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Public fast charging for trucks - where and how much?

Table of contents




Data and insights on modelling future public battery truck charging demand in Europe

Several studies and data sets have analysed future truck charging demand in Europe. Here, we summarise a few sources for truck charging modelling.

Data

Comprehensive datasets on truck driving are hard to get. Therefore, we developed some own datasets: 

Long-haul truck traffic data

As charging infrastructure will be particularly important for long-haul truck transport, we developed a synthetic data set of truck traffic. The data is based on an EU project from 2010, which we updated and translated into road traffic.

Truck stop locations

Locations where many trucks stop already today are prime candidates for truck charging. We and others published data and interactive maps on today’s truck stop locations.

Together with ACEA, we collected GPS coordinates from parking trucks in Europe based on 700,000 trucks in Europe. In this case, the underlying data is not publicly available.

Truck parking locations: We collected our own data set of 18,000 publicly accessible truck parking lots in Europe.

Actual truck trip data

However, all those datasets do not contain information on actual truck driving behaviour of single vehicles (driving periods, stops, break time).

  • Germany: To get a better feeling to distinguish between public and private, as well as slow and fast charging, we used 2,400 driving profiles representative for German trucks. The dataset is distributed via Kraftfahrzeugverkehr in Deutschland 2010 - Nationale Verkehrserhebungen (clearingstelle-verkehr.de). However, this dataset is also limited to some extent. There are no GPS data in the dataset, we only have information on the parking location (public versus private). Some of the driving profiles are incomplete, so that we needed to sort out about 15% of the driving profiles. Finally, German trucks tend to be used a little bit more in regional traffic than in long-haul traffic. For a more detailed analysis, one probably needs more detailed data.
  • For Europe, the European road freight transport survey is a very rich micro data set which contains trip specific information for 100,000s of trucks. It is a bit complicated to obtain from the European Commission but very rich. More details here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/european-road-freight-transport-survey

Methods and Results

Charging network and charging behaviour can ex-ante be studied in various ways. Most common are

Simulation of driving and charging behaviour, for example for

Optimisation of charging networks

Coverage approach

A very straightforward approach is built charging stations along the major highways at fixed distances, e.g. every 50 or 100 km.

Comparison of different approaches

A comparison of aforementioned approaches is given in Electrification of road freight transport –public fast charging infrastructure and the market diffusion of battery electric trucks

Modelling truck waiting queues has been done, e.g., here and here.