In this September 21, 2023 webinar, members of the EC’s Electric Freight Consortium discussed the importance of private-sector partnerships and best practices for engaging with a range of stakeholders to successfully deploy medium- and heavy-duty electric vehicles for the movement of goods.
Key highlights:
- Drew Kodjak, White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy: “We’re transitioning from the power source that powered cars and trucks for 100 years to a new power source and a new power paradigm. Today we have power companies, battery companies, charging companies, and stakeholders in equity. In order to do policy right, we have to be able to engage everybody in an effective way, and, to me, that’s why the Electric Freight Consortium is such a critical organization in doing so.”
- Andrea Pratt, Volvo Group North America: “We’ve learned that one of the keys to the success of this project was respecting the concerns raised by all stakeholders and working together to design scalable solutions. We’ve managed to deliver 23 battery-electric trucks, still in operation today.”
- Anthony Harrison, TeraWatt Infrastructure: “Partnerships with the Volvo Group and the other OEMs are incredibly important because ultimately, as an infrastructure provider at the stage that we’re at in the market, we want to be building solutions that are actually going to work for the fleets, not doing it in a vacuum and just trying to take our idea of what charging needs to be and sell it to the market.”
- Chinmay Jaju, Uber Freight: “Being very flexible… because each opportunity is different, will be required from folks who want to electrify, to accommodate all of these different business models. One shoe is not going to fit everyone.”
- Dan Loflin, Prologis Mobility: “We don’t want to build where the puck is; we want to build where the puck is going to be. We’ve found tenants to be remarkably flexible and they’re thinking about how to reduce their cost of charge, which means opening the operational aperture event to bring in third parties. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many are open to that.”
- Steven Moelk, IKEA Group: “We work with six or seven different transportation providers across the US. And sharing our insights, knowledge, and learnings back and forth with them helps enable charging infrastructure.”
- Ben Prochazka, Electrification Coalition: “Transportation electrification is no longer a question of if; it’s a question of when. We’re at the nexus and opportunity of policy and technology aligning to where we can really start to see a future where freight will be electric.”