Charging Trucks Comes First — Stay on Task

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

Key takeaways

• Charging trucks is the first, second, and third priority
• Side benefits to the site are welcomed, but can’t be allowed to drive design decisions
• Don’t let potential local or hypothetical value propositions distract from charging delivery

As the people who will be building electric truck charging microgrids engage in their design and implementation, they are going to hear a lot of things about how amazing microgrids are. To paraphrase the late comedian Gallagher, microgrids slice, they dice, they even make julian fries, but you have to hit that sucker just right.

The people charged with designing and deploying the incremental, modular charging microgrids at logistics truck depots and stops, whether they work for major logistics firms like Amazon or UPS, major truck stop firms like Pilot J, or the engineering, procurement, and construction firms that they engage, will be tempted to add value propositions from the laundry list of additional benefits they can bring. This has to be avoided for as long as possible, and definitely in the first round. Adding value propositions adds complexity and trade-offs, and the focus needs to be on providing adequate charging infrastructure to trucks.

This doesn’t mean that some of the benefits of microgrids won’t accrue somewhat automatically, but they must remain secondary to the primary use case, getting energy into trucks as efficiently as possible.

As the authors — Rish Ghatikar and Michael Barnard, experts in sustainability, transportation, and strategy — explored in their diagnosis of the challenges of truck charging, there are overlapping concerns which can heavily slow down deployment of megawatt-scale charging solutions to accelerate truck electrification, and getting derailed into non-charging value propositions is one of them. So far the actions have included incrementally adding charging capacity in standardized increments and leveraging the pricing flexibility that microgrids with solar and battery buffering permit for competitive advantage. Another key requirement for success is sticking to the knitting, and the knitting is charging electric freight trucks.

Some of this is related to Parkinson’s Law of Triviality, also known as bikeshedding, which states that “the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely proportional to its actual importance.” The example Parkinson used in his 1957 book was of an organization building a nuclear reactor which spent vast amounts of time on the location, size, and amenities of the shed for workers’ bicycles.

This isn’t to say that many of the value propositions of microgrids aren’t useful and important, but many of them aren’t useful and important to the organizations that need electric trucks fully charged and ready to roll. It’s worth going through a list of them to explore which ones will be of merit, but which can’t be permitted to override the primary concern.

Microgrids can cut costs by reducing reliance on expensive peak-hour electricity and optimizing energy use. With local power generation and storage, they can enable organizations to avoid high utility charges while potentially earning income by selling surplus power back to the grid and improving its resiliency. Smart energy management can save reasonable amounts of money. Prioritizing this above truck charging needs, however, could lead to poor optimization of charging trucks.

Modeling this out to optimize the cost case will be useful, and while each charging microgrid will be highly self-similar following the guidance in this series of articles related to the strategy, local pricing on net metering and utility programs will have an impact. In general, however, the focus needs to be on maximizing the delivery of energy to trucks from the smallest grid connection that’s feasible to avoid the long delays in large-scale grid connections that could support large two-way flows of electricity.

Where grids are unstable and services are mission critical, then microgrids can offer organizations resiliency services, keeping the organization running even if the grid connection goes down. Given the scale of the buffering batteries required, potentially tens of MWh, running most facilities’ other draws off of them in the event of a grid disruption is certainly going to be possible, but to be clear, the facilities that require charging — logistics depots and truck stops — already have diesel generators for that purpose. In the US, the average disruption per customer is about two hours per year, well above the European average and far above best of breed grids like Germany’s and Denmark’s, where the average is under 15 minutes per customer.

Initial increments for truck stops are going to charge relatively few trucks per day and week as the electric fleets build. Similarly, the initial increments of charging at logistics centers will have smaller buffering batteries as only a portion of the fleet will be electric in initial years. The first increment should be focused on rapidly getting charging enabled, not making the facility more resilient in the event of lower likelihood outages where a generator already exists. There will be time for site resiliency to be optimized in later increments. And to be clear, the diesel generator is a source of energy for electric truck charging that will likely be exploited part of the time.

Most of the other purported value propositions of microgrids are for other stakeholders who aren’t particularly interested in ensuring that trucks can deliver loads and should be avoided as much as possible.

Putting storage and solar at the end of the distribution grid helps utilities to avoid buying more electricity wholesale in a couple of ways. The first is simply that if organizations are generating their own electricity with solar and using the environment to provide heating and cooling solutions through heat pumps, then there will be less demand on the grid to supply the electricity. This is a win for the utility that comes for free by building a charging microgrid, and should be leveraged as such in discussions, but isn’t the point. The point is that the local grids can’t supply truck charging fast enough or inexpensively enough, and microgrids with local generation are required to accelerate the transformation.

The second is that big batteries are a catnip for utilities in two ways. The first is demand management, paying organizations to lower demand from the grid at times of high demand, in late afternoons and early evenings typically. This has been done traditionally with major industrial demand segments like pulp and paper mill drying ovens and aluminum smelters. However, the point of the charging microgrid is to minimize the grid connection and provide as much energy behind the meter as possible.

