AMPLY POWER SIMPLIFIES ELECTRIC VEHICLE INTEGRATION
Electrical vehicles are popping up all over the roads, even in fleet vehicles. If you’ve considered converting your fleet, chances are you’ve wondered how you’d keep your vehicles charged and ready to go exactly when you need them. We chatted with Vic Shao of AMPLY Power, a charging-as-a-service provider, to learn how fleets can benefit from AMPLY Power’s charging solutions.
MWS: WHAT IS AMPLY POWER AND ITS ELECTRICAL SOLUTION?
SHAO:
As with many new technologies, certain aspects don’t “take off” by themselves. End-users aren’t likely to alter their ways of operation until they know the new way is reliable and at a low cost. Think of solar power: an industry that didn’t take off until a developer absorbed all the upfront costs and risks. That’s the idea and technology behind what AMPLY Power is planning to do with the electric fleet industry. AMPLY Power interjects certainty and reliability for electric fleet managers through fixed prices on electric power.
MWS: WHY SHOULD FLEETS USE AMPLY?
SHAO:
Customers I’ve talked to have been buying diesel and CNG for decades. They are familiar with those structures: how to budget and forecast pricing. But when it comes to electricity, it’s a whole new ballgame, and fleet operators are really struggling. Unlike diesel, there are 3,300 electricity providers across the country. You could drive five miles down the road, and all the sudden you’re in a different utility company territory. This could mean different tariff pricing with demand charges and time-of-use schedules. When you enter these different territories, your fuel provider is suddenly completely different, sometimes up to a 100 percent price difference.
This makes forecasting and budgeting fuel almost impossible. Fleets that can’t predict fuel pricing can’t comfortably bid projects or establish budgets. AMPLY Power’s services eliminate this problem for fleet owners.
MWS: HOW DOES AMPLY WORK?
SHAO:
I spent 10 years in renewable energy: solar, wind projects, and energy storage projects. We didn’t expect our customers to buy solar panels, spec out converters, tracking systems, and other technology know-how and specifications and installation that goes along with it. These are things end-users don’t often care to deal with themselves. As a solar developer, we packaged and installed all these components and established utility connection to the grid beforehand. Once the project was performing and generating electricity, we sold the energy output to a customer for the next 10 to 20 years on a fixed-cost basis. We got rid of all the upfront work and the financing involved to put the project together. We only billed the customer by the output or the performance. In fact as the developer, if we fell short, were delayed, or the system was not delivering on the full output that was promised, we actually ended up owing the customer damages on a performance obligation charge.
That’s the idea AMPLY is bringing to the charging space, and we want our customers to buy the output—in this case, electric miles driven. The chargers themselves are very new pieces of hardware and technology with little knowledge on reliability, performance, and uptime guarantees. Add that to utility connections, differing jurisdictions, and ensuring your vehicles are all up and charging at the right times during the day with the lowest cost of electricity as possible, and charging an electric fleet becomes a headache.
AMPLY bundles all of that into a structure that pays for the equipment, handles the integration with the utilities, and gets everything up and running before services are offered to a customer. Customers are billed only by the number of electric miles used. We’re essentially creating a similar structure for electric fleets as we were in renewable energy.
MWS: WHAT’S NEXT FOR AMPLY POWER?
SHAO:
What my team and I have done prior to AMPLY was collectively deploy hundreds of megawatts of solar energy storage, and my cofounder has deployed tens of thousands of chargers all across the country, so what I’m describing isn’t exactly new to our team. We want to interject our experience and know-how into the fleet charging industry.
There are a number of customers currently in the negotiation stage to partner with AMPLY Power’s charging solution. AMPLY Power will have its first set of deployments in the second quarter of this year. AMPLY Power also sponsors and will have a booth at the Advanced Clean Transportation Expo in Long Beach, California, April 23-26.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Vic Shao is the founder and CEO of AMPLY Power, a charging-as-a-service company that de-risks and accelerates the adoption of electric-powered bus and truck fleets. Before AMPLY Power, Shao served as the founder and CEO of Green Charge Networks (GCN), an energy storage company that manages electric demand and renewable deployment for customers. Find out more, visit www.amplypower.com.
MODERN WORK TRUCK SOLUTIONS: MARCH 2019 ISSUE
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