Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Planning for Alameda County, CA

As the County continues to add more electric vehicles to its fleet, they have also added many EV chargers to sites and buildings that were never anticipated to carry this additional electric load. From 2015 – 2018, Optony worked with the County to review the electrical impacts, and to design both cost saving and building electrical solutions to enable further EV charger expansion at the County’s principal fleet hosting sites. Battery energy storage systems are a viable solution to respond to EV circuit overload while providing simultaneous solutions to high utility demand charges caused by these spikes in EV charger load. To aid the County in battery procurement, Optony began by creating a proprietary model of battery performance and using this model to cost-optimize the battery system specification against the EV charger current and forecasted load. Optony’s latest software tool for EV planning is the Electric Vehicle Meter Disaggregated Cost Optimize Simulator (EV-MDOCS). Optony has modeled battery systems configuration and specifications for multiple battery chemistries including lithium ion, lithium iron phosphate, and zinc bromine flow batteries.

See Alameda County’s Electric Vehicle Charging Locations and Pricing plans here.