Electrifying Cogeco’s Cross-Border Vehicle Fleet

With operations across the U.S. and Canada, Cogeco Communications Inc. is a publicly traded telecommunications company, serving 1.6 million residential and business customers.

Dunsky and partner PowerON (a subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation) supported Cogeco in the development of a forward-looking fleet electrification roadmap for its fleet of over 1,000 vehicles. With corporate vehicles making up 38% of the organization’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, this represents an important step to achieving Cogeco’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050. For this work, Dunsky led a modelling exercise and proposed a pathway to full fleet electrification which has been optimized for cost-effectiveness by leveraging our proprietary E-FLEET model. For each of the organization’s three business units, we identified:

1. The optimal number and type of electric vehicle (EV) replacements each year taking into account our internal forecasts around future EV availability and costs, and importantly, the operational requirements of each vehicle;
2. An appropriate EV charging strategy that was tailored to each vehicle’s duty cycle, and accounted for viable EV energy management configurations;
3. The incremental financial costs of the recommended fleet electrification roadmap in comparison to an internal combustion engine vehicle (ICEV) baseline, and;
4. The expected change in annual GHG emissions.

Additional scenarios were modelled for two of the three business units, which explored the cost-effectiveness of transitioning to a vehicle leasing rather than an ownership model.

Our analysis was based on a detailed techno-economic analysis for diverse vehicle types, including medium- and heavy-duty vehicles such as service vans and bucket trucks which are an important part of a telecommunications fleet.

Since 2021, Dunsky has developed over a dozen fleet transition plans for municipalities, governments, utilities and private companies in North America. Leveraging our proprietary Fleet Electrification Optimization Model (E-FLEET), Dunsky helps fleets of all sizes and vehicle types plan for the most cost-effective transition to electric vehicles. We help fleet managers and executives take the guess work out of complex fleet electrification planning and align plans with organizational targets (e.g.: GHG emissions reductions, long-term cost savings, etc) without sacrificing operational reliability.