The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) released a new report that assesses the infrastructure requirements for converting the U.S. vehicle fleet to battery electric. This analysis, a 2021 top priority of ATRI’s Research Advisory Committee, focused on three critical challenges for nationwide vehicle electrification:
- U.S. Electricity Supply and Demand
- Electric Vehicle Production
- Truck Charging Requirements
The study found that full electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet would require a large percentage of the country’s present electricity generation. Domestic long-haul trucking would use more than 10% of the electricity generated in the country today – while an all-electric U.S. vehicle fleet would use more than 40%. Some individual states would need to generate as much as 60% more electricity than is presently produced.
ATRI’s analysis also quantified the tens of millions of tons of cobalt, graphite, lithium and nickel that will be needed to replace the existing U.S. vehicle fleet with battery electric vehicles (BEV), placing high demand on raw materials. Depending on the material, electrification of the U.S. vehicle fleet would require 6.3 to 34.9 years of current global production. This is the equivalent of 8.4 to 64.4% of global reserves for just the U.S. vehicle fleet.
Finally, it was found that charging the nation’s long-haul truck fleet will prove challenging, partially due to the ongoing truck parking crisis. Current technology will necessitate more chargers than there are truck parking spaces in the U.S., with hardware and installation costs of $112,000 per unit, or more than $35 billion system-wide.
Beyond BEV automobiles, the report concludes that while there are certain applications for BEV trucks, a completely new charging infrastructure is critical to increasing BEV truck adoption by the trucking industry. Furthermore, the research documents that existing raw material mining for BEV batteries will likely need to be re-sourced with an emphasis on domestic mining and production.
A copy of the full report is available through ATRI’s website.
