Power-thirsty electric big rigs will soon need places to charge up.
Charging company TeraWatt Infrastructure intends to become a prime destination as truck operators begin to electrify their fleets. The San Francisco startup tailors its charging stations for fleets, often heavy-duty trucks.
TeraWatt Infrastructure has raised $1.1 billion and aims to have its first charging station operational by the end of the year. Neha Palmer, the company’s CEO and co-founder, recently joined Automotive News News Editor Pete Bigelow on “Shift: A Podcast About Mobility” to discuss TeraWatt’s business strategy and plans.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation, edited for brevity.
Q: There are a lot of charging companies, but TeraWatt has a distinct business strategy focused on a single niche. Can you tell us about that?
A: We start with fleets first, and build our solutions around the complex needs of fleets. Something that’s key for fleets and maybe a little bit more unique than public-facing charging is reliability. We want to operate these sites with incredibly high reliability. Fleets’ main business is transporting goods, and they need to feel really confident in their transition to EVs.
Where do you plan to locate your charging stations?
Location is everything. We are in places where fleets are located — warehouse hubs for heavy-duty customers, downtown areas for our light-duty fleets. We think about the places that are most operationally impactful for them. We also need to think about power availability. This is something where we start sussing out from the beginning, even before we buy a piece of property.
So far, you’ve acquired properties in 18 states. How do you envision this charging network developing?
We’re starting to build out the I-10 corridor between the Port of Long Beach, which is a hotbed of activities when it comes to electrification, and we’re going eastward, all the way to El Paso. Obviously, in California, we’ll start near the ports and Inland Empire (a center for distribution and logistics east of Los Angeles) where there’s a lot of warehouses. Then eastward through Phoenix, into New Mexico and onto Texas.
You are talking about fleets. You are talking about ports. Are you specifically focused on heavy-duty trucks?
We’re somewhat fleet agnostic. We’ll help any fleet that needs to solve some complex charging needs. We have light-duty customers. What we know from our heavy-duty fleets is they’re going to require more complex solutions. If you take a heavy-duty vehicle that needs 1 megawatt of power, that’s the same amount of power you could charge eight to 10 light-duty vehicles with. So if you have eight to 10 heavy-duty vehicles at one time, that’s a lot of power required.
That’s a lot of power. Are utility companies ready to accommodate that? Is it uneven state by state?
Certainly in California, all the utilities there have a lot of requests for interconnects when it comes to charging and have programs in place. It definitely varies across the board when it comes to other locations. We do see utilities quickly picking it up and realizing that this is coming. They’re learning how to deal with the requests. There’s still a big learning curve.
Are electric grids in the United States ready for this?
The good news is that this is going to be a transition that takes some time. We’re not going to turn a switch and, all of a sudden, everything is electrified overnight. Fleets might turn over once every 10 years, so we can talk about getting ahead of that curve in places like the Inland Empire, for example, where there’s going to be a lot of demand.
We talked a bit about locations. Do you want to space TeraWatt charging stations out across I-10 or does it make more sense to cluster them in hot spots? Some combination of both?
You want to be spaced out enough where if someone truly wants to go from Long Beach to El Paso, they can do that with the technology available. Over time, we’re seeing larger battery formats that allow them to go longer distances. But we also see there’s a lot of local demand. Eighty percent of truck routes are less than 200 miles, and there are lots of trucks that can go 200 miles on one charge.
So if you think about that, you realize it could be a phased approach with how these fleets adopt. They’ll start with shorter routes, and then think about the longer routes over time.
If you are out in the middle of the New Mexican desert, can you get enough power for a charging station or is that a slog? Can you supplement with renewable energy or is that too cost prohibitive?
We certainly know there’s other technologies we’ll want to integrate, whether that’s to offset power prices or provide more on-site power generation. So we are certainly looking at different things like solar, batteries or a combination of the two to supplement what we get from the grid. Those rural use cases could really be interesting to start to implement some of those things.
Along the lines of alternate energy sources, do you see hydrogen in trucking’s future? Might we one day find hydrogen fueling equipment at a TeraWatt station?
It’s definitely early days for hydrogen. There is a significant amount of infrastructure required. When you think about the maturity of each market and how much time the market needs to scale, EV trucks are already there. There’s lots of people incorporating them into their fleets. And while electricity is not as ubiquitous as I’d like, it is definitely a known commodity.
You’ve raised $1.1 billion and are planning to have your first charging station up and running by the end of the year. What does the horizon look like?
I hope it’s just a drop in the bucket, because when you think about the vast amount of infrastructure required to truly electrify every vehicle in the country, it’s in the trillions of dollars. We’re super excited to have that money to start to build out this network. But we know this is early days. There’s a lot more investment required. We’re excited about starting to build the initial part of that backbone.