The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has announced $100 million in funding under the Driving the Nation program in three focus areas to support heavy vehicle electrification.
ARENA is separately providing $28.6 million in funding to two projects with $19.6 million committed to Linfox and $9 million to Toll—unlocking more than $124 million in investment into freight decarbonisation.
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ARENA CEO Darren Miller says the heavy transport sector has an important role to play in reducing the environmental impact of moving goods.
“The heavy vehicle market has matured significantly over the past year in relation to battery electric vehicles, particularly vehicle availability and infrastructure,” Miller says.
“However, there are still significant hurdles including upfront costs for operators, challenges with charging technology and infrastructure, as well as the lack of real-world data.”
“Transport accounts for about one-fifth of Australia’s CO2 emissions, with heavy vehicles a significant share of the transport emissions pool, emphasising why ARENA is focusing in this area of greatest impact.
“We know that customer demand across different modes of transport will continue to increase, with the transport sector expected to become Australia’s largest source of emissions by 2030.”
ARENA’s new focus areas will seek projects that support high impact demonstrations and deployments of electric trucks, the deployment of heavy vehicle charging solutions, and other innovations to encourage the uptake of battery electric vehicles, regardless of size.
Under the 2022 focus areas, Australian logistics company, Linfox, will receive $19.6 million to deploy 26 battery electric trucks and charging infrastructure across three distribution centres in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria.
The trucks will be deployed over three years to a range of customers across metropolitan and regional routes, with the aim to validate the performance of heavy EV trucks over longer distances, multiple duty cycles per day and at scale.
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ARENA will also provide Toll with up to $9 million to support its ‘Project TruckVolt’, which will roll out 28 battery electric trucks and required infrastructure at 10 customer and Toll-owned sites across Australia.
Both projects will not only contribute to ARENA’s decarbonisation goals but will also assist the industry in assessing the technical and commercial feasibility of electrifying heavy vehicle fleets and showing the transport and freight sectors what is possible when decarbonising heavy vehicles.
