Battery electric long-haul trucking with overnight charging in the United States: A comprehensive costing and emissions analysis

Abstract

This work presents a costing and emissions analysis of long-haul battery electric trucks (BETs) with overnight charging for the U.S. market. The energy requirements of a long-haul truck for a 600-mile (966 km) real-world driving range determine battery sizes. The battery masses are used along with a fleet-replacement model and the U.S. payload distribution to compute payload losses for two different chemistries, Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt (NMC) and Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP). With present battery energy densities, BET fleets require 6% (NMC) or 27% (LFP) more trucks to move the same cargo as today’s diesel fleet. The cost of electricity delivered using high-power overnight chargers is analyzed. Our baseline scenario estimates 0.32 USD/kWh, and it only decreases to 0.15 USD/kWh for the optimistic scenario. Currently, we compute the total cost of ownership for BETs to be more than twice ($>$2x) that of diesel trucks, however, the price premium is projected to decrease significantly to 1.2x in the long term. BETs could become economically competitive with diesel if the delivered cost of electricity drops below 0.1 USD/kWh, and if we realize projected improvements in battery energy density and cost. Our emissions analysis shows negligible greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits from switching to BETs today, primarily due to the carbon intensity of electricity generation. In the long term, we project BETs to have 40% less GHG emissions than diesel. Today, BETs are not well-suited for the long-haul trucking sector. However, short-haul trucking could potentially benefit from electrification, and battery-swapping could significantly benefit long-haul BET, hence we encourage further investigation. Our analysis framework is provided as a Google Colab Notebook that can be modified to assist these needed future studies.