Abstract
Vehicle fleet electrification has been regarded as one major pathway towards achieving energy independence and reducing air pollutant & greenhouse gas emissions. Compared to light-duty and medium-duty vehicles, the electrification of heavy-duty vehicles, especially Class 8 trucks, is more challenging due to the battery size required to attain a driving range necessary for their operating goals. Since drayage trucks generally have limited daily mileage, return to a home base every night, and spend a large amount of time creeping and idling, drayage operation has been the first targeted application for Class 8 electric trucks. The feasibility of operating battery electric drayage trucks at the individual vehicle level has recently been demonstrated. However, questions remain whether these trucks would be capable of meeting the needs of typical drayage operation at the fleet level.
This paper presents a feasibility analysis of operating an electric truck fleet based on real-world operation data of a drayage operator in Southern California. Second-by-second activity data collected from 20 trucks in the fleet were used to estimate the corresponding electric energy consumption and the state of charge for the battery using a microscopic electric energy consumption model. An algorithm for generating tours of drayage activity from the collected data was developed and implemented. Then, multiple scenarios with different battery charging and truck scheduling assumptions were analyzed. The results show that 85% of the tours could be served by electric trucks if allowing for opportunity charging at the home base during the time gap between consecutive tours.
