An Investment Blueprint for Heavy-Duty Charging to Support Battery-Electric Drayage Along the I-710 Corridor

As California experiences the impacts of climate change – unprecedented wildfires, heat waves, and related setbacks to air quality improvements in the region – there is an even more urgent need to fast-track efforts to reduce emissions and increase vehicle electrification across the transportation sector, especially for heavy-duty trucks traveling on one of the most heavily traveled freight corridors in the United States. The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), with the public-private Transportation Electrification Partnership, identified through an RFI process in 2018 a critical need for charging infrastructure installation to catalyze battery electric truck deployments. Five years later, charging infrastructure installations have not kept sufficient pace. To catalyze the needed investment, LACI has developed an investment framework for the I-710 corridor to address the charging infrastructure needs of a significant portion of the San Pedro Bay Ports’ drayage trucks. The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), The Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), with partners Coalition for Environmental Health and Justice (CEHAJ) and bp pulse (formerly AMPLY Power), and supported by regional stakeholders Southern California Edison (SCE), Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP), and the Harbor Trucking Association (HTA), executed a California Energy Commission (CEC) Medium and Heavy-Duty Zero Emissions Vehicle Infrastructure Blueprint grant to evaluate the investment opportunities for siting drayage truck charging depots around the I-710 South Corridor (pictured below). Portions of this critical corridor support up to 39,000 truck trips daily (most associated with San Pedro Bay Ports freight), an amount that may increase as much as 50 percent by 2035.1 Furthermore, the San Pedro Bay Ports estimate that 30% of this drayage truck traffic stays within this area, delivering cargo to the local warehouses, transloading centers and East LA railyards. To understand how to invest in the charging infrastructure to support this traffic, LACI implemented a selection framework to identify specific locations primed to support charging depots based on the existing truck traffic, grid capacity, and community priorities. Prioritizing infrastructure at cost-effective sites with business models that can address fleets of all sizes, LACI has modeled a selection framework for infrastructure locations and financing mechanisms that can be applied to California’s other freight corridors. The Blueprint identifies sixteen candidate sites for charging infrastructure based on traffic, grid capacity, and community priorities, such as proximity to sensitive communities and investment in underserved neighborhoods. To narrow this list to four candidate sites primed for investment, LACI, bp pulse, and CEHAJ conducted outreach to ascertain the site owner’s interest and capability in deploying charging infrastructure. The project team ultimately chose four distinct facility types: one storage yard, one private fleet, one warehousing complex, and one public parking lot. bp pulse then conducted an in-depth site assessment of the four facilities to evaluate the capital costs and operating costs of an infrastructure deployment. For the remainder of the sites, the project team created a more high-level assessment of only capital costs. All sites were evaluated from a qualitative perspective for various EV charging business models.