In Episode 193 Gary looks at the whole Logistics aspect of EVs: What’s the state of play with trucks, vans and other delivery mechanisms and electrification?

In this episode, we’re going to be looking at the scale of the issue and the potential solutions that are out there.

We'll hear from Lorna McAtear - Head of Fleet with National Grid in this episode.

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Zapmap, the free to download app that helps EV drivers search, plan, and pay for their charging.

Links in the show notes:

• Getting heavy-duty vehicles in gear for net-zero
• This new all-electric luxury trailer is a 24-foot off-grid sanctuary - - Cool Thing
• Episode 178 - The Fleet Electrification Episode

Episode produced by Arran Sheppard at Urban Podcasts: https://www.urbanpodcasts.co.uk

(C) 2019-2024 Gary Comerford

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Gary C 0:00

Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode 193 vv musings, a podcast about renewables, electric vehicles, and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. On the show today, we'll be looking at trucks and how to electrify logistics.

Gary C 0:26

This season of the podcast is sponsored by zap map the free to download app that helps EV drivers search plan and pay for their charging. Before we start, I want you to say if you're new here, welcome. On this podcast we talk about renewables, electric vehicles, things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners and there's almost 200 episodes in the back catalogue, covering topics such as charging, buying a new or used Eevee, electric planes, electric boats, personal electric vehicles, such as E bikes, e scooters, on one wheels, we've got discussions with a national grid, the AAA the heads of the main charge point operators key players in the motoring world such as Quinn Wilson, there's also episodes talking about EB insurance your first day with an EV running your car in cold weather, charge your age, and we've got reviews of pretty much all the electric cars on sale from people who own and have run them for the last six months. So check out the back catalogue, I'm sure you'll find something of interest or a topic of discussion today's trucks and fleets. More specifically, I'm talking logistics and electrifying that aspect of transportation. There is a saying which goes something along the lines of everything you can see, touch or eat has been on the back of a truck at some point. Trucks or lorries, as we call them in the UK are an integral part of the logistics network. They transport everything from live cattle and wind turbine blades to containers full of Chinese tablets come across on a ship from the Far East. And it's a huge business. But we'll get to that in a short while. Back in the mists of time I did some work at the headquarters of a major shipping company which handle some of the shipping containers. And it's a pretty much 24 hour operation. Getting these containers off trucks and onto the ship bar off the ship then onto trucks. And depending on the cargo and the destination, there's a whole range of trucks that can be used for this 10 tonne trucks 20 tonne trucks 40 tonne articulated lorries, some are panel sided, some are open sided, some are refrigerated, and the one thing they all have in common at the moment is that they generally

Unknown Speaker 2:36

all run on diesel. And diesel has a number

Gary C 2:41

of advantages. It's easily obtainable. It's reasonably efficient in terms of the distance a lorry can go and a gallon diesel. And you can find these pretty much every petrol station around the country. As a result, there's a huge ecosystem that's grown up around diesel diesel refuelling, and the whole transportation or logistics industry in general. And in this episode, we're going to be looking at this aspect of transportation. And considering some of the challenges and solutions to getting dirty diesel off our roads, and replaced it with something that's more eco friendly and much lower pollution. We're going to be looking at scale of the issue and the potential solutions that are out there. We'll also look at the challenges around implementing these solutions, and where we are along the timeline of implementation. Now this podcast is done over 190 episodes so far. And during those 190 episodes, we've covered many, many aspects of the electric vehicle revolution. We've looked at myths and legends, we've looked at specific electric cars, we've spoken to thought leaders, CPO executives, charger manufacturers breakdown service operators, we've looked at running electric vans, electric planes, electric boats, Hell, we even did an episode on electric flying cars, as someone listened to these episodes could come away with a feeling that for the most part, it's fairly quick and easy to electrify something to create an electric version of a car such as to Jack your eye pace, De Niro, a VW ID model or Nissan LEAF, you throw up some charges. And that's pretty much the bulk of the work done. Sure, there's going to be teething troubles when it comes to things such as the right number of charges in the right place, cost vehicles, getting the public to understand that this isn't a passing fad that will be replaced with something else in a few years, all that sort of stuff. And that's the hearts and minds thing which will sort itself out in the end. After all, it's your car, your drive your charger your money. You work with a solution that fits the best for you and look to the government to incentivize what needs to be done at a national scale. But when you move the focus from personal transportation such as cars, bikes and scooters, and refocus it to cargo, transportation issues changed dramatically.

Gary C 4:53

Whereas the earlier issue with personal transport was how much do I pay to get an EV in a charger when it comes to cargo and logistics, the questions are a lot different. Businesses are obviously driven by cost, but they're also driven by lots of other factors that private car owners don't really need to take care of or be concerned about. We spoke with Lorna McAtear, head of fleet at National Grid last season. In that discussion, she told me about some of the issues she has to deal with when it comes to running a fleet of vans, cars and four by fours. And whether it was just a case of throwing a few charges in a depo.