Similarly, utilities often look at big microgrids as backup storage that they would like to draw on to provide energy to more households and businesses in the local grid area. Avoid being drawn into discussions with utilities on these last two points. They are distractions from getting electricity into trucks. If utilities try to gain access, lean into the advantages the microgrid is providing by just existing, and draw the line there.

Microgrids are often claimed to increase grid security from risks of foreign or domestic terrorism. A decentralized grid, the thinking goes, is much harder to disrupt. That’s not the concern of the people who just need to put electricity in trucks. Once again, avoid opening that door, as cybersecurity and physical security types will flood through it, wasting time and money.

This doesn’t mean that ensuring that the basics of physical and cybersecurity for the charging microgrid, the centralized management site, and the communications links put in place, as well as any mandated utility and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and state’s cybersecurity compliance requirements aren’t important, but they are like the energy management system and the battery management system — just services in aid of keeping things running and grid secure. Get accurate and useful threat assessments, and don’t let the budget for cybersecurity grow like kudzu.

Something that’s both true and irrelevant to the needs of logistics and truck stop organizations is the value of microgrids in tackling energy poverty and enabling economic development in marginalized regions. Truck stops and logistic depots will often be in low income rural counties, and in many cases will be the biggest energy consumers for miles around with electricity — theoretically — to spare. In the event of a major power outage due to severe weather or other concern, by all means open the doors of the facilities if they are the only ones with electricity and people would be freezing in the dark.

But in general, the benefit of the charging microgrid to the region is future-proofing local employment at the truck stop or logistics center, not trying to ensure that impoverished people in the area have access to reliable electricity. There are other organizations working on that. If local municipal organizations try to engage in discussions about sharing the microgrid electricity abundance more broadly, point to the employment and local tax revenues from the facility’s continued existence and focus on getting charging working.

The last one is a pitfall disguised as a shiny bauble — technological innovation. Microgrids are seeing a lot of efforts around cutting edge AI optimization of power, best-of-breed batteries, and brand new power management solutions. Avoid everything cutting edge. Get what works and is proven to work reliably. Charging grids aren’t sandboxes for innovators, they are the equivalent of diesel tanks and gas pumps. The sandbox is the central staging site and the pilot or three that destruction-test the design before field deployments.

To these points, in most cases major logistics and truck stop operator organizations will be engaging contractors to design, build, and operate the charging grids, not having the expertise in house (at least not immediately). When working with them, these guidelines for what to focus on and what to avoid have to be discussed early and regularly. It’s easy for these extraneous value propositions to be injected by microgrid enthusiasts, as it’s relatively early days for this form of technology, and many people working in the space have the air of evangelists more than pragmatic deployers.

The key challenges related to charging microgrids identified in introductory articles for this strategy that this approach will address include risks related to interconnection and utility coordination, uncertainty related to revenue streams, badly or over-optimizing cybersecurity, and avoiding the challenges in resiliency and reliability measurement. A strong focus on getting trucks charged will simplify the program significantly.

When engaging an engineering, procurement and construction firm to design and build incremental modular microgrids, make it clear that the most reliable and least expensive charging of trucks is the first, second, and third point, that secondary benefits outside of that to the site are just that, secondary, and must not drive design decisions, and that larger local value propositions are restricted solely to what is automatically delivered by having a microgrid at all.

Previous articles in this series:

• Accelerating Electrification: Freight Trucks Will Dominate In The US
• Electrified Freight: Trucking Will Grow & Big Logistics Players Will Dominate
• Trucking Will Electrify, But What Hills Must Be Flattened?
• Charging Microgrids: Progress for Electric Trucks, Challenges Remain
• Truck Charging: Start Small, Scale Smart
• Electric Truck Charging’s Cost & Price Flexibility Are Its Superpower

---

About the authors:

Rish Ghatikar has an extensive background in decarbonization, specializing in electric vehicles (EVs), grid integration, and demand response (DR) technologies. At General Motors (GM), he advanced transportation electrification energy services, as part of a broader climate strategy. Previously, at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), he focused on digitalizing the electric sector, while at Greenlots, he commercialized EV-grid and energy storage solutions. His work at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spearheaded DR automation to support dynamic utility pricing policies. An active climate advocate, Ghatikar advises on policies and technologies that align the grid with transportation and energy use for sustainable growth.

Michael Barnard, a climate futurist and chief strategist at The Future Is Electric (TFIE), advises executives, boards, and investors on long-term decarbonization strategies, projecting scenarios 40 to 80 years into the future. His work spans industries from transportation and agriculture to heavy industry, advocating for total electrification and renewable energy expansion. Barnard, also a co-founder of Trace Intercept and an Advisory Board member for electric aviation startup FLIMAX, contributes regularly to climate discourse as a writer and host of the Redefining Energy – Tech podcast. His perspectives emphasize practical solutions rooted in physics, economics, and human behavior, aiming to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future.