Speaker
Description
To meet climate goals and limit global warming there is an urgent need to decarbonize road freight transport, including the forestry sector’s transport. Previous studies have shown that electrification is an effective means for carbon abatement in freight transport and will play a key role. In the project TREE (Transition to efficient electrified forestry transport) 12 electric timber and wood chip trucks are operated in commercial operation at seven different sites in Sweden, illustrating the feasibility to electrify forestry sector’s transports. The TREE project has pronounced that access to reliable charging is critical for efficient electrification. A single charger failure, due to technical malfunction, limited power supply, or waiting times at the charging point, can render an entire route infeasible or that an entire region is not accessible. This creates a form of systemic fragility, where the operational viability of electric trucks is highly sensitive to disruptions at individual charging points. Such vulnerabilities reduce system reliability, increase operational risk, and may slow down the adoption of electric trucks. In this study, we aim to analyze and improve the robustness of charging infrastructure for heavy electric trucks in forestry transport. We propose indicators for assessing the robustness of a charging network. To assess the robustness of a charging network, we combine a fleet planning tool for mixed fleets of electric and diesel trucks with Exploratory Modeling and Analysis (EMA) to run many simulations with different potential charging failures implemented and different combinations of trucks. Based on the results, we explore the robustness of a charging network in a region. The aim is to use the results to propose improvements in the charging network.
| Keywords | electrification; resilience; charging; modeling |
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