Trucking Will Electrify, But What Hills Must Be Flattened?

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Key Takeaways

• Grid upgrades for high truck charging demands can take years
• Microgrids with buffering batteries and solar enable charging immediately
• Depots and truck stops require different charging technologies and have different energy profiles

One of the primary challenges of electrifying freight trucks in the United States comes down to adequate charging infrastructure without compromising freight operations. The economics of electric trucks, battery availability, scaling manufacturing, etc., could be another set of challenges. With focus on the intersection of freight truck electrification and electricity infrastructure, optimal siting of charging infrastructure, and availability and reliability of power for charging are real challenges that’s stymying truck electrification.

In this series, Rish Ghatikar and Michael Barnard, experts with global careers in transportation, sustainability, and energy, are drawing out the way, or guides, to accelerate the greatest freight decarbonization benefits in the United States The first articles provided a high level overview of sustainability, economic, and equity benefits for truck electrification. They dealt with why electrified road trucking had the conditions for success, and why there was little room for additional rail decarbonization and almost no room for any growth in water freight. They outlined Richard Rumelt’s kernel of good strategy — diagnosis, policy, plan — and the series will leverage those elements to develop a coherent plan for truck electrification.

The United States is advancing electric transportation with expanded charging networks, incentives, and investments in light- and medium-duty vehicle electrification to cut emissions and increase sustainability. Taking clues, one could conclude that electrified freight trucks may have fewer roadblocks to rapid decarbonization; however, it does not mean no challenges, or that there aren’t multiple strategies that might achieve this end. Let’s first diagnose the challenges, suggest some policies and focus on the policy we will elaborate on in this series — strategic grid-connected microgrids for truck stops and depots.

The authors’ opinion is that scaling electric truck manufacturing is not a substantial barrier, and that as battery costs decrease and energy density increases, demand for electric trucks will drive multiple existing and new manufacturers to meet it rapidly. Only 203,000 semi trucks were sold in 2023, a volume which can easily pivot to battery-electric and grow rapidly.

Charging at truck stops requires significantly higher power levels to accommodate the large battery capacities typical of freight and heavy-duty vehicles and lower dwell times, as longer charging times directly affect truck operator’s productivity, and delay truck electrification plans. Fast charging of higher capacity batteries requires chargers with high power levels that are termed extreme fast chargers or megawatt charging systems.

Charging infrastructure at distribution centers and depots for trucks must be designed for first- and last-mile services. Trucks that operate over shorter distances can charge at truck depots where they are parked during non-operational hours. As highlighted by McKinsey and Company, addressing this need requires a design review and the need for significant investment in higher-capacity charging stations, tailored energy management systems, and smart scheduling to optimize charging during off-peak hours​. 

Understanding that the truck charging needs will drive the design of charging infrastructure, a distinction with the use of high-power charging infrastructure for truck stops and depots, is the standardization of charging used for electric flows to/from truck batteries. While light duty and medium duty electric vehicles use connectors like Society of Automotive Engineers’ (SAE) J1772 for alternating current (AC), CCS for direct current (DC), and the recent standardization of the North American Charging Standard SAE J3400 which handles both AC and DC, trucks currently require customized or emerging standards and connectors for megawatt charging.

Strategic microgrids across the freight corridors, truck stops, and depots paired with renewables, battery storage, and energy management features can be simplifying and coherent policies that can overcome these challenges across the transportation and electric grid industries.

The United States’ grid had no need to expand or modernize for 30 to 40 years. Projected growth in electricity demand didn’t materialize, even as total electrified services increased. The country uses far more lights far more of the time than it used to, but they are very efficient LEDs. The country has far more screens displaying static and moving graphics, but they are LED as well. Some efficiency measures have kept electrified buildings and heating or cooling technologies relatively reliable, although the end-uses have high use of gas and oil for heating.

Electrification of the United States economy has not significantly progressed as a ratio of total energy consumption for the past thirty-five years. Transportation and heating energy is still dominated by fossil fuels. This has meant that the grid hasn’t changed much in that time. The wires carrying electricity to the end points of truck stops and warehouses have remained thin, with lower voltages and running overhead where they are more subject to impacts of extreme weather than in Europe, as an obvious benchmark. Upstream from the warehouses and truck stops, the distribution grid has not been proactively upgraded to handle greater loads and localized distributed generation that renewables, battery storage, and electric vehicles provide.

Meanwhile, substantial de-industrialization of United States electrical grid component manufacturing has occurred, with China building a greater and greater percentage of the market. China is now the largest manufacturer of transformers, which step voltages up or down, and converters, which change between AC and DC. These are essential technologies for enhancing both the distribution grid and the end-points where trucks will charge.

There are two levels of charging that make sense for trucks. At depots where they overnight, Level 2 or low power levels of Level 3 charging are often sufficient. Level 2 charging for trucks refers to an AC charging that delivers a moderate amount of power — typically between 7 kW and 22 kW, depending on the specific setup. Level 3 charging refers to a DC charging that delivers high power levels for fast charging. These lower charging levels have the potential to minimally impact power availability and grid reliability, resulting from truck charging.

Where the depot can have more trucks that have heavier duty cycles, and so require more charging, Level 3 charging may be more prominent. Level 3 charging can be scaled up and is the fastest and most powerful type of charging currently available for electric vehicles, including trucks. Extreme fast chargers and megawatt charging systems — commonly used terms for higher levels of charging — use DC to charge a vehicle’s battery directly, bypassing the onboard AC-to-DC converter used in Level 2 AC charging.

