More than is typical even for technology entrepreneurs, Neha Palmer is in the business of predicting the future. TeraWatt Infrastructure, a startup unicorn based in San Francisco, is a bet on the idea that some future day, companies from taxicab operators to e-retailers will have large fleets of electric trucks, cars, and vans—and need somewhere to charge them. Palmer's strategy is to figure out where to start building chargers now, a process that can take years, to serve that future demand.
That there will be plenty of people wanting to charge in the future is fairly certain. The US government aims to cut bus, truck, and van pollution by more than half by 2045, a shift that will require a significant jump in the number of zero-emission vehicles on the road. Heavy-duty, energy-hungry trucks, which account for almost 10 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions, are a particularly appealing target. But picking where to invest in infrastructure before many of those vehicles have even been manufactured is challenging.
TeraWatt analyzes zoning maps and data on highway usage, and it monitors government incentives for electrification, like California’s especially ambitious truck and van pollution goals. (The state’s gunning for all zero-emission sales by 2045.) It talks with electricity providers about where it will be easiest to feed enormous amounts of power—potentially a small town’s worth—into an electric truck in the time it takes the driver to down a sandwich and a coke.
Sometimes the selection process is more organic. “You know in your bones when you’re standing on the corner and you see the traffic coming through,” Palmer says. “You know it’s a good location.” TeraWatt is building stations in 19 states and also acquired real estate for seven charging sites along freight-heavy Interstate 10, connecting California’s busy Port of Long Beach, next to Los Angeles, with El Paso, Texas, on the Mexico border.
TeraWatt is part of a land grab heating up as companies seek to stake out charging stations for future commercial fleets of trucks, vans, and cars. Private companies have pledged more than $16 billion to build charging infrastructure for fleets and private cars in North America in the next decade or so, according to Atlas Public Policy, a think tank.
TeraWatt’s plans also include networks of fleet chargers on major freight routes along the East Coast and West Coast of the US. Truck stop operator Pilot Company has announced plans with Volvo and General Motors to install thousands of truck-charging stations across the US, and its competitor, TravelCenters of America, says it will install 1,000 by 2028. A group of nine utilities in three western US states have plotted out a path of 27 charging stations for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles along Interstate 5; a first site, a kind of test bed, opened in Portland in 2021.
Governments are egging on the frenzy. Last summer’s Inflation Reduction Act offers funds and tax incentives for building up zero-emission fleets and infrastructure. And the Feds will reportedly grant California, and any states that want to follow, special permission to set their own tighter truck emissions rules.
Folks who work on and around electric vehicles like to talk about the chicken-and-egg problem—people won’t buy EVs today because there aren’t enough charging stations, and companies won’t build charging stations because there aren’t enough EVs to use them. Earlier this year, a Daimler Truck North America executive told reporters that customers once enthused about the prospect of purchasing large battery-powered trucks had backed away from buying in bulk because they were worried about charging them.
Between the efforts of companies like TeraWatt and recent progress from automakers, both chicken and egg seem to be willing. After a four-year delay, Tesla in December began delivering its Semi, a battery-powered semi truck with a claimed 500 miles of range, and it plans to build 50,000 by 2024. (As always, take Tesla timelines with a grain of salt.) Amazon is delivering packages using Rivian trucks supplied under an agreement struck with the automaker in 2019, although the ecommerce giant has purchased only a fraction of the vehicles it once promised.
More established automakers are also pushing commercial EVs. General Motors’ BrightDrop division and Ford both make electric vans of their own and have subsidiaries selling to fleets. Daimler and Volvo have sold and delivered electric semi trucks. A survey taken in 2021 by the Corporate Electric Vehicle Alliance, a group led by the nonprofit Ceres that represents 24 companies, including Amazon, Hertz, Best Buy, and T-Mobile, found that members plan to buy almost 330,000 electric vehicles by 2026, including 42,000 cargo vans, 5,000 box trucks, and 6,000 tractor trailers.
But while plug-in trucks are coming, it’s an open question how quickly commercial fleets will go electric, or whether businesses might move toward a different zero-emission technology altogether. That makes quickly building a nationwide charging network a riskier proposition.
One problem is that because of the limitations of battery technology, today’s plug-in trucks are unable to travel the long distances needed to haul goods cross-country. Right now, companies that have placed orders for or taken delivery of the handful of commercial vehicles in production mostly plan to use them for local deliveries, so that the vehicles can return back to their home bases to charge at the end of their shifts. If electric trucks don’t become capable enough to grow beyond that use case, there could be less demand for sprawling, highway-side charging stations.
Skeptics, meanwhile, doubt that fully electrified vehicles on the scale of long-haul trucks will ever make financial sense, because of the cost and weight of the gigantic batteries necessary to move them. Hydrogen fuel cells and liquified natural gas aren’t much talked about for passenger cars anymore, but they are still in the race to figure out zero-emission freight. That could mean the land and charging infrastructure paid for by TeraWatt and others will never become the linchpin of the future of trucking they hope.
There’s also the challenge of finding the sheer amount of power needed to quickly charge a big electric vehicle. A recent report from the energy company National Grid estimates that highways across New York and Massachusetts will need 71 high-capacity charging stations along highways by 2045, with most equipped to charge big electric commercial vehicles. And by 2030, it predicts, a quarter of those stations will require more than 5 megawatts of charging capacity—enough to boot up an outdoor professional sports stadium.
Wiring a station of that size into the electric grid can take years and tens of millions of dollars’ worth of upgrades. What’s more, that juice will need to be delivered quickly, because trucking operators likely won’t tolerate chargers that work like straws sucking at mud. The situation demands “long-term capital planning” by government agencies, the authors wrote.
In fact, despite the myriad uncertainties, anyone interested in chargers should start making significant plans now, says Andrew Meintz, the chief engineer for electric vehicle charging and grid integration at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The infrastructure “takes a while to build but is then around for a really long time,” he says.
Some challenges to building out truck-charging infrastructure can only be discovered by building it. In Oregon, Daimler worked with the local utility Portland General Electric to build out a truck-charging station that opened in 2021. Some semi trucks are already being “topped up” at the facility, says John Farmer, a spokesperson for the utility, but its most important purpose is operating as a test bed for engineers studying how best to charge big vehicles. Workers have, for example, installed multiple makes of chargers to test how quickly they can charge up a truck, or their effects on the local grid. “Here’s the thing: No one has done this before,” he says.
Updated 03/31/2021, 4:00 pm EST: An earlier version of this story stated that TerraWatt had built stations in 19 states. It is still in the process of building these stations and they are not yet complete.
