EVs Will Soon Rule the Road

By Erin Madison

Electric vehicle charging stations – what’s the difference?

Anyone who watched the 2022 Super Bowl knows car manufacturers are investing heavily in electric vehicles.

“Just about every other Super Bowl commercial was for a new model of an electric car,” said Dan Rausch, Treasurer and Corporate Development Officer for NorthWestern Energy.

Dan expects nearly all new car offerings to be electric by the late 2020s.

“We’re not that far away from the preponderance of all new cars being electric,” he said. ”It’s changing, and it’s changing in a hurry.”

Used cars, of course, will still be available with traditional gas or diesel engines.

More electric cars mean more demand for electricity, and at North- Western Energy, Dan and his team have been working to make sure we’ll be able to meet that demand. Every electric car uses between 150 to 300 kilowatt hours of electricity per month.

“Our challenge for corridor charging will be to make sure we have power available and sufficient EV charging ports in our service territory,” Dan said.

NorthWestern Energy has begun to install electric vehicle, or EV, charging stations across our service territory. This year, we are in the process of installing two high-speed charging stations in Mitchell and Chamberlain, South Dakota. We previously installed two charging stations in Missoula, Montana.

We’ve also partnered with Town Pump, a Montana-based gas station and convince store chain, to install charging stations at nine Town Pump locations across the state. Each location will have one high-speed and one Level 2 charger.

These charging stations are mainly used by out-of-state drivers who are passing through, maybe to Mount Rushmore in South Dakota or Glacier and Yellowstone national parks in Montana. Charging stations have electronic payment options, similar to a gas pump, allowing drivers to pay to charge their cars.

NorthWestern also supplies the electricity to power nine different Tesla charging stations in Montana and one in South Dakota.

We’re working to make sure we can meet the demand for electricity as more of our local customers begin charging EVs at home. Most, if not all, electric vehicles come with a Level 1 charger that customers can plug into a standard 120-volt household outlet. These chargers are much slower than the chargers

found at gas stations or in parking lots – they take almost all night to fully charge an EV battery.

Customers in our service territory have been slower to adopt electric vehicles than in some other parts of the country. Dan expects to see an uptick in our electrical customers who own EVs and charge them at home around 2025 or 2026.

The at-home chargers can typically be set on a timer so the car won’t start charging until the middle of the night. That’s when there’s the least demand on our system, which makes it easy to supply energy for those chargers.

Level 2 and high-speed chargers are trickier, in terms of electricity supply. Because high-speed chargers are so fast, they pull a large amount of energy in a short period of time.

“That will be one of the challenges,” Dan said. “We can’t control when someone pulls up and starts charging.”

NorthWestern Energy is in the early stages of looking at those capacity issues and developing solutions. We’re also looking at the possibility of having specific tariffs for cities, school districts or other entities that might want to charge a whole fleet of electric vehicles, such as school or city buses.

There’s no doubt electric vehicles will soon be commonplace, but Dan expects it won’t take long for EVs to be replaced by newer technology, possibly hydrogen-powered cars.

“I am optimistic about the growing number of electric vehicles in the next decade,” Dan said.

A NorthWestern Energy electric vehicle charges outside our Bozeman, Montana, office.

EV charging continues to grow

EV charging station volumes continue to trend upward significantly. This chart shows the historical usage of the 10 Tesla chargers that receive electricity from NorthWestern Energy.

Electrifying our fleet

NorthWestern Energy is in the process of deploying six plug-in electric hybrid bucket trucks across our service territory. These bucket trucks range in both size and plug-in technology packages. Four of the new trucks are small buckets (40 feet) with idle mitigation and cab comfort. This technology will reduce idle time while allowing the operator to set the cab temperature to a comfortable level without idling. These new bucket trucks are headed to Helena, Bozeman, Yankton and Huron. One new 60-foot bucket with idle mitigation and cab comfort will be used in Huron.

The final truck, a 48-foot bucket for Billings Substations, will have both idle mitigation and cab comfort, in addition to Electric Power Take Off (E-PTO) technology. The E-PTO feature allows the boom to fly on the battery, reducing noise for the operator and increasing fuel savings.

All six trucks have telematics capabilities that will provide real-time data as to the battery run times, PTO run times and overall analysis of the hybrid system. This data will be used to evaluate the trucks and offer insight into the effectiveness of the system, best practices, and help provide quantitative data for future plug-in electric vehicle applications.

These new bucket trucks are part of our commitment to replace 30% of our light-duty vehicles (cars through half-ton trucks) with electric alternatives by 2030. We will also replace vehicles at the end of their life with electric alternatives. By 2030, we plan to replace 20% of new medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, 30% of new bucket trucks and 100% of new forklifts with electric alternatives.

“Investing in electric technologies will reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as fuel consumption and maintenance costs,” said Dan Fitzpatrick, North- Western Energy’s manager of fleet and equipment.