US Air Force, Defense Innovation Unit partner for EV charging as a service
Photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash.
The Department of the Air Force (DAF) joined forces with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to deploy Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging as a Service (CaaS) solutions at six US Air Force installations.
The EV CaaS project puts the DAF’s Climate Action Plan into operation, as well as Executive Orders 14008 and 14057, all of which are aimed at mitigating the risk due to the speed and impact of climate change.
The DAF-DIU EV CaaS project represents an approach for the government to engage with industry partners and meet the growing demands of government-owned vehicles (GOVs) and privately-owned vehicles (POVs).
The goal of the DAF-DIU partnership is to prototype a CaaS business model that can rapidly scale across the DAF to support the Department’s transition to a decarbonised fleet.
DIU sourced solutions from across the industry through its Commercial Solutions Opening process, resulting in the selection of TechFlow and Leidos. The chosen vendors will deploy prototypical EV charging facilities and will kick off the effort by analysing differentials across owner/operator, lend/lease, and other potential business models.
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“These projects are underway and in various stages of implementation to meet the Air Force’s diverse needs,” said Justin Martin, DIU energy program manager, on the EV as a charging partnership. “This project is about more than delivering infrastructure — we’re prototyping a process that wraps around a business case for electrotechnology.”
The selected vendor technology platforms are intended to offer different ways to deliver capacity for commercial electric energy solutions to safely, reliably and cost-effectively meet government requirements. For example, user data gained from operating different EVs, charging facilities, and differing enabling technologies could enable the DAF and DIU to acquire valuable information comparing electric and liquid fuel fleet logistics.
“We’re excited to deliver robust EV CaaS infrastructure that shares financial risk between the DAF and industry partners while promoting expanded access to charging for GOVs and POVs alike,” said Martin.
One of the partnership’s key milestones is identifying how an industry partner can leverage independent financing to support the rapid growth of charging infrastructure across installations and recovery of investments with cost-effective charging rates and contractual terms.
Originally published on Power Grid.
