Electrified Freight: Trucking Will Grow & Big Logistics Players Will Dominate – CleanTechnica

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Key takeaways

• Delivering inexpensive, reliable electric truck charging requires scale
• Major logistics, truck stop and turn-key services firms have the scale and will lead the way
• The big firms that embrace this will increase market share

Movement of freight in the United States (U.S) is going to shift more and more to roads on electric trucks, due to factors explained in the series this article introduces. Utilities aren’t able to address growing charging needs, and there are other concerns and blockers, but they are all addressable.

Major logistics players including big truck stop firms like Pilot, major depot owners like Walmart and Amazon and turn-key services, or engineering, construction and procurement firms like TLM have an opportunity to take market share and increase profits during and after this transition.

The nugget of the solution is incremental, modular charging microgrids, with lots of solar power and buffering batteries. What that all means and how it differs across the organizations which will be accelerating both market capture and decarbonization in the next couple of decades is explained over the series. The authors’ focus is on creating a Google Maps level perspective, not a tightly granular perspective for a specific firm, and so there is latitude in the details that will have to be analysed and considered during strategy implementation.

This is non-trivial and the authors — Rish Ghatikar and Michael Barnard, experts in sustainability, transportation, and strategy — are laying out the framework and making themselves available to firms that want to pick their specific strategic choices within the framework.

Major freight logistics firms like Amazon, UPS, Fedex, and Walmart with large numbers of depots are already considering electrification of freight trucking and have the volumes to accelerate the transition. Amazon has over 100 fulfillment centers, 50 sortation centers, 150 delivery stations, Prime Now hubs and Amazon Fresh distribution centers, at least 10 major air facilities supporting Prime Air and specialized centers for handling bulky items in the United States.

Walmart operates about 42 general merchandise distribution centers, numerous grocery distribution centers dedicated to perishable and non-perishable food items, several e-commerce fulfillment centers, specialty centers focused on specific product categories and Sam’s Club distribution centers. There are 4,615 stores spread across 49 states and territories in the United States, many of which will be worth equipping with charging due to distance from the nearest distribution center, enabling two way trips without paying retail charging prices for electricity.

Major truck stop operator chains like Pilot Flying J, Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores and TravelCenters of America also have the scale to take advantage of the transition or lose during the process. Pilot has 750 locations, Love’s has 600 and TravelCenters has 280 locations. That’s a lot of charging microgrids. These chains have major capital behind them, with Berkshire Hathaway having a majority stake in Pilot and BP owning TA outright. While not as well known, the Love family fortune is around $10 billion, and they have access to capital that smaller players won’t.

Major truck stop and depot construction turn-key services firms, especially the ones that offer close to turnkey solutions, are another group which has a significant opportunity. TLM Development Company, Trinium Inc. and Snyder Construction Group are big in this group. These firms have all built many truck stops for clients across the United States. In the distribution center space, Gray Construction, Arco Design/Build and Ryan Companies are among the major players.

These vendors have the competitive opportunity to develop a short menu of charging microgrid increments as per the approach outlined in subsequent articles with tight control over what gets built. They can offer clients simplicity, and they can offer it to smaller operators who couldn’t afford to develop the incremental and modular solutions themselves, and so would spend a lot more money for less reliable infrastructure. They could approach big organizations which own many sites and work to become their vendor of choice for this as well.

The thing these firms have in common is volume. Designing and engineering a single microgrid for megawatt scale truck charging is a significant overhead cost. Designing three to four microgrids for different capacities, ensuring modularity and commonality of components, and then building them potentially hundreds of times means that design and engineering cost is amortized over many sites, lowering the costs of all of them.

These are organizations which can negotiate for volume discounts which won’t be available to smaller organizations. In the case of the Walmarts and Amazons of the world, they have access to global supply chains. That gives them the best ability to buy less expensive, high quality equipment globally and bring it to the USA. It also means that they could conceivably do much of the design, engineering and support work for depot charging in low cost geographies both inside and outside of the USA.

As the stakeholder matrix the authors sketch out in the series makes clear, every microgrid can require interaction with utilities, regulators, municipalities and — as the charging microgrid grows — up to federal stakeholders. Major organizations like Amazon and Pilot have significant economic and political clout that they can bring to bear to accelerate approvals and gain more attention to their files. When Walmart calls, phones get picked up. These organizations have centralized staff specialized in dealing with many of the organizations already, and strong relationships. This alone will reduce the time and cost to deliver charging microgrids for the major players.

For major depot operators, that means the operational cost advantages of electrified trucking can be achieved at a much lower price point with more reliable depot charging and less dependence on truck stop charging networks.

For major truck stop operators, they’ll be able to have lower costs of charging for the same retail price of delivered electricity as the truck stop up the road, or charge less and get more traffic. They’ll also be able to electrify faster than smaller competitors and so own the electrified road freight business of the future, likely putting smaller operators out of business and expanding.

For the turnkey services firms, this is an untapped market that’s about to explode. The firm that does this well following the self-reinforcing actions the authors will outline could radically expand its customer base in the coming two decades. This is an opportunity at a strategic cusp moment that comes along once in a generation or less.

If you are a depot operator with a small number of depots or a truck stop operator with only a few or even one truck stop, don’t try to do this alone. Go to the major turnkey operators, the strategic guidance from this article series in hand, and find out which one is doing the hard work for you. Have them deliver the solutions so that you will still be in business in a decade.

Coming articles will diagnose freight decarbonization in the United States, diagnose the challenges related to electric truck charging and lay out a simplifying policy and self-reinforcing actions that will enable the firms which take advantage of it to thrive. There’s going to be a shakeout as this transformation sweeps through the USA. The biggest and fastest moving will survive and grow.

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About the authors:

Rish Ghatikar has an extensive background in decarbonization, specializing in electric vehicles (EVs), grid integration, and demand response (DR) technologies. At General Motors (GM), he advanced transportation electrification energy services, as part of a broader climate strategy. Previously, at Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), he focused on digitalizing the electric sector, while at Greenlots, he commercialized EV-grid and energy storage solutions. His work at the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory spearheaded DR automation to support dynamic utility pricing policies. An active climate advocate, Ghatikar advises on policies and technologies that align the grid with transportation and energy use for sustainable growth.

Michael Barnard, a climate futurist and chief strategist at The Future Is Electric (TFIE), advises executives, boards, and investors on long-term decarbonization strategies, projecting scenarios 40 to 80 years into the future. His work spans industries from transportation and agriculture to heavy industry, advocating for total electrification and renewable energy expansion. Barnard, also a co-founder of Trace Intercept and an Advisory Board member for electric aviation startup FLIMAX, contributes regularly to climate discourse as a writer and host of the Redefining Energy – Tech podcast. His perspectives emphasize practical solutions rooted in physics, economics, and human behavior, aiming to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future.