Lorna McAtear 5:28

I would love for it to be that accurate and that easy. I think if it was then my life would my job would be done. It's never that simple. isn't. It's a real challenge when you come there. And I think a lot of that if we put some context behind commercial vehicles, they've always been the poor relationship in any company. So when I was at Royal Mail with the largest commercial fleet in the UK, it was still not priority compared to the actual post is delivering out there. So vehicles are always down the pecking order in terms of priority.

Gary C 6:01

Now imagine you're running a fleet of hundreds of large trucks that were for example, supplying food to the major supermarket chains, you've got to pick up food at ports or airports, transport it to central warehouses, take it from the central warehouses, and move it out to the individual stores. You've also got to do that safely, efficiently and quickly. Often in vehicles that need to maintain the specific level of chilled or frozen refrigeration. Driver hours have to be monitored and managed downtime has to be minimised. Trucks sometimes run 24/7 Without the ability to charge a depot overnight. And there are all sorts of regulations around maximum vehicle weights which be affected by needing to include huge heavy batteries as part of a new vehicle. So the freight and logistics sector has a huge number of challenges that private cars don't have.

Unknown Speaker 6:49

Gary C 7:43

Gary C 9:00

And a lot of this is a result of the hub and spoke aspect of deliveries. If you've ever ordered a parcel and they've sent you a tracking link for it, you'll often see that your delivery starts at a factory or a shop, it gets shipped to some large central warehouse somewhere, then overnight to the nearest local depot loaded onto a van or in some cases a cargo bike and delivered to your house. When I worked deliveries for Morrison's during lockdown, I knew that all of their goods would have to transit through a single huge warehouse in Kent, from where they be loaded onto a truck and shipped off to be delivered to individual stores. And at the moment pretty much all of this is done by diesel trucks. Time for a quick sidebar. I used to deliver Bombay Sapphire gin to houses in Overton Hampshire, from the Basingstoke Morrison side. Overton is the home of Bombay Sapphire gin and their factories located there. So a bottle of their gin would have to go from Overton To the nearest delivery logistics warehouse to the central Morrison's warehouse in Kent, back to Basingstoke to be stuck on the back of my van, which will deliver it to the house two miles from where it was, it was originally bottled. And that's logistics for you. That's those of you thinking it will be cheaper just to walk to the distillery and buy it. hard luck. You can only access the shop after taking a paid tour starting at 20 pounds. And whilst you can buy online shipping is only included for baskets of 60 pounds or higher. Now back to the show. The overall freight market

is expected to have two and a half percent growth between 2021 and 2026. Now it's not a lot in percentage terms, but in terms of miles driven and greenhouse gas emissions. It's huge. So if we want to get rid of diesel and replace everything with zero emission vehicles,

how do we do that? Well,

it's not as easy as you might imagine. One issue we have at the moment is the batteries themselves. Now I can drive my Volkswagen ID three on a run in summer and get anything up to four and a half or even five miles per kilowatt hour efficiency on the run. That's because it's a smallish, fairly streamlined card that doesn't weigh a great deal in the big scheme of things. It's certainly lighter than the two Volkswagen SUVs my neighbours have got. But if you'd end up scale up to the size of a 40 tonne truck, complete the trailer on the back full of your favourite Morrison's foodstuffs. The amount of energy needed to push that vehicle forward on its trip from the warehouse in Kent. To a store in, say, Newcastle is quite large. In fact, it's measured in kilowatt hours per mile. Famously Elon Musk's Tesla semi one of the first fully electric artics to be launched and which is currently in service with Frito Lay/ Pepsi Cola in the US will need two kilowatt hours of energy to move a vehicle one mile along the road. On average, my ID.3 will do eight to 10 miles on that same two kilowatt hours of energy.

However, data coming out from the US indicate that the Tesla semi trucks are performing as well as expected, with one in particular, transporting cans from the Pepsi range, drove 1500 miles over two days. The stats for this are available online, and it appears that the vehicle stopped after 12 hours for a three hour charge, which tops it up to 100% from around 20% state of charge. It also did a couple of shorter stops to extend the range slightly. In a continuous run it covered around 400 miles on the little over 80% of the battery. Now given the huge payload it was carrying, that's not too shabby. What this shows, however, is it for any appreciable distance in an electric truck, you'll need huge batteries. If you've got a truck that does a specific route most days or have the ability to stop fairly regularly, you're going to be able to handle batteries with good charge speed.

So what's out there at the moment? Well,

the Mercedes Benz eActos 600e truck recently did a 600 mile journey through the Alps with a 40 tonne load in a single day. That easily covers Kent to, say, Newcastle with range to spare. Engineers have designed the eActos 600 to deliver 1.2 million kilometres on the road over 10 years. Other manufacturers such as Volvo are also getting into the electric trucking business.

So the rolling stock is getting there. The issue as always, is the charging infrastructure.

