How to Prepare the Grid for Electric Medium- and Heavy-Duty Trucks: Lessons from Los Angeles

New analysis of truck data in Los Angeles, California shows how fleets, utilities, local government, and charging as a service providers can prepare the grid for increased power demand from electric trucks.

Los Angeles (LA) is a hub of freight activity — more than $512 billion in cargo moves through its ports and main airport (LAX) every year. From heavy-duty (HD) trucks beginning long-haul trips to box trucks delivering goods across the city, a wide variety of vehicles contribute to local freight movement. And all of that freight movement contributes to LA having the worst ozone pollution in the nation. Electrifying trucks will help the city reduce overall ozone levels as well as some of the particulate matter (PM) along the interstate 405 and 110 corridors. The air pollution along these highways contributes to the disproportionate amounts of asthma and heart disease in many of the nearby low-to-moderate income neighborhoods.

One barrier to medium- and heavy-duty (MDHD) truck electrification is LA’s charging infrastructure: the city’s growing number of electric MDHD trucks will need many more chargers. By 2030, these trucks will need as much as 22 megawatts (MW) in some local areas. New analysis from RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership shows stakeholders how to meet that demand.

Fleets, utilities, local government, and charging as a service (CaaS) providers all know that preparing the grid for increased power demand will require grid upgrades and the installation of new chargers, which will take years to deploy.

As fleets wait for these updates, they can take advantage of a complementary solution: managed charging, a proactive, controlled charging strategy that benefits the customer and electric grid. By revisiting their charging practices, trucking fleets can reduce pressure on today and tomorrow’s grid, meet their current and future charging needs, and save money.

Implementing these solutions — upgrading the grid, installing new chargers, and improving current charging operations — will require intense collaboration between stakeholders and robust data and analysis.

Specifically, they’ll need to know where and when MDHD trucks currently operate, where future power demand will be, and how this demand will impact the grid. With this information they can make decisions that will meet the power needs of electric trucks as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

A new analysis from RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) provides these critical insights. Using Geotab Altitude truck travel data in LA, the analysis can help stakeholders identify areas where new chargers and CaaS solutions will have the greatest impact. It also shows how fleets can use managed charging, a demand flexibility strategy that minimizes charging load during peak demand times, to reduce pressure on the grid while also saving money.

Below, we outline our findings and their implications for truck electrification stakeholders.

Where and when will electric truck power demand be greatest?

Areas with the largest power demand include LA’s ports and its downtown, as well as the city of San Fernando. While many vehicle types are active in these areas, there is a notable concentration of HD truck activity at the Ports of LA and Long Beach, with medium-duty (MD) trucks having more activity downtown.

Both MD and HD trucks have similar usage patterns. Both vehicle types tend to return to their depots around 4 p.m., contributing to the highest unmanaged load peaks at that time. However, their schedules diverge later in the day. HD trucks are more likely to return to their depots late at night and into the early morning, while MD trucks have shorter operational windows for their duty cycles. Additionally, HD trucks consume more power overall and tend to drive more miles per day (roughly 115 miles for urban HD trucks compared to 75 miles for urban MD trucks).

Where should stakeholders prioritize charging deployment?

Areas with high projected power demand are the same as those where truck logistics facilities exist today, making these locations valuable not only for grid operators anticipating new electric loads but also for stakeholders identifying sites for CaaS facilities. These sites provide fast or multi-hour charging options for fleets that need a quick boost or a reliable daily charging solution.

While CaaS may cost a fleet more than owning and operating its own charging infrastructure, it offers valuable benefits for fleets that are unable to charge at their home base. This includes fleets with short facility leases that may not want to invest in charging equipment that is hard to move to a new site, as well as fleets that may not have enough depot space to install new chargers. Strategically placing CaaS facilities in areas with both grid capacity and high trucking demand maximizes the value of those facilities and ensures electric trucks remain feasible. Our analysis shown in the map of LA above can help utilities, local governments, and CaaS providers work together to create effective, well-located charging hubs. Identifying demand is a crucial step but so is working with local communities to ensure that a CaaS site is a good neighbor.

