A new EPRI offering draws on decades of experience and wide-ranging expertise to help airports prepare for an electric liftoff.
Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is a city within a city. The airport covers 5.5 square miles and regularly serves well over 70 million passengers annually, making it one of the busiest airports in the nation.
Large airports like LAX need huge amounts of energy to run lighting, heating and cooling, baggage carousels, and fleets of vehicles to move people and equipment. Traditionally, much of the energy needed to power airports—especially ground support equipment (GSE), such as baggage tugs that bring luggage to and from airplanes—has come from fuels like gas and diesel.
But there is increasing interest and investment in electrifying airports. LAX, for example, is in the process of fully electrifying its GSE by 2033, including the pushback tractors that move planes away from the gate to taxi under their own power. Overall, LAX is electrifying about 1,200 vehicles, including the airport’s maintenance and operations fleets. Electrification is all part of LAX’s broader effort to achieve carbon neutrality in airport operations by 2045.
LAX is by no means alone in its push towards greater electrification. For example, electrification is at the core of the redevelopment of New York’s JFK. The airport’s new international terminal will be the first in North America to use a fully electric GSE fleet, and all commercially available GSE used at JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark airports must be electric by 2030. A survey released by the American Association of Airport Executives at the end of 2023 found that 100 percent of North American airport operators expected their power needs to grow, driven by decarbonization and electrification mandates and objectives.
When Ambition Meets Reality
Airport electrification ambitions raise important questions for operators. For example, adding new vehicles, including GSEs, electrifying heating and cooling, and other airport operations represent a significant increase in load. For airports both large and small, electrical infrastructure was simply not built for this level of demand.
Though important, it’s not just about rising electricity demand. According to a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, peak loads at airports could also double over the next two decades.
Adding large new loads and pushing peak demand higher can introduce power quality issues, such as voltage sags, harmonics, and disturbances that ripple through sensitive airport systems. “As airports add more electrical load like chargers and electrified equipment, the power infrastructure underneath them becomes more important, not less,” said Mark Stephens, program manager of EPRI’s Industrial Power Quality Assessment group. “The more connected the system, the more places there are for power quality issues to originate and impact operations.”
For example, Stephens described how baggage handling systems, moving sidewalks, escalators, and elevators are vulnerable to voltage sags and interruptions. Sudden lapses in power on a moving sidewalk, for example, can pose a safety risk if they result in a fall. Longer interruptions due to power quality issues can frustrate passengers and bring operations to a standstill. “Underneath a large airport, you have what amounts to an industrial plant, with miles of conveyor systems, TSA scanning equipment, and dozens of control panels all part of one continuous baggage operation,” Stephens said. “A voltage sag that lasts a fraction of a second can take that entire system offline for hours.”
Some of the challenges airports face in pursuing electrification revolve around efficient management and coordination of stakeholder roles. For example, airlines typically own the GSE, airports own charging equipment, and utilities are responsible for grid infrastructure. Myriad questions about roles and responsibilities must be answered. “One of the practical questions that comes up is who pays for the electricity? The airline owns the ground support equipment, the airport owns the charging infrastructure, and the utility bill goes to the airport,” said Baskar Vairamohan, an EPRI technical executive. “Working out how to track and allocate those costs is not a technical problem, but it can slow everything down just as much as a technical one.”
Optimizing the economics of electrification investments requires smart and coordinated planning. For instance, the timing of charging a new electric GSE will significantly affect the investment’s payback time. Charging electric baggage tugs, pushback tractors, and other equipment that replace diesel-powered vehicles during peak demand will significantly increase operational costs and payback times. Off-peak charging lowers those costs but is complicated because GSE must operate during normal airport hours, which often coincide with peak demand.
“Some airports have already made significant investments in electric equipment and now find themselves asking the next set of questions: how do we manage the load we’ve created, how do we make sure the power quality is there to support it, and how do we keep optimizing as we add more?” said Scott Bishop, a senior technical executive who leads EPRI’s Industrial Center of Excellence. “Electrification opens the door to a whole new level of complexity and opportunity.”
From Assessment to Action
EPRI has been working with airports for decades to assess their potential for electrification, quantify return on investment (ROI), and identify the grid infrastructure and other equipment requirements needed to make it a reality. EPRI has conducted assessments for both large international airports, such as LAX and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, as well as more regional hubs in Birmingham, Alabama, and Orange County, California, focusing on everything from GSE to gate electrification to energy efficiency and power quality.
