(photo: Greg Hintler, CEO of The Mobility House North America)
By Fleet Management Weekly Staff
February 19, 2025
Developing a reliable, cost-effective charging solution is one of the most critical steps in electrifying your fleet. If you’ve got a large enough fleet, you may need to invest in building charging infrastructure. This can be tricky if you’re starting, as you’ll likely begin with just a few EVs before scaling to a significant percentage of your fleet in the coming years. To help you find the best charging solution for your fleet’s evolving needs, you’ll want to find a reliable partner to guide you through the process.
The Mobility House works with fleets and charging station operators to help them find charging solutions for their needs. Using their proprietary charging and energy management system, ChargePilot, they can help fleets optimize the charging process at a lower grid capacity, saving both capital and operational costs. ChargePilot is also easily scalable, allowing fleets to electrify at their own pace without worrying about outgrowing their charging infrastructure.
We sat down with Greg Hintler, CEO of The Mobility House North America, to learn more about ChargePilot and how it makes electric mobility more affordable for fleets.
Can you tell us about The Mobility House and what your company does?
The Mobility House’s vision is to create a zero-emission, zero-cost charging future for everyone. We’ve been at it for almost 15 years now, during which time we’ve become the leading fleet-charging company in the world. Our solution is operated by over 2000 sites, from significant transits in the US like New York Metro, Miami-Dade Transit, and Houston to European sites like the Irish Postal Service or the entire Austrian Postal Service.
image: The Mobility House
What we’re doing at those sites is helping the customers design the most resilient, cost-effective charging infrastructure possible. Then, our charge management system (CMS), which we call ChargePilot, ensures that those fleet vehicles are charged reliably at the lowest cost and with the customer’s choice of charger and vehicle. We have designed our ChargePilot solution to be based on open standards so we can ensure it is interoperable with all the leading players in the EV charging ecosystem.
How does The Mobility House make electric mobility more affordable?
Our ChargePilot solution helps our customers save on capital and operational costs. Fleets can save millions of dollars by avoiding costly grid upgrades. This is possible because of ChargePilot’s automated load management capability, one of our solution’s unique value propositions. Our system allows you to install chargers with a nameplate capacity that exceeds what you have available on your site, whether limited by utility service or your electrical panel.
image: The Mobility House
Say you want to install ten chargers at 150kw each. That’s a total nameplate capacity of 1.5 megawatts. But assume you only have one megawatt available at your site. Instead of going to the utility to ask for a 500kw or more upgrade, which would cost thousands of dollars and could take years, you can install your ten chargers and have ChargePilot manage the load of those chargers so that they never exceed your available capacity.
As for the operational side, ChargePilot can examine your fleet’s driving patterns and utility rates to minimize the cost of charging your vehicles. The system considers the time-of-use rates, demand charges, and dynamic rates to reduce the total cost of charging. Let’s assume you aren’t dependent on the utility because you operate as part of a microgrid and have a lot of DRS on site, like solar and batteries. We can work around the availability of those resources to ensure you’re charging your vehicles at the lowest cost and as reliably as possible.
How does The Mobility House make reducing the total cost of ownership possible?
A few different things can reduce your fleet’s total cost of ownership. First, The Mobility House’s ChargePilot solution can help you avoid grid upgrades. As we’ve established, you can install more chargers than your site’s available capacity, significantly reducing capital expenditures (CapEx) and operational costs. Second, it optimizes energy use by intelligently managing utility rates and your driving schedule to ensure you’re charged as cheaply as possible.
Thirdly, it’s scalable for future growth, which is helpful if you’re electrifying and looking to scale your fleet without constantly upgrading your site. You can easily add additional chargers at any time while using the automated load management feature to stay within your site’s limits. Lastly, ChargePilot easily integrates with various chargers and software systems, whether your fleet management system or depot management system. You can use our open interfaces and APIs to connect with those systems, and we’ll consider those parameters as we optimize the charging of your fleet.
Are there any fleets you work particularly well with regarding size or type?
ChargePilot can generally work with any charger or fleet, from one vehicle to hundreds. But the solution shines when you have more vehicles to charge and more power to manage. That’s because you can more fully leverage the optimization capabilities of ChargePilot to drive down the total cost of ownership. This is typically when you have larger vehicles, trucks, buses, and vans. Also, to the point I mentioned earlier around sites with existing infrastructure, ChargePilot can easily tie into that ecosystem, whether it’s software or hardware infrastructure. That’s where we have a sweet spot.
Tell us about the new partnership between Schneider Electric and The Mobility House. What does this mean for fleets?
Schneider Electric and The Mobility House have a long history. We’ve worked together on multiple projects, particularly here in the US in the school and public transit space. We’re looking at track deployments and Vehicle-to-Grid pilots in both those spaces. We’ve also worked with AlphaStruxure, a joint venture between Schneider Electric and Carlisle. In all those projects, Schneider is typically the lead–they design the infrastructure and provide a lot of their electrical infrastructure equipment and switchgear. They manage the projects while The Mobility House works on the design to ensure we have the optimal number of chargers on site and the right types of chargers with the correct power levels. Our primary role is to deploy ChargePilot in the operational phase.
In some places, ChargePilot operates standalone, while in others, it is tied to the Schneider microgrid controller. This is the case at the Brookville charging site in Maryland, close to DC, where we are working in the context of a microgrid. Right now, a big part of our global collaboration is focused on those larger vehicles, trucks, and buses. We’re extending that partnership into Europe and Asia, anywhere where you have a lot of power requirements but where utility upgrades might take too long. That’s where Schneider comes in and provides a turnkey solution to design the proper infrastructure for your large bus, truck, and car fleets.
Can you share a fleet success story?
One is in Brookville, Maryland, and it is tied to our relationship with Schneider. In Montgomery County, close to DC, a public transit authority was looking to electrify its fleet to ensure high resiliency and reduce its carbon impact. AlphaStruxure designed a microgrid that included a solar array, some batteries, some gas generation, and 56 charging ports. There were different OEMs and power levels, from 60kw to 450kw.
The Mobility House provided its ChargePoint solution to tie in with the microgrid, optimizing cost savings and the solar consumption on-site to enable charging directly in the microgrid island mode. So, if there were a power outage, the site would disconnect from the grid and operate in microgrid mode. At that point, The Mobility House could then adjust the charging optimization to adapt to the constraints of the microgrid. That site has now been operational for over two years. It’s a great success story of how Schneider Electric and The Mobility House can help a forward-looking and innovative public transit agency create a resilient, low-cost fleet deployment.
How has The Mobility House evolved? What’s next for the company?
As we work towards the electrification of fleets, I think it’s important to remember that we meet customers where they are today. The company has evolved significantly in the 15-year history of The Mobility House. We began providing chargers, helping customers get their infrastructure off the ground so they could plug in and charge. Now that customers can reliably charge their vehicles, they want to find ways to bring down the cost and optimize their TCO. That’s where ChargePilot comes in. We try to optimize both CapEx and OpEx.
As we look toward the future, customers are trying to find a way to use their vehicles to generate revenue when they’re not being driven. That’s where we work on things like Vehicle-to-Grid, using these assets to generate revenues in the energy and capacity markets.
