Texas epitomizes big. This fact preoccupied me driving the seemingly endless roads from Austin to El Paso. Somewhere just to the west of San Antonio on Interstate 10 — what seemed like only halfway across the map of Texas — I noticed that the green mile marker sign read 500. Meaning I still had 500 miles to go to El Paso and the border with New Mexico.
Meaning no affront to Texans that live out there, there is a lot of nothing between San Antonio and El Paso. At one point on my journey, the Texas Highway Department kindly mentions that the next availability of gas is 87 miles away. That gas is two lonely stations on opposite sides of an overpass in Bakersfield. No, not the one in California. A few miles more and you hit Fort Stockton.
These two lonely fuel stations are indicative of future electric truck station needs in big expanses like Texas. The geography lesson here is that distances between cities in Texas typically exceed 250 miles, and 250 just happens to be that magic number currently associated with maximum range of most of the commercially viable Class 8 electric tractors. By commercially viable, I mean they still can carry sufficient paying payload to make the same number of trips as the diesel truck they are replacing would make. The graphic below highlights my point on distances between major cities in the south-central U.S.
Getting closer to El Paso, I got to the point where I-10 and I-20 merge. It was Sunday, a lighter traffic day, so I could count trucks. I had a lot of time to count trucks. The eastbound lanes were averaging about 10 Class 8 trucks of various vocations per mile. The electronic map program says mileage between El Paso and Dallas is 635 miles, and El Paso to San Antonio is 551. The eastbound trucks I was counting were likely going to one of those cities. Simple math says 600 miles of trucks at 10 trucks per mile is 6,000 trucks, and 600 miles is also about right for miles achievable in an 11-hour driving day.
At 2 kWh/mi energy use typical of current Class 8 battery electric trucks, that means these routes need at least 7.2 GWh of electricity per day on this segment of road. I’ve lived in Texas a fair while, and know that the energy grid here has been strained both in winter and summer, operating at capacity repeatedly. So, this new load for electric vehicle transportation suggests new generation and distribution are needed.
