Earlier this year, Ford Pro and Atlanta-based energy provider Southern Company launched a six-month pilot program to gain valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with managed charging for electric commercial fleet operations and its impact on the electric grid.

The pilot demonstrated how Southern Company can shift charging for its fleet into lower cost periods, respond to grid signals, and maintain operational readiness.¹ These learnings can help develop a framework to assist commercial customers with electrification at scale, inform future EV customer programs, and bolster energy reliability.

The Pilot

The pilot leveraged Southern Company’s more than 200 existing Ford F-150® Lightning® trucks and over 150 Level 2 AC Ford Pro Chargers at its subsidiaries. Ford Pro Intelligence monitored and analyzed data from vehicles and chargers, giving the company visibility into charging patterns and energy use.

With a diverse fleet that spans multiple states, Southern Company’s fleet operations provided the ideal testbed. The pilot showed how their large enterprise fleet could leverage managed charging capabilities to responsibly manage energy demands while ensuring their fleet drivers always have access to charging when and where they need it.

The Results: Energy Savings and Insights for Future Grid and Customer Benefits

Intelligent energy management played an important role during the 6-month pilot. For Southern Company, Ford Pro’s software became a strategic tool, allowing them to control when their chargers were available and to see the impact on energy usage when charging abilities were managed during specific peak-charging timeframes.

“Ford Pro’s energy management algorithm was able to throttle chargers to avoid windows of peak grid demand, shifting charging within the drivers’ existing charging window while still ensuring that drivers got the energy they expected out of a charging session,” explained Tom Canada, fleet electrification project manager at Georgia Power, a Southern Company subsidiary. “The insights gleaned from this pilot represent valuable learnings 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 managed charging for their fleets.”

The impact was immediate. Ford Pro managed strategic demand response tests that leveraged its charging software to schedule charging pauses at specified times of high demand and peak pricing. Southern Company’s fleet maintained operational continuity throughout, demonstrating that dynamic fleet charging has the ability to respond to utility signals while protecting business-critical uptime. As a result, Southern Company was able to demonstrate the ability to reduce total charging demand by 0.5 megawatts (500 kW) of power during a 30-minute demand response event, averaging roughly 10 kW of savings per charger.¹

This demand response test was executed on three occasions at different times of the day and for varying lengths of time throughout the pilot. It demonstrated energy savings potential, grid efficiency, and maintained charger reliability for fleet drivers. Ford Pro’s software proved helpful in continuing to provide the visibility and control needed to better understand the pilot outcomes and make future data-driven decisions for fleet charging capabilities.

By combining data straight from Ford vehicles and chargers with its software solutions, Ford Pro is empowering companies like Southern Company to envision potential EV charging efficiency and savings for both EV fleet customers and grid reliability for all.

About the author: Britta Farrow is a member of the Ford Pro communications team.

Originally published on the From The Road blog.