Shana Patadia is head of business development at Synop. Britta Gross is director of transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute.
Despite challenges over the past year, commercial and public fleets in the U.S. continue to electrify. However, many fleet operators are discovering that the biggest challenges often lie not in vehicle or charger technology, but in connecting to and integrating with the electric grid.
Many U.S. utilities offer incentive programs to customers and fleet operators across their service territories. These range from small pilot programs (dozens to a few hundred ports) to mainstream make-ready/rebate programs (hundreds or thousands of charging ports over three to five years) to large-scale deployments, mostly in California and New York, of tens of thousands of ports over multiyear periods. SoCal Edison’s Charge Ready program, for instance, involves $436 million to bring online over 30,000 EV charging ports; in Michigan, DTE Electric’s Transportation Electrification Plan would support approximately 19,300 chargers.
However, even as many utilities encourage charging hub deployments, they and others across the country are also trying to manage unprecedented load growth driven largely by electrification and data centers. Studies from the Clean Energy Group and the U.S. Department of Energy, among others, have shown that distribution system upgrades and interconnection reviews can take over a year, particularly for sites with multi-megawatt charging needs. The grid will get there — but not overnight.
So how can fleet owners, charge point operators, and utilities overcome their fleet-grid integration challenges?
Focus on grid planning early in the electrification process
Fleet customers understandably begin electrification planning by estimating energy use (e.g., annual kilowatt-hours required to charge a vehicle). But when fleets approach utilities with energy-based assumptions alone, projects often stall later in the process, after site designs are complete and expectations are set. That’s because utilities are tasked with maintaining a reliable electric grid plan for coincident power demand. A single depot charging dozens or hundreds of vehicles can create sharp, synchronized peaks, often in constrained windows. These peaks, not total energy consumption, inform utility infrastructure needs.
Tools such as EPRI’s eRoadMAP, which provides yearly U.S. EV demand projections to 2030 and beyond, can support early, grid-aware planning. EPRI has also built GridFAST, which directly addresses the peak demand/total energy use disconnect to make electrification easier for both utilities and organizations.
GridFAST helps fleet customers translate duty cycles and charging behavior into utility-relevant load profiles, making power (not just energy) needs explicit early in the process. It doesn’t solve all interconnection or grid upgrade issues, but it enables more realistic conversations about hosting capacity, peak demand, and operational tradeoffs before projects become set in stone.
Utilities benefit from clearer forecasts, while fleets gain a more predictable and streamlined pathway through the interconnection process. This collaboration enables more efficient project planning, reduces the likelihood of costly redesigns, and supports utilities in their work to deliver reliable, cost-effective service as transportation electrification scales.
These early planning capabilities complement GridFAST’s core strength: standardizing the pre-interconnection process and helping both sides engage constructively and confidently from Day 1, ideally years ahead of the actual site needs.
Supplement planning with charging management software
Even with better planning, many fleet projects may still encounter limits because utility distribution systems simply were not built for rapid and concentrated electrification load growth.
Distribution upgrades typically require multiyear planning, permitting and construction cycles. But waiting for full upgrades before energizing a site can hinder fleet owner goals such as emissions reductions or operational savings. They can also hinder utility goals.
This is where we’ve seen charging management software, or CMS, play a critical role.
When grid capacity is limited, managed charging provides one of the most cost-effective and fastest paths to bringing a site online. Modern CMS systems can:
- Manage site-level power caps.
- Coordinate charging across multiple chargers and vehicle types.
- Integrate on-site solar and storage.
- Adjust charging in response to utility rates, demand charges, or grid events.
- Mitigate charging peak demands.
For instance, a food and beverage distribution center faced a strict 80 kW site limit from the utility but wanted to increase its EV delivery fleet from 20 to 66 vehicles. A CMS that coordinates chargers, vehicles and mobile batteries, was able to supply up to 406 kW supplemental power with 880 kWh storage, delivering up to 480 kW at the site without exceeding utility limits while also maintaining charger availability and daily fleet readiness.
As charging management becomes more sophisticated, customer sites can do more than avoid problems (e.g., decrease charging in response to demand charges) — they can actively support the grid during peak periods via vehicle-to-grid programs.
A CMS can also reduce daily peak EV charging demand. A CalSTART report on managed charging for medium- and heavy-duty fleets showed that it could reduce peak load by 25%, from 200 kW to 150 kW, compared with an unmanaged scenario. In addition, an Atlas Public Policy report on charging infrastructure for electric school buses estimated that LA Metro could reduce its charging capacity needs from initial estimates of 20 MW to 10-12 MW — a decrease of approximately 50%.
By orchestrating load to stay within interconnection/site limits and responding dynamically to both fleet and grid conditions, CMS systems take vehicle charging from being an inflexible load to a controllable one. They allow fleets to operate safely within existing infrastructure and enable utilities to better manage their infrastructure investments while staying confident that site limits will be respected.
From grid risk to grid resource
Better vehicles or faster chargers (i.e., hardware improvements), while important, won’t scale or simplify fleet electrification on their own. In our experience, early utility-customer collaboration on planning and operations is critical to deploying at scale and should be treated as a single, continuous process.
GridFAST helps fleets and utilities align early on what electrification should look like from a grid perspective. Charging management software ensures that those expectations hold when projects meet real-world constraints such as limited infrastructure, evolving rates, and operational variability.
The grid will expand: Utilities are investing billions to make that happen. In the meantime, managed charging offers a practical bridge and a way to electrify today while building toward the system of the future.
Unmanaged load growth from electrification and data centers could potentially run up against the limitations of the electric grid. But thoughtfully planned deployments with flexible operations provide one answer to some of the grid’s present challenges.
