Clean Freight Coalition Estimates Cost of Electrification
It has been almost a full year since we last wrote about the Clean Freight Coalition (CFC), but in that year they have been working in the background studying to determine how much money it would cost to transition the nation’s entire medium-duty and heavy-duty inventory from diesel to electricity. The number is not pretty.
Details
The CFC estimates the cost to be $1 trillion dollars. Of that, $620 billion would have to come from the industry itself with costs such as purchasing the new vehicles and installing chargers at the headquarters.
The report, given an executive summary by Roland Berger, highlights the details regarding electrifying America’s fleet.
Cost-Sharing?
It goes without saying that asking the trucking industry to upfront the costs to fully electrify fleets is herculean in nature, even Dr. Wilfried Aulbur, a Roland Berger senior partner commenting on the study, agrees with that sentiment.
“An industry with a yearly turnover of about $800 billion and a profit margin around 5% cannot invest $620 billion without financial support or a significant increase in freight rates,” Aulbur said.
This means that other stakeholders are going to have to step up, and so far, they are making strides in doing so. The federal government is planning to have about 49,000 miles of easy-access electricity roads by 2040 through the National Zero-Emission Freight Corridor Strategy, and California offers incentives for the purchase of zero-emission vehicles.
Conclusion
No matter what the case may ultimately be for the future of trucking, this study is solid proof that the transition to cleaner energy is going to be a very gradual process rather than the earthquake some regulators are hoping for it to be.
The only way to force change would be to follow in California’s footsteps and set a hard deadline for a nationwide ban on diesel truck operation, but doing that is a surefire way to send the economy into gridlock. As such, it will be interesting to see which comes first: fully electric trucking across the United States, or fully autonomous trucking across the United States. Frankly, we could not tell you which will happen first.
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