Companies are already successfully making the switch to electric after California passed a landmark law last year requiring the trucking industry to transition to electric and hydrogen fuel over the next two decades.
More electric trucks, more charging stations, but challenges remain
Big rig trucks that serve the ports have to transition first — their fleets have to be 100% carbon-free by 2035.
There are more electric trucks on the road, but the lack of charging stations has been a source of major pushback from the industry against these new statewide rules.
Over the last year, there have been gains in building that infrastructure, including the launch of what’s now one of the largest truck charging depots in North America. It’s in Lynwood, right off the 710 Freeway, a major trucking corridor, and just down the road from the nation’s busiest ports.
The depot has 65 chargers and can serve up to 200 trucks at a time in a lot that’s less than an acre. Operating since March, the depot primarily serves electric trucks deployed by shipping giant Maersk.
Jonathan Colbert, VP of Marketing for charging depot builder Voltera.
“For the industry and for fleets that want to electrify, this is literally the silver bullet of what they’ve been asking for: How do you take a site that’s in close proximity to a port, electrify it, and quickly,” said Jonathan Colbert, vice president of marketing for Northern California-based company Voltera, which built the charging station.
Voltera is also building another charging depot in Wilmington. It’s one of several companies leading the effort to build truck charging depots along major shipping corridors in the state.
Why it matters
The push to electrify trucking and build the infrastructure needed to support that transition has been led by communities living nearest to major trucking corridors. That’s because medium- and heavy-duty trucks, mostly diesel fueled, are some of the largest sources of pollution that contribute to higher asthma and cancer rates, as well as global heating.
Medium- and heavy-duty trucks make up only 6% of the vehicles on the road, but spew nearly 50% of the pollutants that form smog and 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the California Air Resources Board, or CARB, which regulates these emissions.
So electrifying those trucks is an important piece of improving public health and addressing human-caused climate change. Bruce Tuter, a supervisor with CARB, said that diesel trucks have gotten a lot more efficient and less polluting over the decades, but it’s still not enough.
One of 65 chargers at the new Lynwood heavy-duty truck charging depot. It takes about three hours for a truck to fully charge.
“Diesel particulates are really highly toxic,” said Tuter. “It’s the most toxic air contaminant that we know of. So it’s absolutely critical that we get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.”
A driver’s perspective
Former long-haul diesel truck driver and school bus driver Kenneth Phillips said the experience of driving the trucks is also better for the drivers themselves. He said electric trucks have the same performance as diesel, but are more comfortable to drive because they’re far quieter, smoother and don’t have smelly — and dangerous — fumes.
“That takes a toll on your body,” Phillips said.
The Compton native now works for electric trucking company BYD, which has a manufacturing facility in Lancaster. Another big perk is the impact on pollution, he said.
“We have to do something to change what’s going on and this is the way to do it,” Phillips said. “It may not solve it, but it will most definitely close the gap.”
Phillips said that it’s only been in recent years that more companies have turned their focus to all-electric technology.
The future is now because the competition is here.
— Kenneth Phillips, former diesel truck driver and school bus driver
“The future is now because the competition is here,” he said. “When I first started (at BYD), a lot of other companies were going to more fuel efficient, but now everybody is into electrical vehicles. There’s only so many alternate (fuels) that you can do. Electric…it’s just the way.”
Kenneth Phillips, a Compton native and former long-haul truck driver and school bus driver, works for electric truck company BYD.
He took me on a short drive in one of BYD’s lithium-battery powered trucks that has a 200-mile range. We drove through a neighborhood and past a high school. But the families and kids there weren’t breathing any dangerous diesel pollution from this truck.
“Just knowing you’re making a difference for Mother Earth, it’s just outstanding,” Phillips said.
Challenges to building more infrastructure
The Lynwood charging depot is a bit of a unique case where all the necessary pieces came together to launch the depot in a timely manner, said Colbert.
Electric trucks showcased at ride-and-drive event at a new heavy-duty truck charging depot in Lynwood.
