Originally posted on the ECOreport.
After a year-long test of two Model S P85D loaner cars and the all-electric BMW i3, an important announcement was made this morning. Greenlots, the City of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and BMW of North America are partnering to launch the new Los Angeles EV police fleet.
Los Angeles’ EV Police Fleet
“The city of Los Angeles has a plan to make 80% of all fleet purchases electric by 2025. LAPD is the first department to start moving towards that initiative. Their goal is to get to over 500 EVs over the next five years. In this initial phase, Greenlots is supplying 100 Level 2 chargers and 4 DC fast chargers, along with our smart charging platform that bridges the electrical mobility demand-side management behind the meter for energy storage, which enables the LAPD to scale up the number of vehicles they have without needing to scale up the infrastructure every time they deploy a new vehicle,” explained said Brett Hauser, CEO of Greenlots.
Those first 100 vehicles will be 2016 BMW i3s, with an approximate range of 85 miles on a charge.
When Level 2 Chargers Can Be Advantageous
If the number of fast chargers seems less than what might be expected for a police force, that’s because these are not meant to be patrol or pursuit vehicles.
“They are being used primarily in the motor pool. That is to say, they will be used by LAPD officers to go back and forth between meetings or other point-to-point drives. As such, they pose no threat to public safety as response vehicles are concerned since they will not be responding to emergencies,” said a spokesperson for the City of Los Angeles.
“If you think about the characteristics of a DC fast charger, it is a full charge in 26 minutes. It is spikey or peaky in nature and that can have an impact on the overall cost of energy consumption (especially during peak demand) and you might not have enough capacity to handle multiple DC fast chargers. Greenlots looks at a wholistic solution, especially when it comes to DC fast charging. You look for ways to mitigate that impact. That is through response and through energy storage to provide capacity when it is needed,” explained Hauser.
He added, “In practicality, a DC Fast Charger will cost four or five times as much as a Level 2 Charger. When you have an initial 100 vehicles, there is no need to do a fast charge for each of these and you are not going to put a DC fast charger at every parking stall, but you can put a Level 2.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy Greenlots