The facility is part of the Helix Water District’s Operations Center in El Cajon and will include 87 high-speed chargers ranging from 40 kilowatts to 640 kilowatts, with a total charging capacity of 5.9 megawatts, which is enough power to support 4,425 to 5,900 homes.
The depot is expected to come online in late March or early April. And because Helix’s fleet currently includes only a small fraction of zero-emission vehicles, the district will be able to share its charging site with other nearby public-sector agencies.
“We’re really all in this together … We need an infrastructure that can support the greater good of the public, and of government,” Kevin Miller, Helix’s operations director, said. The district provides water to some 278,000 residents in eastern San Diego County.
The charging depot represents an $11 million investment by the district, funded largely by grants of about $10.5 million, from sources including the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), and San Diego Gas and Electric. The California Advanced Clean Fleets regulation is a key driver behind its development. It requires that all new fleet vehicles in each class must be zero emission starting in 2030 — an extension from 2027 CARB made in October.
Organizations like Helix face multiple challenges when transitioning to EVs. For starters, vehicle classes like dump trucks are still largely powered by internal combustion engines. And fleet vehicles need to be ready to go at a moment’s notice at any time, officials said.
“The nature of the work we do in the water industry doesn’t allow us to park the fleet all night long to trickle charge up until the next morning,” Miller said. “And that really dictated the size of the system, of each of those Level 3 chargers, and how we would optimize charging to make sure we could respond in the event of an emergency at any point in time.”
In the coming years, the district will need to convert more than 100 of its vehicles to zero emission. Most of these are medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, but some are dump trucks and supersized pickups like the Ford F-350.
A Helix analysis explored the power needs at the agency’s depot facility, and the cost of developing the infrastructure and transitioning the fleet to zero-emission vehicles. It also included keeping the fleet at its current number of vehicles rather than increasing the number to compensate for vehicles being out of service due to operational limitations related to charging.
“So that’s what we designed our system to accommodate,” said Joe Garuba, Helix’s facilities manager. “We also didn’t want to charge during peak hours. We didn’t want to have to add staff.”
All of these parameters and operational needs will be fed into the depot’s nerve center, its charge management system, provided by BetterFleet.
“This project demonstrates how advanced EV fleet management, smart load control, and mission-critical design principles can come together to support real-world utility operations,” Daniel Hilson, BetterFleet CEO, said in a statement.
Similar technology is used by public agencies like the city of Roseville, Calif., a suburb of Sacramento which is transitioning its city and transit fleets to EVs. There, AI and machine learning created a digital twin of the transit system, optimizing the management of electric buses and other vehicles, and for a number of priority metrics like cost-per-mile. The water district spent nearly three years exploring fleet management technologies.
“There’s a whole set of parameters that gets put into play,” Garuba said. “There has to be a pretty extensive AI component to it, that it can pick up the dynamic charging schedule, and then overlay that with all the charging priorities that we preset by category.”
The system must then consider the state of charge for each vehicle, and its assigned agency — so that Helix can recoup the expense of charging vehicles from other government entities.
Electrification will help Helix keep up with state regulations around fleet transitions to zero-emission vehicles, and it will also save the district money.
“What we’re seeing in our current fleet is it’s about one-fifth as expensive to operate an electric vehicle as it is to operate a gas vehicle, from a fueling standpoint,” Garuba said, noting this differential can fluctuate “greatly” depending on electricity rates.
“The final piece is the infrastructure. And I think that number is so expensive, it historically throws off the whole equation,” he said, indicating without the grant funding to cover the infrastructure costs, the project would have faced significant headwinds.
“This project will not only benefit Helix, and its ratepayers, but it’s going to benefit the community at large, and ultimately, save folks money. And improve the air quality,” Miller said. “So these are all, I think, wins as far as this goes. But we could not have done it independently.”