Where low charging power levels is all that is required and the fleet is small, no additional electrical supply may be required, whether from grid upgrades or alternatives. If minimal grid upgrades for this subset of depots are required, they are relatively less capital intensive and take less time. Where the fleet is large or higher power Level 3 charging is required, more power and energy are required and  if nothing else is done, grid upgrades will be significant, capital intensive, and can take multiple years, depending on the site, region, and charging levels.

For truck stops, megawatt charging is designed to charge large truck batteries (often over 500 kWh in capacity and 250 to 350 miles of range per full charge) to 80% state of charge rapidly in the range of 15 to 30 minutes for extended-range travel with minimal charging downtime. For example, Nikola’s battery truck has a range of 330 miles with a battery capacity of 733 kWh. Continued developments with electric truck manufacturers aim to improve range and operational efficiency.

Enabling even a single truck to charge with megawatt chargers at a truck stop, even with the present battery specifications, would require a significant grid upgrade if no other alternative existed. Enabling five or ten trucks to charge simultaneously gets into dicey grid infrastructure upgrade territory very rapidly. At present, this can mean years in waiting and millions of dollar costs to the truck stop, and if it were the only strategy available, would be prohibitive for business cases.

For depot charging, time of use billing, which is available from most utilities now, will enable energy management of charging truck fleets overnight with the lowest cost of electricity or when the grid power is not constrained, as long as the fleet size is not large. However, the larger the fleet size and heavier the duty cycles, the more it will be difficult to charge all vehicles in the time allocated, once again potentially driving up grid connection costs and justification for microgrids and energy management options.

Truck stops must charge trucks when the trucks arrive, not when it’s convenient from time of use billing or grid conditions perspectives. In the United States, trucks tend to drive more during daylight hours, with truckers typically stopping in the late evening and sleeping for several hours. This is driven by driver regulations for total hours of driving in the day, as well as by diminished risks on better lit roads.

However, this pattern is at risk of being upended by autonomous trucking features, which multiple truck manufacturers including Daimler, Volvo, Tesla, and Nikola are working on. Early iterations of autonomous technologies will likely allow convoying, enabling trucks to roll through the night with one or two drivers alert and overseeing the convoy while others sleep in their cabs. This will change the pattern of charging for depots and truck stops with the need for timely charging being prominent.

Electric trucks will change trucking patterns in urban areas too. At present, major urban areas frequently have night time noise limitations and concerns that limit last-mile deliveries by larger diesel trucks. As electric trucks are much quieter, those concerns are eliminated and night time deliveries and hence higher speed depot top-ups of batteries are likely to be required that are good use cases for microgrids and energy management features.

In the authors’ opinion, the simplifying policy — per Rumelt’s strategy kernel — which addresses all of these concerns is to deploy microgrids with buffering batteries and solar panels for larger depots and all truck stops..

As per the United States Department of Energy, a microgrid is “a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources within clearly defined electrical boundaries that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. A microgrid can connect and disconnect from the grid to enable it to operate in both grid-connected or island- mode.” A microgrid can be a small, localized network of electricity generation, storage, and energy resources that can operate independently or in conjunction with the main power grid. It typically can serve a specific area, such as a campus, industrial site, neighborhood, or even a single building or home. Microgrids are designed to assure power availability for reliable and resilient power, especially in areas prone to outages or where energy autonomy is desirable.

In the authors’ model, the microgrids will be grid-connected and will be supported by local renewable generation such as solar and battery storage, to align with carbon mitigation objectives. These microgrids will leverage the flat rooftops of distribution centers, truck stops, and parking area canopies with solar generation. They will have increasingly inexpensive and large buffering batteries to ensure availability of power when trucks need them and house energy management features to improve reliability and energy savings for the site.

The model of operation is straightforward. When grid electricity is cheap and abundant, the maximum amount of energy supported by the grid connection is stored in the buffering batteries. Note that this approach can also be leveraged for grid power with low prices or low carbon content. When the sun is shining, the maximum energy that can be stored in the batteries is stored and the rest is used to charge trucks. When the microgrid has a surplus, net metering is leveraged, providing electricity to the local distribution grid so that it does not have to be purchased by the utility from the third-party generator further away. This approach also improves grid reliability and resiliency by alleviating the grid congestion and supply-side constraints.

The plummeting costs of batteries has made the return on investments from large batteries in truck stops and other locations quite short in duration. Barnard explored this when the news of CATL’s $56 per kWh LFP batteries was announced early in 2024, finding that up to 22 trucks a day could be charged with megawatt charging with no grid upgrades with a reasonably-sized and priced battery in 2025, and have a return of investment under three years just on time of use billing arbitrage. That was without solar power on the site or the other revenue increasing and cost avoidance potential.

Grid upgrades would eventually be required in truck stops and depots with heavy duty cycles as electric fleets increased, but batteries in microgrids could defer those costs for years, enable immediate megawatt charging deployment, reduce the total size of the grid upgrade, and have strong operational revenue and cost advantages even with a more robust grid connection.

What was unlikely even three years ago — large-scale battery buffering of electricity for megawatt charging of heavy trucks — is economically advantageous today. Similarly, the plummeting costs of solar panels, despite the 50% tariff on Chinese panels, means that commercial solar installations at depots and truck stops are less expensive and with a faster return on investment than ever.

The simplifying policy that the authors propose is that the vast majority of freight truck charging will be done on depots and truck stops with grid connections, solar panels, and large battery storage systems, deferring grid upgrade costs and allowing immediate start of deployment of trucking. The collective strategy has the potential to accelerate electrification of truck charging.

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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.