[rtkwe]

Even slow overnight charging will have to be pretty beefy for these trucks and their batteries though. They're going to expend significantly more energy than your commuter car so they'll have to suck down a lot of juice overnight.

[reportingsjr]

In the areas that companies build their truck lots with diesel depot's there is typically significant power available. The US electrical grid has expanded at a fairly steady rate. I don't see why it wouldn't be able to handle a continued growth rate via electric trucks.

Just to put some numbers out there, the semi battery pack is probably around 850kWh-1MWh. Imagine if this gets drained every day and a company has 10 trucks, the trucks have roughly 10-12 hours to charge (~6pm to 6am). So you'd need 1MW of electrical capacity.

This is equivalent to about 20 modern US homes (200A*240VAC) and not that crazy in the scheme of things. A medium sized factory in the US probably has a grid connection around this size depending on what they do.

[secabeen]

The grid also has lots of excess overnight capacity. From the California Independent system operator data, the state has 42,000 MW of total capacity. Overnight demand is below 23,000 MW for much of the night. Even if we exclude the top 20% of capacity as too expensive or polluting, we still have 11,000MW of available capacity today in the overnight window in California alone.

[WirelessGigabit]

I wonder how much longer the excess in CA will be there. As we are moving more and more towards solar we need more storage to handle shadow and the loads at night.

[rtkwe]

It's certainly doable but it's not going to be cheap at all. That's at 1300 amp service of 480v 3-phase just for charging plus the chargers to handle that ~100KW of load per truck, to provide that power you're likely going to have the external charger setup instead of just one on the truck itself and those aren't cheap.

[Damogran6]

If the numbers work, they'll do it. It's not like they're going to get 95% of the way through the design process and then give up because power delivery costs a little more.

If the ROI is there, they'll do it. If it's not, they won't.

[rtkwe]

Well yeah my point is the ROI is pushed out because of the extra expense of the install and acquiring sufficient electrical service above and beyond the cost of the new fleet.

[reportingsjr]

No, but installing an maintaining diesel tanks and pumps ain't cheap either! Especially if you have to deal with any environmental destruction caused by spillage or leaking tanks (happens way, way more than most people think).