“Flipturn’s product considerably reduces peak power demand and charging costs, and provides in-depth visibility into charger reliability. It is constantly improving and continuing to address our needs as we scale.”
Jeff McAleese,
Senior Manager Tech Sort Automation & Visibility at Purolator
Reducing peak demand costs
Purolator runs a consistent daily delivery schedule, where their vehicles return to the depot at around the same time between 4:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Vehicles used to begin charging as soon as they parked, causing a huge daily spike in Purolator’s electricity usage. Utilities usually bill for electricity in two components: overall energy consumption (in kWh), and the peak power demand (in kW). As a result, these spikes resulted in an increased peak demand cost for Purolator.
With Flipturn’s dynamic power management, Purolator has significantly lowered these power spikes, reducing the peak demand component of their utility costs by over 50% on some sites, while ensuring all vehicles are still on time for morning departure.
Richmond site
Peak demand reduced from 355 kW to 140 kW (–60%) across 60 chargers, decreasing peak demand costs by $2,680 a month.
Quebec City site
Peak demand reduced from 208 kW to 124 kW (–40%) across 34 chargers, decreasing peak demand costs by $1,400 a month.
Improving charger reliability at scale
As Purolator scales their operations to hundreds of chargers, they need sophisticated tools to spot issues and maintain charger reliability. Flipturn provides a range of functionality around charger health, helping Purolator quickly identify issues and take action to ensure the reliability of their critical charging infrastructure.
- Real-time visibility into charger connectivity, faults, and error codes
- Alerts when chargers go offline or charging ends unexpectedly, so site operators can take action swiftly
- Reports to summarize charger health and make it easy to identify the lowest-performing chargers
- Tools for issue resolution, from resetting a single charger to pushing remote firmware updates across the fleet
Multi-site visibility and management
Purolator operates on a national scale, with charging depots all across Canada. Their leadership needs to be able to identify broad trends across their operations, while also being able to drill down into specific sites and chargers. In close collaboration with Purolator, Flipturn is continuously improving its multi-site visibility and management features:
- Reports on energy usage and power demand across multiple sites with different utility rates
- Real-time status and reports across all sites at once, or filtered site by site
- Fine-grained permissions to give users access to only a subset of sites
- Showing data in each site’s local time zone, making it easy to communicate with on-the-ground operations personnel
