Clearing the Air: Yes, Batteries Are Ready To Power Long-Range Freight Trucks

Co-contributor: Anthony Eggert

This article was co-written by Forbes contributor Anthony Eggert. Anthony is a Senior Director at the ClimateWorks Foundation where he works to end the climate crisis by amplifying the power of philanthropy.

The U.S. Congress just passed the most meaningful legislation on climate change in more than a decade. But, while meaningful, it unfortunately omits road freight, one of the most timely and consequential opportunities to reduce climate pollution, improve human health, and catalyze a new domestic industry. The new administration can correct this through future legislation that includes investment and policy support for the production, purchase, and charging infrastructure for a national transition to zero-emission electric trucks.

Unfortunately, while there is growing recognition of the important role of batteries in powering cars, buses, and delivery vans, there is still widespread confusion and misunderstanding about the potential for long-range, heavy-duty (i.e. big rig trucks that travel more than 300 miles in between refueling stops) battery electric (BE) trucks, often aided and abetted by misinformation from incumbents in the fossil-fuel and combustion industries. Even some clean transportation proponents don’t fully understand the viability and attractiveness of long-range battery electric tractor-trailers to replace our polluting diesel truck fleet.

The truth is that, with targeted policy support, both BE and fuel-cell long-range trucks can soon out-compete diesel on cost while providing massive benefits for public health and the climate. 

Batteries, in fact, are on a fast track to compete with diesel, both due to declining battery costs and realistic pathways for trucking to secure cheap electricity from cheap zero carbon power today. Reducing the cost of zero-carbon hydrogen fuel is possible, but much more challenging, because the production and distribution chain do not have the same learning-rate advantages as batteries. If we are truly serious about addressing climate change, aggressive and stringent policy support is critical for either zero-emission technology to replace the diesel fleet.

Less than five years ago, few people in the climate community believed that long-range trucks could ever run without polluting combustion engines. The best that many hoped for was for biofuels to substitute for fossil fuels.

Of the few who saw the potential for a zero-emission trucking future without polluting tailpipes, most believed that hydrogen fuel cells were the only feasible zero-emission technology, assuming we could substantially lower the costs to own, operate, and conveniently refuel them.

But of the approximately 25 long-range zero-emission truck models manufacturers plan to release by 2022, only five are fuel cell (FC) trucks. The rest are powered by lithium ion batteries.

This is a profound shift. Not long ago, few thought batteries could become cheap enough, light enough, durable enough and could be charged fast enough to power long-range trucks. Today, batteries are increasingly the technology of choice for zero-emission road transport, including medium and heavy-duty trucks.

So why isn’t more being done to encourage BE trucks? Some critics of BE trucks claim, falsely, that batteries will always be too heavy and can never be recharged fast enough for them to be a viable zero-emission solution for long-range trucking. Incumbent interests, like some in the oil and gas industry, have pounced on these false claims to drive a wedge between hydrogen and battery proponents, with the aim of sowing confusion and slowing down the zero-emissions transition.

Let’s examine each of these claims to understand why they are false.

Weight: The North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE) estimates that almost 90% of the heaviest trucks average less than 500 miles per day in the U.S.. A 500-mile range, BE tractor-trailer will require a battery capable of providing approximately 1.2 MWh of energy. While batteries are heavy, BE trucks require hundreds of fewer components compared to diesel trucks. According to a recent study by LBNL, because BE trucks don’t need an engine, fuel tank, multi-speed transmission, and much of the drivetrain, the net weight addition for a 1.2 MWh BE truck is only around 8,000 pounds. So, if a manufacturer simply converted an 80,000-pound tractor-trailer to battery electric without further investment in aerodynamics and light-weighting, it would result in a 10% loss of payload, at a maximum.

A 10% loss of payload is significant but not large enough to render BE long-range trucks unviable — more than 80% of U.S. truck trips will be unaffected by this weight penalty, according to NACFE.  But the reality is likely to be even better. If a truck is designed to be electric from the bottom up with attention to weight-reduction, aerodynamics and the use of the battery pack for structural strength, then the payload penalty can drop to as low as 3% with current battery pack energy densities.

In a recent interview, Tesla’s

TSLA
Elon Musk said he expects that a 500-mile (or more) range truck will be at weight parity with a diesel truck once battery pack energy density reaches 300 Watt-hours per kilogram, which is only a 15% improvement over the current industry average. Battery energy densities have improved 300% since 2010. A further 15% improvement is nearly inevitable within the next few years.

Recharging and utility upgrades: A myth persists that it will take several hours to recharge a BE big rig or that the power needs will overstress the grid.  What is usually implicit in these claims is the assumption that fast chargers will not exceed 250 kW of output. But there are no insurmountable technical barriers to build charging stations that can provide 500 miles of range in 30 minutes.

A station capable of supercharging up to five tractor-trailers at the same time will draw around 10 MW of power — less than the amount produced by GE’s new wind-turbine. Thousands of new urban load centers, like hospitals, needing more than 10 MW of power are commissioned each year around the world, and rarely do any of these trigger the need for major grid upgrades.

Further, charging stations for trucks need not be in urban centers, and are more useful at distribution centers or along major highways, closer to high voltage transmission lines, further reducing the cost. Upgrading the distribution system and building out a truck charging network is certainly non-trivial, but still routine for utilities with advance planning. In short, electric trucks will not “break the grid.”

But please don’t misunderstand, transitioning the world’s long-range freight truck fleet to zero-emission will still be an enormous challenge. It will require strong vehicle standards to motivate truck manufacturers to produce and sell zero-emission trucks, like California’s Advanced Clean Truck rule. It will require sustained public and private investment in charging infrastructure, manufacturing, and training to create new jobs. It will benefit from targeted incentives, preferential access to ports and cities, and other measures that make zero-emission trucks economically attractive to all users.  And unfortunately, it will face opposition from incumbent and laggard industry players.

But fortunately, what it won’t require is for us to invent an entirely new technology. Battery electric trucks are ready to deliver.