To manage the sort of charging needed to keep a fleet of eActos trucks on the road you need lots of infrastructure designed to handle the specific needs of trucks and this means long charging bays with side mounted chargers. This also means very fast charging. The standard is referred to as MCS - megawatt charging system. This means good, well designed hubs that can handle lots of trucks, lots of drivers, and provide the facilities they need with charging at the speed they need. Now I spoke to CPOs on this programme and asked several of them about charging for trucks. None of them have a comprehensive solution for this. Although both Osprey charging and Gridserve charging can handle long vehicles at several of their locations, but nobody has MCS charging at the moment. However Gridserve did announce recently that they were leading a consortium dedicated to designing and implementing what they're calling the Electric Freeway. Within the first two years of this seven year project Gridserve's committed to installing over 200 high powered chargers across key motorway service areas and more than 10 commercial depot charging locations. Within this they'll also be deployed at least one megawatt capacity high power chargers. This means that batteries don't need to be as big as some of those already designed because on the EU laws, HGV drivers must stop every four and a half hours for 45 minutes. The hope is to better use that 45 minutes to recharge and get the driver on his or her way. Again, with a full battery. That will best of luck to that project. We'll keep an eye out on it.

they aren't zero. Now I posted on the platform that used to be called Twitter

recently, that this is the equivalent of being run over in a stampede by 1000 smaller people, rather than 100 larger people or being bitten by lots of little venomous snakes rather than one huge one. It's probably less painful at the time, but the end result is the same.

The next fuel that always raises its head when discussions such as this are opened is hydrogen. I was in recent trade show in London, and it was eye opening the number of vehicles there that were pushing hydrogen as a solution. Again, as with HVO, hydrogen has a lot of potential to be great fuel for trucking and other logistics, it produces no emissions when processed through a fuel cell, is fairly lightweight, can be carried in bulk with large tanks, and it gives you excellent range. Well, it gives you range. But these are all the pluses that people use when trying to push hydrogen cars and nobody looks at the downsides or the inherent dangers. Again, the issue here is that you need to have a good source of readily available hydrogen to make this happen. Applicants talk about 'electrolyzing Hydrogen using excess renewables'. But this is assuming that a there's going to be excess renewables and b there'll be sufficient to enable widespread electrolysis of hydrogen after everything else has been accounted for. Even if both of these conditions are met, there are other far more important uses of hydrogen than moving cargo around the country. Uses which will have a more positive effect on the environment from a carbon dioxide and particulate point of view. For companies that produce hydrogen on site, and there are several of these, using it as a fuel for long range trucks is okay as long as it's produced using electrolysis. For warehouses that have lots of solar panels on the roof, it might be possible for electrolysis to produce efficient hydrogen to run a fleet of trucks. But for those that don't, this could mean using methane as a hydrogen source. And that's not great. In fact, that's distinctly bad.

Secondly, all UK and most foreign truck drivers have mandated rest breaks every four hours also. This allows adequate time for charging as evidenced by both the Tesla semi situation and the Mercedes eActos that we mentioned earlier. Of course, the fly in the ointment that makes this difficult at the moment, as mentioned earlier, is the actual infrastructure. If you're relying on the public infrastructure for your truck charging, especially in the UK in Europe, you probably not be able to run your truck as well as you might want to right now. If you've got local charging and a depot this situation becomes more tenable. The Gridserve Electric freightway project will go some way to alleviating the issues with public charge of large EVs. But as with everything related to the world of electrifying things, it will take time. There's always going to be someone wanting to push back against this on a principle basis - "I'm not going to go electric because someone says I have to" or an ideological basis "EVs are not the right solution will wait for hydrogen", or a vested interest basis, where people who stand to lose out from the electrification of trucking will protest. But that's the price of progress.

When they stopped using whale oil to provide the oils for streetlights. The whaling industry disappeared almost overnight. The replacement was better, cheaper, and easier to get.

Wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happens with trucks. It's time for a cool EV or renewable thing share with the listeners. Stockholm is banning fossil fuel vehicles in the city centre. From early 2025 in area of 180,000 square metres or about 20 blocks that form the Swedish capitals finance the main shopping area will only allow electric cars, some hybrid trucks and fuel cell vehicles. Dementia comes on the back of booths to turn the capital into a walking city or a biking city along the lines at places like Utrecht and Amsterdam. To further reduce all car traffic. Public transport is to be advanced while personal mobility in the city is to be proved for pedestrians and cyclists so that car trips are largely unnecessary. Any goods vehicles may also come as low emission hybrids when entering the new zones. Other exceptions include emergency and health care vehicles, and drivers with a disabled parking. I'd love to see this

And that's the show for today. Hope you enjoyed listening to it.

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Thanks as always to my co founder Simon. You know I watched some of his initial videos where he was learning to ride the one-wheel. On the face if it the concept’s easy: one foot either side, clasp the knees together and use your weight to steer, accelerate and stop. I asked him why it took him so long to learn. He told me:

it's never that simple. Is it Gary?

Thanks for listening. Bye