That collective experience is now being combined with other areas of EPRI expertise to develop a new supplemental project, the Airport Energy and Power Quality Walk-through Assessment, that holistically addresses the challenges and opportunities represented by airport electrification. “This offering brings together the tools and insights we’ve developed from decades of airport assessments with expertise from across EPRI,” Vairamohan said. “The goal is to give airports and utilities a complete picture, not just of the electrification opportunities in front of them, but of everything they need to make those investments work.” To achieve that goal, the offering has four pillars: power quality and energy efficiency, demand flexibility, electric transportation, and low-carbon fuels.
Airports can pursue all four pillars or focus on the areas most relevant to where they are in their electrification journey. For example, an airport still in the early stages of planning might begin with a comprehensive assessment of electrification and energy efficiency. One that has already electrified significant portions of its fleet might prioritize demand flexibility to schedule and manage charging, keeping costs down and avoiding grid strain. Another might focus on power quality, assessing whether its existing infrastructure can handle the loads it is about to add without risking critical systems.
A Proven Process
To better understand what to expect with the Airport Energy and Power Quality Walk-through Assessment, it’s instructive to consider how past EPRI airport electrification assessments have worked and the value they have delivered. An assessment begins with a detailed conversation with airport officials to understand their priorities, existing infrastructure, and near-term goals. Ideally, this initial collaboration includes the local utility to determine whether they offer any funding or incentives to support electrification.
After that initial fact-finding, an EPRI team visits the airport to conduct an equipment inventory, inspect the electrical infrastructure, and interview airline and airport staff. This results in an analysis that identifies electrification opportunities, including which investments offer the best near-term returns.
“The assessment is always driven by what the customer wants,” Bishop said. “We go in with a framework, but the priorities come from the airport. Some are focused on reducing emissions to meet a regulatory deadline. Some want to understand what infrastructure they need to build. Some are trying to make the case for a federal grant. The work looks different depending on where they are.”
Bishop noted that the utility is never just a bystander in this process. In fact, in several past assessments, the utility itself has initiated and funded the engagement because it recognizes that a rapidly electrifying airport is both a major customer and a significant new load on the local grid. Understanding what loads are coming and when is as important to the utility as it is to the airport. “The utility has a real stake in this,” Bishop said. “They want to know what load is coming, how fast, and where on the system it is going to land. An airport assessment gives them that picture, and it allows them to get ahead of the infrastructure requirements rather than react to them.”
The benefits of electrification can be substantial. At Albuquerque International Sunport, for example, EPRI’s assessment identified 112 pieces of ground support equipment with a clear path to electrification, including baggage tractors, belt loaders, pushback tractors, ground power units, and preconditioned air systems. The analysis projected lifetime savings of nearly $6.75 million in the best-case scenario.
The assessment also revealed how sensitive electrification economics are to planning decisions that might seem operational but are fundamentally financial. For a baggage tug replacing a diesel unit, for instance, off-peak charging produced a payback period of under four years. The same tug charged during peak demand hours produced a negative lifetime return. “Getting the economics right requires understanding the utility rate structure, the airport’s operating hours, and how to align charging schedules with the times when electricity is cheapest,” Bishop said. “That’s not something most airports have the expertise to work through on their own, and it’s exactly the kind of analysis that can make the difference between an investment that pays off and one that doesn’t.”
Charging infrastructure presents its own layer of complexity. Unlike consumer electric vehicles, which benefit from standardized charging protocols, ground support equipment has no universal standard. Different GSE manufacturers use different battery chemistries and communication protocols. The result: a charger that works with one manufacturer’s baggage tractor may not work with another’s.
“The challenge airports run into is that there’s no universal charging standard for ground support equipment the way there is for electric cars,” said Arun Patel, CEO of Minit Charger, a leading supplier of GSE charging equipment to airports. “Different manufacturers use different protocols, and if your charger and your vehicle aren’t speaking the same language, the equipment simply won’t charge. It’s a logistical problem that catches a lot of operators off guard.”
The breadth of the Airport Energy and Power Quality Walk-through Assessment reflects the scale of the challenge and opportunity of electrification. Power quality assessments draw on EPRI’s Industrial Power Quality and Energy Efficiency group, which has conducted more than 430 assessments across industries ranging from semiconductors to food and beverage manufacturing. Demand flexibility work connects airports to EPRI’s legacy of research on managed charging and load optimization. Low-carbon fuels expertise leverages EPRI’s work on sustainable aviation fuel for airports.
The goal of the Airport Energy and Power Quality Walk-through Assessment, said Vairamohan, is to give airports and their utility partners a phased roadmap that connects near-term investments to long-term goals. “The airports that get this right will be the ones that planned for all of it,” Vairamohan said.
EPRI Technical Experts:
Baskar Vairamohan, Mark Stephens, Scott Bishop
For more information, contact techexpert@eprijournal.com.
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