When we talk about electric HGVs, it seems natural to focus on the truck. How far will it travel? How long will it take to charge? How much will it cost? But after attending the opening ceremony for the new Electroway charging hub at Magna Park Lutterworth last month, I came away thinking there’s an even more interesting question for our sector: what will electric trucks mean for the warehouse?
The scale of this new facility is impressive. There are around 180 secure HGV parking spaces and 32 of those spaces are equipped for eHGV charging, supported by a 4.5 MVA grid connection. Some chargers can deliver up to 400kW, which is vastly more than the 7kW domestic charger I use for my Tesla.
Yet one of my biggest lessons was that the maths is not as simple as adding up the maximum rating of every charger. Trucks do not all demand maximum power simultaneously, and their needs vary according to battery condition, dwell time and operating pattern. The 4.5 MVA available at Lutterworth is considered comfortable for the current installation without sophisticated load management. So for warehouse operators contemplating fleet electrification, it seems that the answer is not necessarily to install enormous amounts of charging capacity behind every warehouse meter.
Shared infrastructure looks set to be part of the solution. Operators based at Magna Park now have access to a substantial charging facility on their doorstep. For some businesses, that could remove or reduce the need to make their own major investment in grid connections and HGV chargers. It also raises new questions about how logistics parks should be designed.
Could rooftop solar on one warehouse eventually provide electricity to trucks charging elsewhere on the estate? Should every building have its own completely separate energy infrastructure, or should future logistics parks operate more like integrated energy systems? At present, moving locally generated electricity between separate properties remains commercially and regulatorily complicated.
There are operational details too. Refrigerated trailers need power for their cooling equipment, so Electroway provides separate electrical connections for them. Specialist vehicles may need electricity for equipment traditionally powered through a power take-off (PTO). Electrification is therefore about considerably more than replacing a diesel engine with a battery.
When I asked what was preventing more facilities like this being built, several people gave me the same answer: demand. There is a familiar chicken-and-egg problem here, because fleet operators want confidence that charging infrastructure exists before buying expensive electric trucks; but investors need confidence that enough trucks will arrive, to justify building the infrastructure.
Warehousing sits right in the middle of that transition. For decades, our location decisions have centred on land, labour and transport connections. Increasingly we need to add power to that list. I asked several people whether the range and routes of the eHGV will ultimately change the shape of network design for logistics solutions, but the answers are still being explored. What seems certain, however, is that the warehouse of the future will not simply store and move goods. It will also become part of the energy infrastructure that enables vehicles to operate, binding the haulage and storage functions of logistics more tightly together.
Clare Bottle
UKWA, CEO
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