Electrifying Australia’s truck fleet is a grid story as much as a freight one, and it will play out at the depot gate.
Endgame Analytics is pleased to share the fourth instalment of our decarbonising transport research series, this time looking at the grid implications of battery electric truck uptake: how much electricity a fully electric fleet would draw, where it would charge, and what that means for the networks that serve it.
We sized the national fleet’s energy from ABS and NTC data, then modelled least-cost charging for a 30-truck depot at Eastern Creek in Western Sydney against Endeavour Energy’s substation demand and tariffs, and scaled it to ten depots.
Some key highlights:
- The energy task is large:A fully electric version of today’s truck fleet would draw 31.8 TWh a year, adding 14% to NEM and WEM electricity use, rising to 49.3 TWh by 2050. Articulated trucks are 22% of the fleet but would draw 62% of the energy.
- Most charging happens at depots, at least cost: 83% of truck-km would be charged at depots. A least-cost depot charges in the early hours for about $1,015 a day, compared with about $2,860 for the same driving on diesel at $2 a litre.
- Price signals move the peak, they don’t remove it: Ten least-cost depots would lift the Eastern Creek zone substation to about 28 MW overnight, against a 19.2 MW evening peak in 2023, leaving only about 7 MW of headroom by 2030.
- Small operators face the biggest barrier: 70% of operators own a single truck and margins average about 2%, so connection upgrades and chargers could stall the transition without government support.
Networks will need to plan for a potential peak caused by coordinated depot charging, and add capacity.
Read the full paper here