Volvo recently announced its plan to construct an electric charging corridor in California. The route will link some of the state’s most important ports and freight corridors. Volvo is partnering with Shell Recharge Solutions, TEC Equipment and others to develop the corridor.
The plan is for it to be publicly accessible for medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles (MHD EV). It is to be completed by the end of 2023.
According to a recent article in CleanTechnica, the project will “address key barriers to long-range MHD EV deployments and accelerate widespread adoption.”
The California Energy Commission (CEC) has offered a $2 million grant under Bestfit.
“This is an opportunity for these companies and the industry as a whole to really prove the [benefits] of the application of EVs in long-haul trucking,” said Danny Gomez, managing director of financial and emerging markets at FreightWaves. “It’s super exciting to see all these partnerships come together.”
This project will enable convenient charging for smaller fleets that want to avoid making major financial investments in large-scale charging infrastructure at their site.
The project will also convenience fleets looking to electric vehicles for rental and short-term lease opportunities and fleets that require an OEM-neutral location along their route for “opportunity charging.”
One of the biggest hurdles in making strides toward widespread adoption of EVs is the lack of infrastructure to support them, but Volvo has been an industry leader in heavy-duty truck technology for the past 5 years.
For EVs to become widely adopted in the industry, it is imperative that more OEMs take the initiative to help solve the infrastructure dilemma. While EVs are not the only initiative toward a greener industry, it is unfair to place on carriers and shippers the whole financial burden of building private charging stations at their facilities.
“Hopefully [this California project] can become a model for what can happen in other parts of the country,” Gomez added. “And hopefully the economics become such that it doesn’t need heavy offsets from environmental programs and can be widely applied across the U.S.”