Maximizing today’s grid: Why fleets should transition to managed charging

Managed charging is a powerful way for fleets to power their electric trucks. By changing where, when, and how they charge, they can improve operations, save money, and reduce pressure on the grid. And since managed charging better leverages existing infrastructure, they won’t have to worry about how to power their vehicles as they wait for infrastructure upgrades, which may take years to implement.

The first step in transitioning to managed charging is to understand how often trucks are used. Our research found that the median truck has 15 hours of downtime per day and that, even on busy days, trucks are not used 24 hours.

The next step involves adjusting at what time trucks should be parked at their depots. Charging at off-peak hours, like overnight, is more cost-effective than charging during peak hours. And when trucks charge overnight, they can charge slowly, which is more energy efficient and requires less expensive hardware

In LA, afternoons are also off-peak periods, when lower demand and high solar production often create excess available energy.

What’s the potential load reduction?

Getting more usage out of surplus grid capacity can spread the high fixed costs of infrastructure upgrades over more hours, which ultimately can lower the cost of electricity for all users. For instance, if a location normally has a 19 MW load, slow charging all vehicles would reduce that load to 14 MW. Similarly, overnight charging would yield a 22 MW load, but this load would only occur after 9 p.m., when the grid generally has capacity and when power is cheaper. These numbers are specific to the analyzed area with the highest unmanaged power demand in this study, but the larger trends will be comparable in other areas as well.

The real world will undoubtedly deviate from our model. For example, results from the North American Council on Freight Efficiency (NACFE) and RMI’s Run on Less Electric DEPOT show, some fleets will maximize use of electric trucks since their operational costs are lower, potentially charging during peak hours. These charging strategies presented above are the ends of a spectrum, with likely future load curves somewhere in the middle. However, by understanding what is possible in terms of mitigating peak demand and anticipating the magnitude of these loads, ps utilities can plan for grid upgrades, help charging providers identify where charging infrastructure can make the most impact, and work toward the least-cost solution

What’s Next

Understanding where vehicles operate, where charging infrastructure is needed, and how to optimize electricity usage during off-peak times is a crucial step for any community, government, or utility planning a smooth transition to electric trucks. Utilities that can confidently predict the size and location of future demand can enable faster fleet electrification while keeping costs down for all customers. Local governments can play a key role by offering land or incentives to support CaaS facilities, ensuring that small fleets and those without depot charging capabilities are not left behind in the transition to cleaner freight systems.

Electrifying freight vehicles in LA offers significant benefits but the resulting power demands must be carefully anticipated and managed to support the grid while keeping costs in check. While fleets have various charging options — including the ability to charge away from depots — these choices will directly shape the impact of EV trucking on the grid.

This analysis helps pinpoint where utilities, local governments, and charging developers should focus their efforts. By aligning utility planners, fleets, policymakers, and developers, LA can create resilient infrastructure that reduces emissions, improves air quality, and accelerates the shift to a cleaner freight system in one of the country’s busiest logistics hubs.

Methodology

The above map uses Geotab telematics data to forecast EV power loads for 2030 across the city of Los Angeles. Geotab analyzes trip data for commercial fleets, computing aggregate statistics for vehicle driving behavior and domiciling characteristics. Information such as daily vehicle miles travelled (VMT) and domicile times are used to build hourly load curves for medium- and heavy-duty trucks, with peak loads calculated for individual local areas. Vehicle populations are determined from VMT registration data and assumed to be distributed across the city at the same density as domiciling stop frequency. It is also assumed that fleets electrify at rates comparable to ACF compliance milestones, comparable to other research projecting that 13% of heavy-duty fleet vehicles will be electrified by 2030.

About Clean Industrial Hubs

The insights discussed above come from RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership’s Clean Industrial Hub in Los Angeles, California, that accelerates industrial and heavy transportation decarbonization in the region. Clean industrial hubs bring together policymakers, financial institutions, project developers, and community-based organizations to enable groundbreaking decarbonization projects in the hardest-to-abate sectors. In Los Angeles, RMI and MPP’s analyses, convenings, and tools support stakeholders working to advance zero-emissions trucking, low-carbon cement plants, sustainable aviation fuel, and decarbonized ports, by increasing the size, scale, and speed of critical climate investments that benefit the environment, the economy, and communities. This work is done in partnership with the Bezos Earth Fund.