Yes, there are probably very few outlets where mail trucks currently park. These things are parked in the middle of parking lots, not in garages. And you need more than one outlet, you need one for every truck that parks there. And I am sure no current USPS office has power service hooked up for several hundred amps of draw that was never anticipated to be used.
There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.
These vehicles ARE being phased in slowly. And installing 100-200 Amps of commercial service is cheap, and I actually think would largely be unnecessary as they can be set to charge at night when office demand is super low.
It takes way less time than building these vehicles will and can be done cheaply with local electricians. It’s strange how common magical thinking about EVs is, like electricity is this newfangled thing that we don’t understand and need massively new, poorly understood infrastructure. We don’t. And that’s a huge advantage.
Many of these buildings are not owned by the USPS. Many of these buildings do not have adequate electrical right now. USPS has 30k buildings.
Paying someone to build vehicles is much different than retrofitting buildings, each in a different jurisdiction, in many cases that you do not own, to allow plugging in a huge number of vehicles in all sorts of weather conditions - in the middle of often uncovered parking.
I am not saying and have not said electricity is the hard part. The logistics of steering the world's highest volume postal operation (with financial issues as it stands) is the hard part. The USPS handles 43% of the world's mail. There are no projects of this size that aren't phased in, which is apparently what they are doing. Some of these vehicles will be electric, so it stands to reason that they will also be building out the equipment and processes required to roll them out.
Except these vehicles are not going to be immediately dumped onto all USPS parking lots. They are going to be built over a period of years. Adding an outlet for each vehicle would cost on the order of 1% of the vehicle cost and would be paid for in fuel savings within a couple months.
Look, I don't know where this idea came from that electricity is this hard problem. It's not. As it is now, many of these LLVs have to be fueled sometimes multiple times per week. Simply plugging into an external outlet not only is cheap but will actually save time.
People who do not have electric cars keep looking for an inventing some kind of "gotcha," but they really are this easy. You literally can just use a normal external outlet to charge them, and even if you want faster charging (totally unnecessary and probably undesirable for this application), it costs maybe $1200 to get an RV hookup (equivalent to L2). I charge from an old dryer outlet, although sometimes use an exterior 120V. It really is that easy. In fact, I don't know if big USPS locations have refueling depots like bus depots do, but if they went electric, they'd be unnecessary and could be removed.
Parking spaces in the US are, by and large, not commonly populated with dryer outlets or RV hookups. This is a common issue that affects EV adoption, particularly when people lease the property where they park their car.
You are entirely correct that the concept of an electrical outlet is not difficult. Commercial real estate is a bit harder, however.
Bear in mind that this contract is for a company to build trucks, and what you describe would be work that is out of scope anyway. The current fleet is way past its replacement date, and needed to be replaced about 10 years ago already. The USPS has funding issues at the moment and it is entirely possible that they cannot afford to do everything at once.
While you claim that it is "1% of the vehicle cost", I think some quick math would indicate that there's no way this is right. 4.8 million dollars to retrofit 40,000 locations for EV charging? That's $120 per station. You won't even be able to pull a work permit for $120.
I still don't understand your point. For your argument to be valid, you'd have to assert that a factory can build new mail trucks faster than you could add charging points.
There will be one factory pumping out cars on a specialised, serial production line. It will be competing with 30 thousand locations operating in parallel.
LLVs are past their expiration date everywhere and likely need replaced all over the country. But, it doesn’t make sense to add charging capability ad hoc for a single parking space in a lot when a new vehicle is sent out - the marginal cost of each space is not linear — you’d retrofit an entire parking lot at one time.
If 10 locations have 10 existing vehicles each, and all of them need to replace one failing LLV, going 100% electric for new vehicles means you need 10 vehicles but a retrofit for 100 parking spaces. It does not make sense to tear up a parking lot every year for one new vehicle over the next 10 years.
You wouldn’t replace mail trucks individually, you would fully transition each location as a unit.
Also, you overestimate the complexity of installing charging points. In many cases the parking will be directly against the post office building. In many cases you would only have to dig a small trench. In some cases you would string up a new overhead wire. When you’re doing 10 at a time, this isn’t complicated or expensive on a per vehicle basis.
1% of the 6 billion total estimate sounds like it's in the ball park.
But that's an expected expenditure over 10 years, and you have to have the ability to charge before you can use the vehicles. That's probably another important factor, because LLVs are past their expiration date now. You're right that it makes sense to upgrade an entire facility's electricals at once. That's almost certainly what will happen over the course of the rollout, but the need for replacing LLVs is likely evenly distributed among locations.
It seems like the right way to charge a fleet of vehicles if your site has limited power is to have some central device that coordinates charging rates, so that together they only pull as much current as is available. You could also set priorities. That way you can install as many charge ports as you want, and just have to worry about whether you have enough power to charge all your vehicles every day.
I don't know if that sort of setup is commonly done or is allowed by code.
Well, you've probably got 14 to 16 hours of time to phase that charge across your fleet. You're still going to need a lot of outlets, but you only need to feed power to 20-25% of them at a time.
In many locations the charging window is going to be a lot smaller than you think with longer routes and later deliveries pushing parts of the fleet into sub-10 hour charging windows. Now you have a need to shuffle power and charging across this local fleet in the middle of the night. Who exactly is going to be doing this? If you are automating it then you are making some very large bets on the charging infrastructure being 100% reliable.
It is a problem that sounds simple at first but becomes more complex when you actually dig into the details. A fleet that is ICE-ready on day one but which can be retrofitted to EV means that you are able to deploy something that works now and pick locations to test EV and all of the details that are involved in the process by doing partial upgrades as various locations. Overall, sounds like current plan is the smart one.
There's no way to do a project this big without phasing it in. The USPS has many tens of thousands of buildings.