Electric tractor-trailers may sound like a good idea when it comes to air admissions and the environment, but the vehicles’ high cost and the lack of supporting infrastructure means that the trucking industry is not ready for the change, an advocate for West Virginia’s truckers said Monday.
West Virginia recently joined a coalition of 19 states challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) decision allowing California to ban trucks, according to the state’s attorney general.
That ban forces truckers to buy electric trucks and regulates trucking out of existence through mandating net zero emissions standards, said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey. Eight other states have already adopted California’s truck ban, and more are considering it.
“This ‘authority’ leaves California with a slice of its sovereign authority that Congress withdraws from every other state,” Morrisey stated. “This woke climate agenda the Biden administration continues to shove into hardworking Americans’ throats will cause massive job losses, increase costs and devastate the demand for liquid fuels, such as biodiesel.”
In West Virginia, the trucking industry supports 34,360 jobs—trucks transported 61 percent of total manufactured tonnage or 65,448 tons per day, according to the West Virginia Trucking Association. More than 84 percent of communities in the state depend exclusively on trucks to move their goods.
Traci Nelson, president of the West Virginia Trucking Association said Monday that the California ban calls for all trucks in that state to be electric by 2035.
“I think that’s a lofty goal for the trucking industry,” Nelson said.
The infrastructure necessary to support electric tractor-trailers and trucks is different from state to state, so using those vehicles to transport goods across the country is difficult, she stated.
“I can’t see the trucking industry going full electric anytime soon,” Nelson stated. “In the trucking industry, we’ve been committed to using clean diesel (fuel) for a very long time and worked a long time to get to that point.”
The cost difference between a new clean diesel long-haul tractor-trailer, which uses fuel refined to reduce emissions, and a comparable one using electricity, is large.
A new diesel tractor-trailer cost $180,000 to $200,000, Nelson said. In contrast, a comparable electric tractor-trailer can cost $480,000.
“That is very cost prohibitive for a small trucking company, and a majority of our businesses are small businesses in West Virginia,” she stated.
Besides the high cost of electric trucks, the infrastructure needed to recharge their batteries is lacking. A trucking company in Joliet, Illinois tried to electrify 30 trucks, but local officials shut down those plans because the trucks would consume more electricity than the entire city, Nelson recalled.
“That’s where the infrastructure problem comes in,” she added. “It (electricity) has to come from somewhere.”
Tractor-trailers haul products ordered online as well as food, medicine, baby formula and other necessities, Nelson said. There is a difference between the efficiency of diesel trucks and electric trucks.
“Today you can spend 15 minutes fueling a clean diesel truck,” she said. “That will get you about 1,200 miles once you’ve filled up. In contrast, a long-haul electric truck has a run of 150 to 330 miles and it takes 10 hours to charge. As you can imagine, that would cut down on efficiency majorly.”
A battery-power tractor-trailer usually has two lithium batteries that weigh about 8,000 pounds apiece, Nelson stated. The batteries make the vehicles heavier than a diesel-powered trailer. The extra weigh reduces the amount of cargo that can be hauled, and this impacts what independent truckers get paid.
Many small trucking firms would be run out of business if they had to switch fully to electric vehicles, she added. Clean diesel technology is reducing emissions already.
Thanks to work between the federal government and the trucking industry to switch to clean diesel engines, emissions from diesel tractor-trailers are 99 percent lower than they were in the Eighties, Nelson said.
“I think that’s something to celebrate. Ninety-nine percent is something to celebrate. Sixty trucks today emit the same emissions that one single truck did in 1988,” she said. “As an industry, we think the environment is important, but they have to be goals we can achieve.”
West Virginia joined the Iowa-led petition with Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Ohio, South Carolina and Utah.
— Contact Greg Jordan at [email protected]
Credit: Source link
