Exploring public charging infrastructure requirements for short-haul electric trucks

Abstract

Vehicle electrification has the potential to revolutionize transport systems globally by enabling a pathway toward lower-cost, zero-emission transport options. Heavy vehicles are poised to potentially be one of the greatest beneficiaries due to their high operating costs. Here a facility location problem approach is adopted to analyze a sample of deidentified truck trip data, providing initial insights into charging network configurations that could support a short-haul electric truck fleet using the case study of South East Queensland. The charging network scenarios include up to 10 optimally-located public sites. The results suggest that a relatively modest public charging network should be sufficient to support the majority of short-haul electric trucks operating in similar regions internationally, in line with other studies that have found that the majority of short-haul electric truck charging is likely to be carried out at depots. Additionally, in outlining limitations of this study, we highlight the need for greater cooperation between researchers, policy-makers and industry to secure access to high-resolution truck trip data to more accurately plan regional charging networks, and freight decarbonization more broadly.

Keywords:

• Charging infrastructure
• electric trucks
• facility location problem
• optimization
• site selection

Acknowledgements

This study was carried out in conjunction with Economic Development Queensland, Queensland Government. We would like to acknowledge the provision of SEQ truck trip data from HereMaps by the Australian Road and Research Board (ARRB), and the use of VeRoLog’s open-source FLP spreadsheet solver software in implementing the FLP optimization problem.

Notes

1 A truck driving up to 150 km per day would require 90 to 165 kWh (refer back to Tables 1 and 2). With a 22 kW AC charger, this driving range could be delivered in up to 8 hours. It is expected most trucks will have at least 8 hours downtime each day to facilitate this, however, in some cases, public charging during breaks could reduce overnight charging times. Faster DC charging infrastructure could also reduce charging times down to as short as 1 hour (for small rigid trucks travelling 150 km per day).

2 A 100 kW charger operating for 1 hour will deliver approximately 100 kWh of energy. Assuming an electric truck consumes approximately 1 kWh per kilometre, this means that a 100 kW charger will deliver approximately 100 kilometres per hour.