Los Alamos BPU reviews fleet-conversion strategy and community EV‑charging scenarios; draft due February

Consultants from Stantec presented a two-part study to the Board of Public Utilities on Oct. 22, saying the work will (1) produce a county fleet conversion plan and (2) recommend locations and ownership scenarios for a communitywide public charging network.

"The goal of this project is to generally reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from the county fleet vehicles," Stantec analyst Josh Schott told the board. The study pairs a vehicle-level fleet assessment with a separate site-suitability model for public chargers, Schott said. The consultants described four charging scenarios they are modeling: home charging, county-owned public charging, privately owned/shared Level 2 charging, and fast-charging corridors.

Stantec said its fleet analysis included department-level interviews, equipment inventories and on-site electrical assessments. Technical lead Annalie Castillo said the team created a dynamic dashboard intended to let county staff track vehicle attributes and to project year-by-year replacement schedules and infrastructure needs through 2050. The consultants added they are modeling feeder-level electrical loads under low- to high-adoption scenarios so the county can anticipate future capacity needs.

Public engagement factored into the charger siting work. Schott said the project held a public visioning session and an online survey that yielded more than 500 responses. "The feedback we received was varied," he said, noting residents expressed both enthusiasm for EVs and concerns about public investment and charger siting. The survey responses are being used as an equity input to the site-suitability model, the team said.

Board members pressed the consultants for local specificity. Multiple members urged that the team incorporate county assessor and parcel-level data (including garage or carport presence) to better estimate where residents can charge at home versus where public charging is needed. Stantec said the model uses parcel and zoning layers and that the detailed GIS outputs, data sources and weighting rationale will be included in the draft report for review.

The consultants acknowledged economics and rates will be a separate part of the analysis. "We're developing an ownership financial model that is gonna help the county make determinations in terms of capital and operational expenses of the public charging network," Castillo said, and added the team intentionally did not exclude sites solely on economic grounds so equity priorities would not be preemptively eliminated.

On transit vehicles: the presentation told the board Atomic City Transit loads were included in feeder-load projections; the school district has not committed to procuring electric school buses and thus the schools’ buses were not included as an immediate procurement assumption.

Next steps: presenters said they will deliver a draft report to county staff and return to the board in December with the draft, hold an additional community meeting, and submit a final plan in February for adoption and public comment. The board did not take action on the presentation itself but asked consultants to provide clarifications about comparator communities, time stamps for registration data, the number of survey map pins, and whether garage-level data can be incorporated into the modeling.