Rapidly declining costs of truck batteries and fuel cells enable large-scale road freight electrification

Steffen Link (), Annegret Stephan, Daniel Speth and Patrick Plötz
Additional contact information
Steffen Link: Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI
Annegret Stephan: Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI
Daniel Speth: Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI
Patrick Plötz: Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI

Nature Energy, 2024, vol. 9, issue 8, 1032-1039

Abstract: Abstract Low-carbon road freight transport is pivotal in mitigating global warming. Nonetheless, electrifying heavy-duty vehicles poses a tremendous challenge due to high technical requirements and cost competitiveness. Data on future truck costs are scarce and uncertain, complicating assessments of the future role of zero-emission truck (ZET) technologies. Here we derive most likely cost developments for price setting ZET components by meta forecasting from more than 200 original sources. We find that costs are primed to decline much faster than expected, with significant differences between scientific and near-market estimates. Specifically, battery system costs could drop by 64% to 75% and fall below €150 kWh−1 by no later than 2035, whereas fuel cell system costs may exhibit even higher cost reductions but are unlikely to reach €100 kW−1 before the early 2040s. This fast cost decline supports an optimistic view on the ZET market diffusion and has substantial implications for future energy and transport systems.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-024-01531-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natene:v:9:y:2024:i:8:d:10.1038_s41560-024-01531-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nenergy/

DOI: 10.1038/s41560-024-01531-9

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Energy is currently edited by Fouad Khan

More articles in Nature Energy from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().