Major industry project to examine de-risking the decarbonisation of HGVs

A major project to establish whether electric road freight can become commercially viable is being launched next week.

Project Jolt (Joint Operator Logistics Trial) involves academia working with industry to understand how the diesel lorry can be replaced with zero emission vehicles – 44-tonne trucks alone are responsible for 5% of the Uk’s greenhouse gasses.

The initiative sees potentially 15 fleet operators, four truck manufacturers, several technology providers and two universities collaborate to answer the question how can the move to net zero be derisked?

The fleet operators are drawn from across the logistics industry and include John Lewis Partnership, Nestle, William Jackson Food Group, Welch Group, Howard Tenens and Knowles Logistics.

The consortium is being led by Professor David Cebon of the Centre for Sustainable Road Freight.

He said: “We are sharing trucks and chargers on a three-month basis and testing a range of logistics operations.

“We are pooling the anonymised data to develop new sustainable models of working. By sharing the data in this way, we maximise the learning. By sharing the resources, we minimise the costs for everyone involved.”

For some journeys, there is no issue as eHGVs can be substituted for their diesel equivalents; the immediate problems are ones of energy supply and the cost of the vehicle.

However, for longer distances, weight constrained loads and flexible working, eHGVs experience viability difficulties around payload, range, charging time and electricity supply.

These have the potential to impose a financial impact on the operations or to derail the energy transition altogether.

Project Jolt is gathering multiple data on a spectrum of journeys and this information will be used to forecast the impact of eHGVs and the steps required to reduce it.

The initiative is also looking at battery health and degradation. With the battery being a large weight and financial component of the truck, its performance will affect the residual value.

Creating a secondary market will be crucial to the success of adopting eHGVs. The residual value will be determined by the value of the battery

By modelling the industry using data gathered from consortium members, Project Jolt will be able to predict the impact of better batteries, faster warehouse charging, lower capital costs of trucks, improved driving techniques and potential legislation changes.

The culmination of all of these is to establish whether eHGVs can deliver net zero cost increase in addition to net zero carbon.