The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, headquartered in Whittier, serves the waste management needs of more than 5 million people, converting their solid waste and sewage into renewable energy and recycled water.

For an agency built on sustainability, embracing clean electric transportation seemed like a must to Diane Engler, fleet engineering technician for LACSD. But she found that electrifying a fleet wasn’t as simple as just buying some new electric cars. She also had to figure out how best to keep those vehicles charged.

“We have a diverse passenger fleet of about 130 vehicles and 52 of those are now electric,” Engler said. “It would be nice if I could say this is all plug and play but it’s not. Each operation requires a certain performance from a vehicle or charging station. I need to understand when and how often they can charge.”

She noted there are also major hurdles to installing those chargers, including planning, permitting, compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, construction bidding and construction management.

Southern California Edison’s Charge Ready program, introduced to her by her SCE account manager James Pasmore, was a tremendous help in meeting those challenges, she said.

“At LACSD’s headquarters, SCE installed the infrastructure for EV charging stations, which involved bringing electricity from the main feed and installing a transformer and a distribution panel at no cost to the LACSD,” Pasmore said.

Through Charge Ready, he explained, SCE installs and maintains the electrical infrastructure to support EV charging and provides rebates to reduce charging station costs while participants typically own, operate and maintain qualified charging stations.

Engler said Charge Ready allowed the LACSD to install some charging sites it otherwise wouldn’t have been able to install and to complete others much faster than it could have on its own.

“We have six sites completed now,” she said. “Four of those sites were through the Charge Ready program. Two of the sites were in-house, meaning I did the management. For SCE customers thinking of adding electric vehicle charging, you definitely want to go through the Charge Ready program.”

“I don’t think people understand what this is, how hard it is to get and how expensive it is,” Engler said in reference to swapping out transformers to support the second phase of the 44-port project. “It took a team of Edison people, and there were probably six or eight trucks here. And they just do it like it’s something they do every day. It was amazing. All I had to do was buy the charging stations and the software, and I really appreciate that.”

SCE recently received approval from the California Public Utilities Commission to expand Charge Ready from its pilot phase to a scaled program that will add about 38,000 new chargers throughout the utility’s 50,000-square-mile service area. Charge Ready 2, as it is known, will be the nation’s largest light-duty EV charging program run by an investor-owned utility.

Charge Ready 2 is one of SCE’s programs that supports company analysis that concludes 75% of vehicles on California highways must be electric by 2045 in order for the state to achieve its climate goals. The assessment is in line with Gov. Newsom’s recent executive order mandating 100% of new vehicle sales in California to be electric cars by the year 2035.

In addition to Charge Ready 2 for passenger EVs, SCE launched a program last year for trucks, buses and non-road industrial equipment. Also the largest program of its kind in the U.S., Charge Ready Transport aims to add charging to support at least 8,490 medium- and heavy-duty EVs over a five-year period.