PITTSBURGH — Truck makers, fleet owners, utilities and governments working together here and in Europe are developing what they believe will be the least disruptive way to gradually replace conventional diesel trucking fleets with electric fleets in the coming decades.

All of them, along with experts on every conceivable clean energy issue, were represented last week at the Global Clean Energy Action Forum (GCEAF), a three-day conference hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy and Carnegie Mellon University that drew more than 6,000 participants to the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in the city’s downtown.

Electrification of transportation was only one of the issues examined in dozens of seminars in between major announcements by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm aimed at explaining the Biden administration’s comprehensive efforts to decarbonize transportation, industry and power generation.

In the U.S., the transportation sector accounts for 27% of carbon emissions, according to EPA, and about a quarter of European emissions, according to the EU. Strategies to reduce transportation emissions through electrification are emerging on both continents.

The Global Logistics Emissions Council, a coalition of more than 150 organizations including trucking fleets, developed the first electrification guidelines in Europe as early as 2016. That led, in part, to the creation in 2021 of the Sustainable Freight Buyers Alliance (SFBA) and organization of multinational freight shippers interested in sorting out the emerging and sometimes conflicting national policies.

In the U.S., CALSTART — California’s 25-year clean transportation effort — and the California Air Resources Board have worked to create standards and implementation guidelines. CALSTART is active in other states as well.

Representatives of the three organizations joined spokesmen for a global freight company, another representing a U.S. electric vehicle charging company and a third representing a global truck and bus manufacturer in a panel discussion during the GCEAF
marathon of seminars.

Jennie Cato, representing Scania, a Swedish maker of trucks and buses with a presence in 100 countries, said the problem is “not a chicken-or-egg situation anymore.”

“The vehicles are not the bottleneck,” she said.

As if to prove her point, several North American truck makers parked 13 battery electric trucks — from local delivery vehicles, to over-the-road Class 8 semi-trailers — on the roadways under the convention center.

Scania is planning to offer a new electric truck annually for the rest of the decade, she said. “The goal is to have 50% of our sales volumes coming from battery electric vehicles in 2030.

“We can’t do this alone. And we need to have enabling conditions. We need to work in partnerships, both with policymakers and decision-makers; also with peers in our industry, sometimes with competitors,” she said.

Electric trucks are not the only way to build clean fleets, said Roger Libby of the DHL Group, a global delivery company. The company has had to deal with three challenges, he said: availability and timing; cost; and the density of infrastructure, whether it is for charging or refueling.

DHL began electrifying its fleet in 2006, starting with light-duty delivery trucks, which it special ordered because there were no truck makers producing electric delivery vehicles.

“We have 20,000 vehicles in our network. Our goal is to have 80% of our last-mile fleet electrified by 2030, across the world and all 220 countries and territories where we operate,” said Libby.

DHL has tried hydrogen fuel cell vehicles at its Cincinnati hub but ultimately chose battery electric. It has also tried compressed (CNG) and renewable natural gas (RNG) to replace traditional distillate fuels.

“California has done a great job at putting in renewable natural gas and compressed natural gas refueling infrastructure, and so in some corridors, you might not have the charging infrastructure, but you have the RNG refueling infrastructure, and so we might look at trucks there to use that infrastructure,” said Libby.

Vehicle availability is another issue. “If you want to buy a diesel truck, it’s in the market today. If you want to buy an electric delivery, heavy-duty or medium-duty truck, it’s 25 weeks,” he said, adding that ordering a CNG vehicle might take as much as 56 weeks.

As for cost, Libby noted that an electric truck is one and a half to twice as expensive as a conventional diesel. But tax incentives could eventually “pencil out” the extra costs.

At this point, the company is committed to using EVs for its local delivery fleet and installing charging stations at its depots. But using electrics for long-haul trucking is not possible without a charging infrastructure open to competitors as well, he said.

One company designing, building and operating charging stations is ChargePoint, a California company that has built a network of “hundreds of thousands” of charging stations in North America and Europe.

Kevin Miller, a director of public policy, said all the company’s chargers are “smart,” enabling fleet owners whose businesses are located on smart networks to charge EVs at the best price of the day.

“We work with electricity providers [and] utilities every day to help them think about how their product — electricity — is a … part of the transportation system now, and how that can be best leveraged to send an effective price signal. What’s most exciting about fleet operators is that outside of a university economics textbook, a fleet operator is the closest thing in real life that you get to a rational economic actor.”

Alycia Gilde of CALSTART agreed that working with utilities has become another key effort in the switch to electric trucking.

“We’re encouraging our fleets to start with infrastructure, getting to know and working closely with their utility. Let’s make sure that the infrastructure is in the ground by the time that vehicles are deployed,” she said.

Another CALSTART goal is to make sure small fleet owners are not left out of the switch to cleaner fuels. “And we are working very closely with our fleets, working with our drayage community,” Gilde said in a reference to the trucks that move shipping containers from and around California’s ports. Many of those drayage trucks are operated by small companies.

“We’re going to be in the process of kicking off a very thoughtful planning process. We need to understand where … all these truck movements are happening. How are we coordinating with our [utilities] to understand what the power requirements are? Where do we need to be scaling the grid in order to make this transformation happened in Southern California, and how we can use this project as a template for replication?”