Michael Berube, acting deputy assistant secretary for Sustainable Transportation, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy with the U.S. Department of Energy, addresses a Green Truck Summit session titled “Industry and Government in Flux: Evolving Supply, Technology, and Government Positions.”Photo: Keith Norbury
Conventional fuels aren’t going anywhere yet. But electric and other eco-friendly alternatives should continue to gain traction as the U.S. Department of Energy proceeds with its 21st Century Truck Partnership research and development program.
Service Truck Magazine spoke with Michael Berube, the DOE’s acting deputy assistant secretary for sustainable transportation, for an update on the agency’s plans. Berube, who delivered a keynote address at the Green Truck Summit in March at the Work Truck Show in Indianapolis, pointed to an increasing focus on the entire medium to heavy-duty sector.
“This includes everything from work trucks through to freight trucks, promoting improved understanding and work on electrification, natural gas, hydrogen fuel cell applications as well as improvements in traditional fuels and engines,” Berube said. “It’s looking across the whole sector.”
With a window for more than $50 million in new research grants aimed at collaborative industry-academia efforts recently closed, Berube described a shift from cars and other light-duty vehicles to trucks. “You hear lots about connected autonomous vehicles and about electrification. But there’s been a little less of that discussion in the heavy-duty sector and across the work trucks until really just recently.”
The 21st Century Truck Partnership also includes participation from the Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Army, and nearly a dozen private companies ranging from original equipment manufacturers to tier-one suppliers.
Focus shifts
“We’ve revamped the partnership to broaden its focus,” Berube said. “Previously it’s been focused more squarely just on energy efficiency. But we’ve created four task forces. One is focused on electrification. One is focused on operational efficiency, using new mobility technology to try to help improve the efficiency of the operation. One is focused on the internal combustion engine, and that includes natural gas as well as traditional liquid fuels. And one is focused on safety.”
Berube also cited the DOE’s SuperTruck Program, a five-year, $100-million effort to explore the possibility of cutting long-haul truck fuel consumption by half. “We’re already starting to see some of the ideas that come out of that being applied.”
While service trucks aren’t long-haul, many are on the road all day, just within a tighter geographic range. So how does the Partnership apply to technicians and their mobile garages? Berube says the impact is considerable given they may both use alternative fuel technologies and repair and service other equipment using them.
For now, at least, there are limitations. With charging stations limited mainly to urban centers, fully electrified vehicles generally can’t stray too far afield.
“It will depend on service truck usage, on their range needs,” Berube said. “If they’re going out a really far distance on the highway it will be a little more challenging.”
Berube said trucks might benefit by having electrification for power take-off units and other accessories. “I think you’re going to see more of these technologies in the trucking space, and service trucks will also see and benefit from those technologies,” he added.
Fewer breakdowns expected
While service trucks will service vehicles using new fuel technologies, technicians may experience an overall decrease in the volume of emergency calls. “All of the initial indications are that service and maintenance needs go down,” Berube said, noting one other speaker at Green Truck Summit reported first-hand experience that electrified systems seem less prone to breakdowns than ones running on conventional fuels.
“The data is not quite as clear with natural gas but we’re doing current studies to verify if natural gas vehicles also demonstrate less maintenance needs,” Berube said.
Regardless, technicians will need to enhance their skill sets. “They’ll have to have high voltage skills when working on vehicles — that’s going to have to be a whole new skill set that mechanics learn.” Berube said.
Mobile technicians can also expect to be summoned to provide emergency boosts. “If you have a breakdown, you have a vehicle on the side of the road. Do you need to bring some level of backup power?”
Still, electrification isn’t hustling out the gate. For now, at least, all-electric vehicles are best suited to urban areas and major highway corridors, in part because that’s where existing charging infrastructure is in place.
“It’s going to take a little bit of time,” Berube said, pointing to efforts by Electrify America, a Volkswagen subsidiary the automaker established in 2017 in response to its emissions scandal, to establish a network of nearly 1,000 charging stations across the US.
“There’s also a separate pot of money available through states, and the states can apportion NOx mitigation funds towards EV charging,” Berube said.
Market will decide
While hydrogen and fuel cell systems may be a decade or so away, Berube ultimately anticipates market-driven choice.
“We don’t see one fuel, certainly not electrification, taking over everything,” he said. “We see a broad range, and certainly in some geographic areas more cases where one fuel or the other — including liquid fuel — might make more sense.”
Where the DOE and the 21st Century Partnership fit in is on the research and development side. These partnerships prevent duplication of effort, focus DOE research on the most critical R&D barriers, and accelerate progress. “We do earlier-stage research industry either doesn’t have the tools or capability to undertake on its own — usually because it is too risky or too far from market for industry emphasis and resources,” Berube said. “We look at what the gaps are and what has to happen to close those gaps, and then industry and government individually or sometimes jointly go and start working on those specific technologies.”
Among the technical challenges electrification faces are charging time and speed — a challenge also faced with hydrogen infrastructure. “The refuelling time can theoretically be better than hydrogen, but there’s a lot of cost with the equipment to do that fuelling, and the durability of the equipment itself has to be improved,” Berube said. “These are some of the challenges we’re working on.”
Challenges remain
The Partnership is also exploring vehicle interconnectivity and automation issues ranging from the amount of energy required for platooning to how work and long-haul trucks might use data in an aggregative way to better understand how to optimize vehicle operation.
“Automated vehicles have the potential for safety, but a lot of challenges still need to be worked out in developing the actual automated vehicles’ algorithms and the technology before they’re really going to be ready for deployment,” Berube said.
For now, the Partnership continues to engage industry and other stakeholders to look, system-level, at technologies and potential impacts to vehicles and the overall grid.
“We think there’s lots of opportunities looking at that big system level of the transportation system, of which trucks are a critical aspect,” Berube said, acknowledging the operating-cost, pennies-matter nature of the industry.
“They really want to look at what are the most affordable technologies they can have, and part of that is reducing their fuel cost and also improving their reliability. We’re focused on all of those things. If we can decrease the cost and provide more choice, our view is this will allow industry and policy makers at the national, state and local levels to have the best choices in front of them.”
— Saul Chernos
Saul Chernos is a Toronto-based freelance writer.