about building infrastructure to accommodate EV load,” Contreras told other SEPA panelists. “It’s about adopting new technologies that can help us maximize the use of the existing grid and maximize the use of the abundant solar we do have.

“It’s a matter of designing the right price signals to encourage people to charge during grid-friendly hours,” she added. “And we have demonstrated through our existing EV rates that we can indeed shift EV load by sending the right price signals.

“Although there are currently more than 70,000 EVs in our service territory, we have not had to make significant upgrades to our grid to accommodate that EV load. It remains to be seen how much investment we need to make to the grid. But our goal is certainly to minimize the costs for our customers.”

Although the focus of the discussion was “fleet electrification,” discussion moderator Molly Middaugh — director of business development at EVgo, a Los Angeles-based company that has built more than 800 fast-charging stations in 34 states — kept the focus on “last mile” delivery fleets, including smaller companies that may have to rely on their utilities for advice and directions.

To that point, Andrew Price — business development manager with Clean Power Research, a Napa, Calif.-based company that partners with utilities across the U.S. preparing to integrate EVs into their distribution grids — said forward-looking utilities are already offering fleet electrification advice.

“In addition to designing and rolling out infrastructure programs, many are developing fleet advisory services to advise on the costs of charging, total cost of ownership … suitable vehicle models, and ultimately offer best practice fleet charging guidance,” he said.

“A good example is our partner DTE Energy and their E-Fleets program, which is being launched later this year. This program supports fleet operators looking to electrify, provides rebates for customer-sited charging infrastructure and funds a portion of service connection upgrades.

“Noting that very few commercial and industrial companies have enough on-site power to charge many EVs,” Price said one answer to the expected surge in demand when EV charging systems are built is vehicle-to-grid-integration (VGI), enabling an EV or a fleet of EVs, while in charging docks, to sell power back to the system if it’s needed.

“I think VGI is critical to all vehicle electrification applications, and it really must be incentivized,” Price said.

Examples of VGI strategies include not only time-of-day pricing, which encourages EV owners to charge their batteries at off-peak hours, but also much more sophisticated integration systems, algorithmically controlled to limit charging to certain times and that also enable a utility to draw measured amounts of power from EVs connected to chargers. In other words, the power can flow in both directions.

Contreras said SDG&E is building a five-year VGI pilot project with a local school district in San Diego County that will connect six school buses to 60-kW “bi-directional, direct-current fast chargers.”

“The batteries on board the buses will soak up energy during downtime when clean energy is abundant on the grid — at midday, when solar energy production is at its peak — and return the energy to the grid in the evening as solar energy fades away,” she explained.

“The goal is to help ease the strain on the grid, reduce energy costs for the school district and explore new technology to support the pathway to net zero. This pilot is the first of its kind to test advanced use cases of vehicle-to-grid technology,” Contreras said.

Price said utilities with residential time-of-day rates would have a better chance of managing the demand from EVs, whether that demand is coming from vehicles owned by individual motorists or commercial fleets.

“We all know that the vast majority of charging takes place at home, so the continued rollout of residential time varying rates will be an increasingly valuable tool for utilities to manage the costs associated with EV charging,” he said.

Consumer EVs or electrified school buses are just at the edge of the transformation of commercial fleets, especially the “last-mile” delivery services, said Frank Barton Sidles, EV fleet business development manager for BP Advanced Mobility (NYSE:BP).

“The demand response programs are going to play a critical part of managing the grid and the energy, so as to hopefully keeping the investments in the utility upgrades as low as possible to be able to allow for the greatest electrification as soon as possible,” he said.

And while VGI arrangements will play “a critical part” in enabling utilities to offer charging services, commercial trucking fleets will have their own cost issues and will be most concerned with having the power when they need it.

“What the fleets want is … to make sure that their vehicles have the power and the range to be able to do the route that they’re supposed to be doing. Fleets have that strict scheduling regime of when they need to be on the road,” Sidles said.