More money is flowing to charge electric trucks in California

In vanguard markets like California, the demand for places to charge electric vehicles, and battery-powered big rigs in particular, is outstripping the pace at which charging depots are being built. The companies rolling out electric trucks are increasingly eager to close that gap.

The latest example of this dynamic came last week, when EV charging-site developer Voltera announced a new $100 million debt facility. The financing, led by ING Capital with support from Investec, will support development of multiple Voltera-owned and -operated charging sites, along with corporate growth and other initiatives.

It’s not the first nine-digit financing for big truck-charging depots. San Francisco–based startup Terawatt Infrastructure has raised more than $1 billion to finance its plans to build a network of charging centers across the country. Oakland, California–based startup Forum Mobility raised $400 million last year to support its truck-charging depots at California ports and highways.

But according to Voltera, its $100 million debt facility is the first such financing vehicle ​“backstopped by customer contracts,” meaning that individual fleet operators, rideshare companies, and EV-charging network providers have contracted for access and usage of the sites being developed with the new funding.

“The typical financing we’ve seen in our sector to date has been private equity and venture capital–backed, and nothing of this size that is commercial financing for the development of critical infrastructure, backstopped by customer contracts,” Tyler Sentman, Voltera’s senior director of strategic finance, told Canary Media in an email. ​“The fact that we were able to raise this amount of debt is a positive signal that the markets believe in our industry and, more specifically, our business model.”

Voltera doesn’t lack access to capital. The Palo Alto, California–based company launched in 2022 with equity backing from EQT Infrastructure, an arm of Swedish-based private equity firm EQT, which holds €246 billion ($270 billion) in assets under management.

The firm has also been making major investments since then — it has already opened its first big site in Lynwood, California, in partnership with Swedish electric-transport company Einride. The depot, opened in March, has 65 chargers that can fill the batteries of up to 200 electric trucks per day coming into and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles — epicenters of investment in heavy-duty electric-truck charging.

Voltera’s new financing isn’t limited to electric trucks. It’s also building sites for public-charging-network providers, rideshare companies, and light-duty fleets, including an unnamed customer that’s contracted to use its vehicle charging site in San Francisco. The company is also targeting states other than California.

But California is where most of the action is today for electric trucks. Trucking companies and freight and logistics operators in the state are under significant pressure to meet the state’s looming electrification requirements — and Voltera sees a major opportunity in building the chargers needed to help those companies meet state mandates.

The regulatory environment 

California’s ambitious Advanced Clean Fleets rule calls for converting the state’s 1.8 million commercial trucks to emissions-free vehicles over the next two decades, with several nearer-term targets along the way.

Thanks to this regulation, California leads the electric trucking space, with far more of the vehicles deployed than any other state. Still, it’s not alone in facing pressure to expand charging capacity for a rising number of electric trucks. At least 10 other states have adopted truck emissions standards similar to California’s.

At the federal level, EPA last year issued rules that will require increasingly lower emissions from trucks, buses, and other large vehicles sold between 2027 and 2032. The Biden administration has laid out a plan for building out the charging capacity required to power this forthcoming wave of electric trucks, starting with freight hubs and expanding to interstate highway corridors, which are expected to see the preponderance of electric trucking through the coming decade.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $2.5 billion in funding for grants to support charging in disadvantaged and sparsely populated communities — as well as for heavy-duty freight corridors. In January, the administration approved $623 million in grants from this program to 47 applicants in 22 states and Puerto Rico, including several large-scale truck-charging projects in California, Texas, and other states. Ports in New York and New Jersey are being targeted for charging sites capable of serving hundreds of electric heavy-duty trucks.

Earlier this year, Voltera won $9.6 million in federal grants to support its port charging, including $1.8 million for a second charging site near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as $7.8 million to deliver up to 23 megawatts of capacity for more than 120 charging stalls near the port of Savannah, Georgia.

