TeraWatt has designs on providing juice EV trucks need
So far, you’ve acquired properties in 18 states. How do you envision this charging network developing?
We’re starting to build out the I-10 corridor between the Port of Long Beach, which is a hotbed of activities when it comes to electrification, and we’re going eastward, all the way to El Paso. Obviously, in California, we’ll start near the ports and Inland Empire (a center for distribution and logistics east of Los Angeles)where there’s a lot of warehouses. Then eastward through Phoenix, into New Mexico and onto Texas.
You are talking about fleets. You are talking about ports. Are you specifically focused on heavy-duty trucks?
We’re somewhat fleet agnostic. We’ll help any fleet that needs to solve some complex charging needs. We have light-duty customers. What we know from our heavy-duty fleets is they’re going to require more complex solutions. If you take a heavy-duty vehicle that needs 1 megawatt of power, that’s the same amount of power you could charge eight to 10 light-duty vehicles with. So if you have eight to 10 heavy-duty vehicles at one time, that’s a lot of power required.
That’s a lot of power. Are utility companies ready to accommodate that? Is it uneven state by state?
Certainly in California, all the utilities there have a lot of requests for interconnects when it comes to charging and have programs in place. It definitely varies across the board when it comes to other locations. We do see utilities quickly picking it up and realizing that this is coming. They’re learning how to deal with the requests. There’s still a big learning curve.
Are electric grids in the United States ready for this?
The good news is that this is going to be a transition that takes some time. We’re not going to turn a switch and, all of a sudden, everything is electrified overnight. Fleets might turn over once every 10 years, so we can talk about getting ahead of that curve in places like the Inland Empire, for example, where there’s going to be a lot of demand.
