California leads the nation with its EnergIIZE Commercial Vehicles Project, which provides incentives for zero-emission fleet charging infrastructure equipment. What has been the impact of this been on electric vehicle uptake?
A: EnergIIZE in particular, which is for commercial vehicle infrastructure, has a series of funding rounds. And we recently launched the first of the funding rounds.
EnergIIZE in particular is the first of its kind and the largest, medium and heavy-duty incentive program in the market. So, we’re really hopeful that that’s going to continue to drive the uptake of electric vehicles. The industry is really evolving rapidly to address the concerns that we’ve been hearing particularly early on in some of these vehicle developments and deployments about range, anxiety and the different duty unique duty cycles, particularly in commercial vehicles.
The ways in which commercial vehicles are utilised are quite different in terms of duty cycles. So, their charging needs are different as well and that has led to some issues in terms of transitioning fleets to zero emission. So, through this kind of incentive program, and then complimenting that with incentives on the vehicle side as well, we’re really hoping to drive a more rapid uptake in, in this transition to zero emission fleets. And hopefully it works because infrastructure is the key part of everything.
