Webinar panelists point to grid restraints, regulations and the ‘chicken-and-egg’ conundrum of installing MHDV chargers before having trucks on the road

On Nov. 10, Electric Autonomy partnered with Powering America’s Commercial Transportation (PACT) an industry education and advocacy coalition, for an informative webinar with Canadian industry leaders in electrified medium- and heavy-duty fleets: Building charging corridors for electric freight.

If you missed joining the live discussion, you can watch the recording here with Andrea Pratt, vice-president of government & utilities, Greenlane; Martin Archambault, business development manager, fleet electrification for Hydro-Québec; Sam Vercellotti, policy advisor at PACT; and James Carter (moderator), principal consultant with Vision Mobility.

The panel answered viewers’ questions on real-world electric medium- and heavy-duty vehicle (MHDV) use in commercial situations and looked at how public charging can grow from single depots into highway networks.

Getting power to the site

Some of the panelists agreed that one of the biggest obstacles to building charging networks along freight routes is getting enough electricity to the sites.

To give an example of this, Pratt described Greenlane’s truck-stop-style hub in Colton, Calif., which can charge hundreds of trucks a day. Greenlane is a joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, NextEra Energy and BlackRock. The Colton site is designed for 12 megawatts but has only four today, so an energy management system makes up the difference while the utility adds capacity.

“What we’re finding is the utilities can never give us enough power on day one, but a lot of times they can give us enough power to start,” Pratt said.

Quebec’s plan

Meanwhile, in Canada, Archambault said Hydro-Québec’s Circuit électrique charging network subsidiary is working with Propulsion Québec to build stations along a corridor from Quebec City along Autoroute 20 to Toronto along Highway 401 in Ontario. The stations are often placed at existing truck stops. He said Hydro-Québec hopes to switch on its first Megawatt Charging System charger by the end of winter.

Carter noted that Highway 401, which runs from Windsor through Toronto to the eastern Ontario border near Montreal, is one of the world’s busiest truck routes.

Archambault said that because it is government-owned, the utility can take on early risks that private investors avoid. Because there are few chargers available, there are few electric trucks on long-haul routes – the ‘chicken-and-egg’ conundrum.

“If you don’t put some chargers on the highway, there won’t be any trucks, and if there’s no trucks, no one wants to put [in] chargers,” he said.

According to Archambault, Hydro-Québec is designing sites for 20 to 40 chargers even when it installs only four or six at first. It is also working with partners on a system that would let fleets reserve charging time across different networks without adding more software.

For Archambault at Hydro-Québec, the problem is more red tap rather than supply.

“We have a lot of cheap electricity in Quebec, so … it’s only a question of time to get the power where you need it. But .. here at least, it’s a regulation problem.

“There’s a lot of rules that are very very difficult to [follow].”

REGULATIONS

Grid upgrades a necessity

Verselotti warned that 2027 could be the first year grid capacity becomes a real bottleneck. He calls bridging solutions, on-site renewables and flexible interconnection useful “but not as a long-term solution.

“We need permanent, proactive grid upgrades to be able to make this ecosystem scale.”

Electric Autonomy/PACT series of webinars

See the two other webinars in this series here. All three webinars can also found on the Electric Autonomy YouTube channel.

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