00:17:48 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:17:48] S0: Yeah.
00:17:49 · Brett Rogers
[00:17:49] S1: Because if the power goes out, you still want your trash picked up. And so we really have these grid resiliency plays in, and there's different stages of our grid resiliency. One is when we introduce EVs, it's not all at once to a location. We want to make sure that we have a spare ratio on-site. As we phase in these EVs, it's new technology and with new technology comes potential problems, we want to make sure there's a backup vehicle, whether it's a RNG or conventional vehicle on-site. That is the most rudimentary way of resiliency. But we've also layered in another layer of resiliency is when we put in switch gears. And so for background, when you put in charging infrastructure, you put in a transformer. That's normally what the utility puts in, and then we put in a switchgear with the transform plugs into. And that's kinda like a gigantic circuit breaker. That's what feeds all your chargers. Within our switchgear, we're actually able to add in components that allow us to backfeed it. Now you can backfeed it in multiple different ways. On the very crude way, you could backfeed it with a generator. And so, hey. In an emergency, if power goes out, you can pull a generator up, plug it into the switchgear, backfills all your chargers, and now you're able to charge your vehicles again. But, you know, the more clever ways to do it are on a microgrid system. And so we're looking at ways where we can use on-site energy storage, renewable energy in order to make sure our resiliency is there on-site. So then we can backfeed our vehicles in case the power goes out, and we can still service our customers. And so there's a bunch of different scenarios that we have to think about. It's not just plug and play this type of technology. We have to make sure it's durable and that we're delivering that reliable service that our customers are seeking.
00:19:26 · Neil C. Hughes
[00:19:26] S0: Wow. I'm curious. How do you decide which of those routes, depots or vehicle types are are ready for electrification and which are not? I suspect we'll have people listening from all across The US and around the world. Do you make that decision like that?
00:19:40 · Brett Rogers
[00:19:40] S1: Yeah. The first thing we did when we decided, hey. What vehicles to go after first is vehicle type. So in our industry, we basically have three different vehicle types. We have our residential vehicles. So those are the vehicles with that arm on the side of the truck, and they go through your neighborhoods and then pick up the cans in front of houses. So that's our residential trucks. And then we have our small container commercial trucks. Those are the ones with the front forks, and they're picking up cans that are in front of companies, and they're picking up maybe a 100, 120 cans a day, where our residential trucks are picking up more like a thousand cans a day. And then our third type of vehicle are our roll off trucks for our industrial large containers. And so these are, like, the really large containers you see at, you know, a construction site. And so we may pick up, like, six of those a day. And so you have a huge different type of duty cycle between a thousand lifts, you know, a 100, 120 lifts, and six lifts a day. And what we've noticed is when we first entered the space, everyone's like, oh, we should go electrify that one that only does six lifts. Yeah. But that's the wrong way to look at it because what you're missing is the actual drive cycle. And where EVs are most beneficial are in that stop and go driving because you get the regenerative braking system. And so the reality is the best vehicles to electrify are the ones doing the 1,000 stops because those 1,000 stops are potential to regen that electricity in order to increase efficiency. And so that's where EVs really shine. And so what we've actually done is focused on those large number of stops, that duty cycle that requires a ton of stop and go driving, a ton of city driving, those are the best ones for EVs. And it turns out those are the worst ones for diesels from an efficiency perspective. So there's a good trade off there in order to increase our efficiency with EVs. So we first started with the line of business, which the best one for us is the residential, which is a thousand stops a day. The next one would be the front load, which is around a 100, 120 stops a day. And the hardest applications for EVs, because it's mainly just deadhead miles, is the roll off truck, which is only six lifts.
00:21:46 · Brett Rogers, Neil C. Hughes
So we started there, and then we did a route analysis to really understand how long are all these routes across the country, across our business, and understand, hey. Where should we go first? Because when we launch a new technology, we want the highest success rate. So, yeah, we're gonna intentionally go out and pick the shorter routes, the one with lower lifts, in order to make sure that technology works. And then we get the vehicles out there, collect more data, update our models, and then expand over time. Like I mentioned before, we're really excited about the performance, and they're able to basically perform across the country in almost all of our duty cycles we put them through. And so we've already started rolling out our front load trucks now with those commercial containers, and we expect to have some more of our roll offs just trickling in maybe the end of this year or early next year. [00:22:36] S0: I was gonna say the pace of technological change is showing no no indication of slowing down. If anything, it seems to be speeding up right now. And as a company, I would imagine, as your operational technology footprint, as that continues to increase, there'll be recruitment strategies around that required. So as we're literally a couple of months away from life in 2027, where do you go from here? What what is your big focus now?
00:22:36 · Neil C. Hughes, Brett Rogers
[00:22:36] S0: I was gonna say the pace of technological change is showing no no indication of slowing down. If anything, it seems to be speeding up right now. And as a company, I would imagine, as your operational technology footprint, as that continues to increase, there'll be recruitment strategies around that required. So as we're literally a couple of months away from life in 2027, where do you go from here? What what is your big focus now? [00:23:01] S1: Yeah. The big focus is really increase our safety technology, increase our technology that gives visibility to our cities, but as well as optimize routing. From Republic Services, what you're gonna see is a huge push in really leveraging AI and advanced tools to make our business more efficient, and we do that through routing. And that's gonna be a big driver next year, and we'll see more and more coming out of there. [00:23:27] S0: Awesome. Well, I'll be watching you very closely. And as Brett, for anyone wanting to find out more about Republic Services, everything that you're doing, how they can get involved, where should they go? [00:23:36] S1: Yeah. The best place to go is republicservices.com. And, if you wanna get synced up with me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn.