Department of Energy Grants $68 Million in Charging Projects
The new administration may have a philosophy of “drill, baby, drill”, but it does not consider electric vehicles to be completely off the table as an alternative to standard fossil fuels. To that end, the Department of Energy (DOE) is offering $68,000,000 in establishing charging stations for fully electric heavy-duty trucks across the nation.
Details
One such example of the spending is through, Greenlane, a joint venture of numerous truck manufacturers in the United States including Daimler. It is building a 10 Megawatt plant in Barstow, California, using the power of the sun in the desert area to power trucks delivering freight. Assuming a rate of two kilowatt-hours per mile, it can fully charge ten trucks for five hundred miles in an hour.
A similar investment is happening over at Utah State University, where a grant of $22 million is projected to give 21 Megawatts of energy to trucks in the local area, especially those making deliveries to the university.
Conclusion
Though these various investments are helping to bolster electric vehicles’ chances of eventually outpacing standard diesel, there is still a lot of work to be done. If all of the charging capacity of the Barstow, California charging station were placed into a single truck (the safety implications of this being ignored for simplicity’s sake), it would charge at the same rate that it takes for a diesel truck to fill up at the pump. As a result, the charging facilities will still need to have waiting areas as multiple trucks fill up slowly, or each truck takes a turn filling up quickly.
The safety implications make the experiment all the more interesting, as usually batteries will start charging at a much slower rate once they hit 80% so as to avoid overcharging and battery fires. As such, it seems electric technology has its work cut out for them if it ever wants to compete with diesel. One suggestion has been electrifying roads so that trucks can charge as they travel, but until a litany of solutions come together, the best solution we have is to make combustion engines create fewer emissions and to “drill, baby, drill.”
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