Quantifying the Economic Case for Electric Semi-Trucks

Shashank Sripad and Venkatasubramanian Viswanathan

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: There has been considerable interest in the electrification of freight transport, particularly heavy-duty trucks to downscale the greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions from the transportation sector. However, the economic competitiveness of electric semi-trucks is uncertain as there are substantial additional initial costs associated with the large battery packs required. In this work, we analyze the trade-off between the initial investment and the operating cost for realistic usage scenarios to compare a fleet of electric semi-trucks with a range of 500 miles with a fleet of diesel trucks. For the baseline case with 30% of fleet requiring battery pack replacements and a price differential of US\$50,000, we find a payback period of about 3 years. Based on sensitivity analysis, we find that the fraction of the fleet that requires battery pack replacements is a major factor. For the case with 100% replacement fraction, the payback period could be as high as 5-6 years. We identify the price of electricity as the second most important variable, where a price of US$0.14/kWh, the payback period could go up to 5 years. Electric semi-trucks are expected to lead to savings due to reduced repairs and magnitude of these savings could play a crucial role in the payback period as well. With increased penetration of autonomous vehicles, the annual mileage of semi-trucks could substantially increase and this heavily sways in favor of electric semi-trucks, bringing down the payback period to around 2 years at an annual mileage of 120,000 miles. There is an undeniable economic case for electric semi-trucks and developing battery packs with longer cycle life and higher specific energy would make this case even stronger.

Date: 2018-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-tre
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in ACS Energy Lett., 2019, 4, 149-155

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.05974 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:1804.05974

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().