## SEI team finds heavy-duty battery-electric trucks more economically feasible than thought

##### 08 April 2021

If fast charging is available, the competitiveness of battery electric trucks compared with diesel trucks can actually improve with larger trucks, according to a new study by Björn Nykvist and Olle Olsson from the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

In a study published in the journal Joule, the two researchers model high-power fast charging for trucks, enabling smaller batteries. They show that the economics of battery electric trucks per ton-kilometer improves with greater weight, driven by increasing load capacity as well as increased energy savings as a function of weight.

Nykvist and Olsson

They also show that previous findings that the competitiveness per kilometer is worse for heavy trucks than for lighter trucks are very sensitive to assumptions about the battery cost per kWh and lifetime of the battery pack.

Given the rapid development of batteries, we conclude that the economic feasibility of heavy battery electric trucks might have been generally underestimated.

—Nykvist and Olsson

Nykvist and Olsson explore variations across a set of three central battery pack parameters: battery cost, cycle life, and specific energy.

• Parameter set 1 (PS1) is broadly representative of conservative and slightly older assumptions used in the literature analyzing electric trucks by using Li-ion batteries (US$300/kWh, 1,000 cycles, 125 Wh/kg). • Parameter set 3 (PS3) is broadly representative of an optimistic outlook that takes into account recent literature on Li-ion batteries (US$100/kWh, 5,000 cycles, 175 Wh/kg).

Brilliant.