In the race to electrify and decarbonise road transport,
one of the most polluting sectors is lagging behind.
It’s estimated that at least 30 per cent of transport emissions come from trucks,
but less than one per cent of those produced by conventional manufacturers are electric,
and hardly any of those are long-haul.
There are not huge numbers at the moment. Many of them are still in the testing phase and
it's going to be years and years before they are commonplace on the roads.
Yet conventional long-haul diesel trucks are among the most polluting and most likely to
fall foul of impending emissions legislation, as countries adopt net zero targets.
Fundamentally the industry is working on the technology. They know they quite
simply have to get there to be allowed to sell the vehicles in the future.
But the relatively few electric models being built are heavier and around three times more
expensive than standard diesel drives. One way around the high cost and short
supply of new long-haul EVs is to convert existing diesel fleets.
So this is essentially a brand spanking new truck, with the turning circle of a large planet.
And that’s what this fledgling Australian company is aiming to do.
From its workshops north of Sydney, we hitched a ride on one of the
latest EV refits to hit the road. My role is to convert these trucks to
electric. It’s capital that you don’t have to purchase again when you already own it,
but you also upgrade to the latest technology and the way of the future really.
Janus Electric claims it can convert any existing
prime mover for around a quarter of the cost of buying new.
Essentially you get to reutilise your existing vehicle. That comes with a number of advantages.
The cost of electricity in terms of an energy source versus diesel is markedly cheaper. They
get to electrify. They get to reduce their CO2 emissions, and they get to save money.
It’s not only the conversion process, but the battery, that’s at the core of business.
This is what goes into the truck, basically?
This is what goes into the truck. Each module weighs about one and a half tonnes.
The most expensive and critical component of any heavy EV vehicle,
the battery, is interchangeable. It’s designed to be swapped with
fully-charged replacements, stocked at bespoke roadside stations.
That saves the driver having to wait for an on-board recharge, at variable cost.
For starters if you come in at 5pm and you’re right on peak, the cost of that charge is
astronomical, because you’re utilising peak power. The time, you know, some trucks take four to six
hours to charge, so the vehicle’s off the road for six hours, which means you’re losing money.
Janus says its batteries can be swapped in under four minutes, even less time than it takes to fill
conventional tanks with diesel fuel. But the business is still developing.
The company expects to deliver only around 30 conversions by the end of the year.
In the short term, Janus’ battery change stations will be restricted to specific routes.
This is not an investment where we will, for example,
try and install enough charge-and-change stations to cover Australia. That doesn’t
make financial sense. So what we're doing this year is we're installing small,
commercially viable charge-and-change stations between Brisbane and Sydney.
On the other side of the world, unlike Janus, leading manufacturers like Swedish
giant Scania are building new electric trucks, rather than refitting existing diesels.
Scania’s long-haul EVs are due to start rolling off the production line at the end of 2023,
with a new battery the company claims will have a lifespan of one and a half million kilometres.
That’s equivalent to an average truck itself. Of course, they’ll still need a recharge every
several hundred kilometres or so, depending on the load.
You just open the hatch. Plug it in. To charge this one, it will take a couple of hours.
It’s quiet. There are no vibrations. People go around and think that, you know, “Heavy transport.
That will never be possible to electrify.” And we who work with it every day we say that
“We’re already here.” But it’s on open roads where
high-capacity top-up points are required to support any significant, industry-wide
transition to battery-driven trucks. So we say that we need around 20,000
public charging stations with the capacity of mega-charging, meaning
800 kilowatts or one megawatt charging. Who should do that? Who would like to start that?
We need help from countries, authorities and other investors also, to make this happen.
Now there's a bit of a scenario in the industry where they're just hoping that they produce the
vehicles and the charging issue will just get dealt with. But they know certainly they
have to move away from diesel in the next two decades, because of regulations.
Building tens of thousands of charging stations isn’t the only challenge.
Electricity grids will also have to be upgraded to supply the enormous
amounts of energy required to recharge heavy, long-haul batteries at viable speed.
National Grid, I think, once estimated that for each long-distance truck to refuel quickly,
to recharge quickly with a battery, would have the same power draw as a
small town. It's incredibly expensive to build stations that can cater to
that or to upgrade the grid to allow it to cater to that.
Scania and other EV truck manufacturers hope to kick-start the process with a €500mn joint
venture to build 1,700 high-output charging points across Europe.
But the first units aren’t expected to be operational until the end of 2023.
I think one of the biggest topics we have now in the electrification journey,
which is true for trucks and for passenger cars as well, there is “range anxiety”.
There is a lack of infrastructure, or the infrastructure is coming too slow.
Mobile charging stations are another temporary solution.
Northvolt says it’s sold around a hundred units,
but these are just small steps on the long road to decarbonise heavy haulage, the one per cent
of traffic thought to be responsible for at least 15 per cent of all transport emissions.