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The vehicles are part of a pilot project aimed at trouble-shooting EV trucking.
Deep in the Inland Empire, the vast sprawl of suburbia that extends eastward from Los Angeles, the battery-powered semi trucks are about to start their run. They navigate the congested freeways of L.A. County to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, load or unload, and then complete the round trip to trucking company NFI’s warehouse in Ontario, California. When the day’s run is done, the truck adjourns to the brand-new charging depot next door to fill up its battery for tomorrow’s trip.
These trucks are part of a project called the Joint Electric Truck Scaling Initiative, or JETSI. Funded by a handful of state sustainability agencies, the project aims to prove that electric power really can replace dirty diesel for trucking, at least for regional runs. Soon, about 100 electric trucks divided between two shipping companies will be driving around Southern California, delivering cargo while discovering just how challenging it will be for American trucking to run on battery power.
JETSI took a big leap toward its goal this week as NFI, one of two companies that will operate the electric semis, opened a 50-stall high-power charging depot next to its Ontario warehouse.
Jim O’Leary, vice president of fleet services at NFI, told me his company had already installed a handful of chargers and run a few EV semis as part of early initiatives such as the Daimler Innovation Fleet, a recent test project in which Freightliner EV semi drive hundreds of thousands of test miles. When California wanted a more ambitious test of electric trucking, he said, he thought NFI’s operations were an ideal match.
Electric semis still have a relatively short range and long recharge times, so battery power may not work for long-haul trucking — not for a while anyway. One of NFI’s core businesses, however, is “drayage,” or moving shipping containers on the back of semi trucks between a port and a warehouse. The current slate of EV trucks can make this 110- to 120-mile round trip before needing to recharge. Once they’re done, it takes 90 to 120 minutes to power up again.
“What we realized was going to be the sweet spot for electrification was this short haul, returning to the home base,” O’Leary said. “Electrification would be kind of perfect for that application.”
To streamline the operation, NFI was able to buy the plot of land next to its warehouse for the charging depot, negating the hassle of trucks making a separate trip to plug in. O’Leary said the company plans to install 1 megawatt of solar generating capacity on site. That’s not enough to charge the trucks on sun power, but it is enough to fill up the on-site batteries during the day when the trucks are out working, and then use the saved juice to help charge the vehicles later in the day when the sun has gone down.
While that sounds rosy, the purpose of a pilot project is to discover the pain points. With EV trucking, there are plenty. First: weight. The huge batteries needed to power a semi impart a serious weight penalty. Even though the state gives an extra allowance for zero-emission vehicles, O’Leary said (they may exceed the state’s weight limits by 2,000 lbs), they’re just not a great choice for carrying heavy cargo. That means shippers have to be careful about what they say they can move. “You can't really haul beverage like you would a diesel,” he said.
Maintenance is a question mark. As Heatmap has noted before, passenger EVs don’t need the same kind of basic upkeep as gasoline cars — no oil changes, no spark plug swaps. But because today’s EVs haven’t gotten old yet, we don’t know for sure how their components will age over a decade or two. The same is true for EV tractor-trailers. “We know that some of the wearables go away — the oil changes and the need to grease,” O’Leary said. But no one can be sure whether electric semis will save money on maintenance in the long term.
Then there’s the question of who’s going to fix them. A trucking company has enough certified mechanics on hand to repair run-down trucks and get them back on the road. Finding enough mechanics with the proper electrical safety certifications and know-how to repair EVs is no easy task.
The big one, of course, is the cost. NFI’s JETSI project cost $45 million all-in, O’Leary said, counting the land purchase, the chargers from Electrify America, the solar power equipment and backup batteries, the trucks, and everything else. California state agencies including California Air Resources Board, California Energy Commission, and South Coast Air Quality Management District gave money to fund this proof-of-concept, and California cap-and-trade dollars could contribute to electrifying the trucking industry in the future. But JETSI shows just how many hurdles are involved.
“I don’t want to say we were shortsighted, because I think you can’t be shortsighted when you undertake a project like this, and you're obviously looking to the future in some ways,” he said. “But I don’t think any of us, or our partners, realized the complexities that this project is going to have. Not only the complexities, but the capital investment that it takes to actually make a project like this work. And that’s where I think we are still a ways away from this being the norm.”
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.