Cost
Making promises is different than making product. As battery electric heavy-duty trucks come to market, their per unit cost is often double the natural gas alternative…too prohibitive for most end users. Even more, the cost to build out needed on-site fast charging infrastructure makes full scale battery electric vehicle deployment financially out of reach for most commercial fleets.
Capability
Proven RNG vehicles offer a 1-to-1 replacement for diesel technology with similar power, torque, range, and cold start capabilities as diesel regardless of terrain or weather. Battery electric typically does not.
Components
The huge amounts of components needed for battery electric commercial vehicles rely on not-so-friendly foreign sources for production and processing. That supply is also challenged by significant human and workers right concerns, including child labor.
Global battery component availability – including cobalt, lithium, copper, nickel, and rare earths – remains highly restrictive. Increase demand and limited supply has kept the cost of heavy-duty vehicle batteries high. And development of the limited domestic sources that do exist in North America has been met with sizable resistance to the large-scale extraction operations needed to make these operations pencil out.
Accessing these needed deposits often involves accessing critically sensitive areas both on land and under the sea. Consider that obtaining components for a 1,000-pound battery electric car battery requires the moving of 500,000 pounds of earth in the course of mining.
Source: “The Major Problems Blocking America’s Electric Car Future,” Politico, August 31, 2021
Capacity
Fast charging heavy-duty battery electric commercial fleets requires enormous amounts of electricity. But increasing challenges for power utilities – including cyberthreats, growing populations and electricity demand, clean energy mandates, and an increasing number of major storms and disasters like wildfires – have greatly compromised system reliability and capacity. Huge cost and growing resistance to the siting of clean energy production and resulting energy transmission have threatened the massive buildout needed to accommodate expected future growth.
And BEVs are only as “clean” as their energy source. The United States saw more coal-fired electricity generation in the first year of the Biden administration than in the last year of the Trump administration.
Source: “U.S. coal-fired electricity generation to rise in 2021, EIA says,” Reuters, October 18, 2021
Every Transportation Solution Leaves an Environmental Footprint
- The extraction or production of the source material and the equipment required to do so
- The generation of the energy and the resulting emissions
- The waste disposal of the byproducts or equipment
It’s more than just the tailpipe