Industrial and Retail Owners Will Find Electric Truck Charging Hard

Preparing multifamily and retail properties for electric vehicle charging has become a search for business and funding models that will work. The necessary equipment is bulky, expensive, hard to install, and requires adequate power sources.

EV trucks make the considerations harder and costlier. Planning is more complex and, if you’re managing a lot of trucks, likely requires working closely with local electric utilities to get the enormous power upgrades you’ll need.

Patrick Sullivan is chief executive officer of EV Realty, which specializes in developing charging for medium- and heavy-duty (MHD) trucking fleets. These trucks range from local delivery vehicles to short-haul tractors that can pull 40-foot or 53-foot containers, typically between a port and relatively close warehouses.

To understand the charging challenges, you have to grasp the differences in needed power. Consumer EVs can charge overnight using normal residential current. Using Southern California as an example, power lines typically operate at 4 kilovolts to 12 kilovolts. A typical warehouse might have power lines that handle up to 33 kilovolts.

That isn’t close to what an electric truck charging terminal will need. Instead of a juiced overhead line, chances are the site will need a connection to a substation — which might need new construction — that can deliver 10 megawatts or more. Substations typically need between 2 and 10 acres, they’re built by the electrical utilities, and depending on the locale and utility, could take 10 years to construct.

“There’s a massive supply and demand imbalance” of power in the electrical grid, Sullivan says. “There’s plenty of capacity. It’s a matter of how that’s distributed across the system.”

There may be existing substations that might do, but finding which ones have adequate capabilities is hard. “Every line, every circuit coming out of that substation, goes out to all the different locations with customers,” Sullivan says. Customer needs can change all the time and the utility then shifts things around. When his company looks for a substation that might serve as a power source, they have to predict how future demand might change.

Planning for the needed power consumption means arranging future use with the utility and then actually using the power within whatever timeline the company says.

For existing warehousing and logistics facilities, the move to electric MHD vehicles means ensuring the necessary power sources are available and ready — or waiting while the necessary connections are made before bringing the trucks onto the property. It might even mean a secondary location with the power and parking necessary to keep a fleet at the ready so delivery vehicles can then drive to the loading docks.