The real estate was there, in a perfect location near the 710 Freeway and the ports, in an industrial-zoned area, and Southern California Edison had existing infrastructure nearby that they could upgrade and hook up relatively quickly to the site, which has a whopping 7.7 megawatts of power. The project was done in about 18 months.
But that’s not the norm.
“The two problems that you’re going to hear are permitting and getting the power utility interconnection,” said Colbert. “We’re asking for, in some situations, more than a skyscraper’s worth of power in an acre or two-acre footprint, so they’re not really accustomed to being able to bring this amount of power online and quickly.”
The need to upgrade equipment, primarily transmission and distribution lines to service the voltage needed at these sites, can slow a project by months, years and in some cases a decade or more.
“The challenge is not getting the power generated as much as it is getting the power delivered to the infrastructure built,” said Jeff Monford, a spokesperson for Southern California Edison (SCE). “Every one of these construction projects is unique.”
One of 65 chargers at Voltera’s Lynwood heavy-duty truck charging depot.
Monford said SCE has completed more than 80 projects supporting more than 2,000 medium- and heavy-duty vehicles and has 250 project applications in the pipeline that could potentially support another 6,000 electric medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.
Still that’s a drop in the bucket for the estimated need: the state expects to need at least 114,500 chargers by 2030 to support 157,000 electric or hydrogen-fueled medium- and heavy-duty trucks.
More truck charging depots are in the works and coming online, but the pace of building out the grid and connecting these projects to it, is still too slow to meet the rising demand.
Last year, state legislators passed two laws — SB 410 and AB 50 — to figure out how to pick up the pace. And the California Public Utilities Commission issued a ruling last month to set specific timeframes, but industry and environmental experts alike say it doesn’t go far enough.
Political uncertainty
Another wrench in the electric truck transition is the upcoming presidential election. The federal Environmental Protection Agency has yet to grant a waiver to approve California’s new truck electrification law and who wins the election could affect whether it gets granted at all.
Quick background on that: According to the nationwide Clean Air Act, air pollution from vehicles is a federal issue, but the federal government has for decades granted California waivers to regulate its own emissions because Southern California’s car culture has made air pollution a particularly long-running issue here (learn more about that history here). More than a dozen states have adopted California’s stricter car rules, as well as more recent truck rules. The rules have led to and are expected to lead to cleaner vehicles across the nation and the world.
The Trump Administration tried to revoke that power, the Biden Administration restored it, and now a future Trump presidency could put that waiver at risk again. Trump has also said he will rescind any unspent dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides funding to boost electric truck adoption and the needed infrastructure.
So some trucking companies have paused on buying electric trucks, Colbert said.
Community college students learn about the electric-powered Volvo semi-truck at an industry expo in Anaheim in 2023.
But major players in the industry, including Voltera, as well as major truck manufacturers, are betting on electric no matter the outcome of the election.
“I think the election has made some folks wait and see what’s going to happen, but we’re bullish that no matter what…we’re going to see a continued push to get fleets to electrify,” Colbert said. “I don’t think that it benefits any administration to back down off of what’s coming already.”
The delay on the EPA waiver has also made it so California can’t enforce its own law. More than 1,000 diesel trucks have been added to the registry to serve the ports despite the law, which went into effect at the beginning of the year, not allowing that.
CARB released a letter last year stating that they have the right to enforce the law from its official start date of Jan. 1, 2024, once the waiver is granted.
“As far as the state of California is concerned, there is a regulation in place,” said Tuter. “It’s the law in California. We’re just waiting right now to enforce it.”
If Donald Trump wins the election, there’s a possibility the waiver may not happen, but Tuter said there are other legal avenues that California can pursue to still enforce the rules.
Edwin Buenrostro was one of Quality Custom Distribution’s first drivers behind the wheel of an electric truck, delivering to Starbucks across Fontana. The large distribution company is committed to an electric future.
Still, Tuter said, despite the waiver not yet being granted, he’s not seeing much of a slowdown in applications for California’s main electric truck financing incentive program, called HVIP.
“A lot of people are waiting and taking the chance. Some people are not taking the chance,” Tuter said. “Personally, I think the smart money is on don’t take the chance.”
Learn more about electric trucking
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