Portland’s shiny, new electric truck — a Peterbilt Model 520EV — cost around $665,800. COR Disposal and Recycling bought the vehicle with support from Portland General Electric’s Drive Change Fund, which awards grants to electrify transportation using dollars from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality’s Clean Fuels Program. The utility also installed a DC fast-charging station on COR’s property, which can replenish the truck’s battery in about four hours.
At the federal level, funding provided under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) can also take a significant chunk out of the cost of buying e-trucks. The Commercial Clean Vehicle Credit offers businesses tax credits up to $40,000 for qualified vehicles, while the Clean Heavy-Duty Vehicle Program provides $1 billion through 2031 to help communities replace dirty trucks with zero-emissions vehicles and infrastructure.
The IRA funding in particular is projected to dramatically accelerate sales of electric refuse trucks, with zero-emissions models representing between 70 and 77 percent of refuse trucks sold in the United States by 2035 — an eye-popping leap from just 1 percent of today’s sales, the International Council on Clean Transportation said in a January white paper.
Nationwide, at least 75 cities are participating in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Cities program, which gives technical guidance and support to local leaders working to adopt more alternative-fuel cars and trucks in their fleets.
Still, even with the infusion of state and federal funding, companies face other important hurdles to ditching their diesel-driven haulers.
Longer waste-collection routes, particularly outside city centers, might require more battery power than trucks can currently provide on a single charge. In dense urban areas, range is typically less of an issue. In East Portland, for instance, COR’s typical route is around 60 miles; the Model 520EV can travel roughly 80 miles before needing to recharge.
“When you start getting out into suburban routes, there are a lot of routes where electric trucks fit very well, but not all of them,” Scott Barraclough, the senior product manager for e-mobility at Mack Trucks, told the EV magazine Charged in September. “What becomes important is identifying the routes where the truck will work and then assigning the truck to those routes.”
A few years ago, Mack Trucks built its first electric garbage truck for the New York City Department of Sanitation. Following a nearly yearlong pilot, the city opted to order seven of Mack’s LR Electric trucks for deployment. Despite the truck’s success as a trash collector, the vehicle hit an unexpected snag last winter. In New York City, garbage trucks are also required to serve as snow plows — an energy-intensive duty that requires more power than the truck’s batteries could provide.
“They basically conked out after four hours, [and] we need them to go 12 hours,” Jessica Tisch, the city’s sanitation commissioner, told the New York City Council at a December 2022 meeting. She said that, unless the battery technology improves, the city might not be able to meet its 2040 deadline for transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet, the Commercial Carrier Journal reported.
As cities look to overcome these early hiccups and replace more of their fleets with battery-powered trucks, their next challenge will likely involve securing sufficient charging infrastructure. It often takes utilities years to upgrade and expand electricity capacity to supply the megawatts’ worth of power required to charge large numbers of vehicles. That could create a bottleneck that prevents companies from deploying e-trucks as quickly as they’d like.
“We have this disconnect right now between the pace at which vehicle manufacturers can deploy products and the pace at which utilities can energize depots,” Minjares said, adding that solutions to this problem already exist — including installing on-site solar panels and backup batteries and using smart-charging software to balance demand from dozens of vehicles.
“At the end of the day, we need utilities and their regulators to plan for this infrastructure…so that the infrastructure to energize these large depots is ready at the right time in the right locations,” he said.
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