The earliest mandates under California’s aggressive clean-trucking rules fall on the 33,500 drayage trucks that move cargo from ports to warehouses across the state. These vehicles are some of the oldest and most heavily polluting trucks on the road, making them disproportionately harmful to both the climate and to the people who live near the ports — most of whom are low-income and people of color. All the trucks must be completely converted to zero-emissions vehicles by 2035.

The state of electric-truck charger development

Industry groups complain that California’s rules will be hard to meet, particularly for smaller drayage operators who may struggle to afford electric options, which are still two or three times more expensive upfront than diesel versions.

But barriers exist beyond the price tags of trucks themselves — including the cost and availability of charging stations.

Forum Mobility CEO Matt LeDucq told Canary Media last year that the state must add more than 50 high-voltage chargers per day between now and 2035 to meet the advanced clean-fleet mandate. The total cost of developing that many charging sites will amount to tens of billions of dollars, Forum Mobility estimates.

That’s where companies like Voltera can step in, Tom Ashley, its vice president of government and utility relations, told Canary Media in a February interview. Plenty of trucking companies and owner-operators lack access to dedicated charging facilities.

“Even when a fleet can electrify at their own facility, they don’t necessarily want to do that, because that means investing in the know-how to do that, and otherwise trying to identify a partner that they can trust as a long-term charging provider on their property,” he said.

“We’re providing an alternative, where fleets can either live at the sites we’re developing, or just come to charge, and sign a longish-term contract that gives them the confidence they’ll have access to that charging, or additional services, for that full contract period,” he added.

This ​“charging as a service” model is being pursued by companies including Voltera, Forum Mobility, WattEV, and well-established freight and logistics providers like Prologis. ​“Voltera works with its customers to charge an access fee that enables their use of a portion or all of an asset,” Sentman said. ​“We can either pass through or bundle energy and other costs, depending on customer preference.”

As demand for charging grows, so does the scale of the projects they’re developing. Last year, Forum Mobility unveiled plans for what was then the largest truck-charging depot in the state, capable of charging 96 heavy-duty electric trucks simultaneously in the Northern California city of Livermore. That was more than double the capacity of charging depots previously built by logistics-facility giant Prologis and freight logistics provider Schneider National in Southern California.

Other large-scale projects are popping up across the state, including the Lynwood site co-developed by Voltera and Einride, as well as Forum Mobility’s in-progress charging depot in the Port of Long Beach , which will be capable of charging 44 trucks simultaneously and up to 200 per day.

These sites are mainly being built near the state’s major port complexes in Los Angeles–Long Beach and the San Francisco Bay Area, but big projects are also underway farther inland to serve longer-haul routes.

Trucking-as-a-service startup WattEV is using $75.6 million in federal grants to build two depots along the I-5 corridor in California’s Central Valley and another in the city of Blythe on the California-Arizona border, with a combined total of 258 charging points.

Beyond financing, the grid is a key stumbling block to expanding electric-truck charging; it’s hard to secure the megawatt-scale power grid connections required. Many large truck-charging depots face yearslong wait times from California utilities, which are struggling to expand their grids fast enough to meet growing demand for electricity.

“Identifying and acquiring land in ideal locations that already has access to installed capacity and a clear land-use-approval pathway is extremely challenging,” Sentman said. ​“Even with Voltera’s expertise, this often requires a multiyear energization process with utility partners.”

As they wait for grid hookups, electric truck-charging depots are being built to circumnavigate these bottlenecks. Prologis’s Denker Avenue Depot near the Port of Long Beach includes on-site batteries and linear generators from startup Mainspring Energy, allowing it to support up to 96 heavy-duty electric trucks while it waits for a utility grid upgrade that is expected to take about two years to complete. WattEV’s charging depot in Bakersfield features solar panels and batteries to supplement grid power for its high-voltage chargers.

But longer term, as pressure mounts to electrify trucks and more money flows into the space, there’s only one way to allow charging to grow fast enough: Utilities across the country need to invest in grid infrastructure to support EV charging — including and especially electric truck depots.