California to require all trucks entering ports and railyards to be fully electric

Think we got supply problems now?

2035 may sound far off... but in 12 years only electric trucks can enter ports?


California Looks To Ban Diesel-Powered Trucks To Rectify ‘Decades Of Racist’ Practices

The proposal would require medium and heavy-duty trucks entering ports and railyards to be fully electric by 2035

A ‘Moral Obligation’: California Looks To Ban Diesel-Powered Trucks To Rectify ‘Decades Of Racist’ Practices | The Daily Caller

California is self destructing. Bot hey, on the bright side, maybe we'll just have to do with less Chinese imports.

I'm just going to point out that making large trucks electric is much more difficult than making smaller cars electric.
One of the biggest issues is that it is hard to store large amounts of electric power in batteries. A bigger heavier truck is going to take more electric power, meaning it will require more battery storage. This will make it very expensive.
Obviously logic and simple engineering facts were lost on those coming up with these policies.

But it can be said that natural gas actually does make more sense for trucks than it does for cars. It has to do with volume to surface area ratio of the compressed gas tank.

 

Nice post but a small correction. Natural gas, with both reduced energy content and pressure related physical limits on storage tanks (I think state of the art the last time I was working with it was somewhere in the nieghborhood of 10,000 psi which in practice requires a h*ll of a lot of armoring) makes them a rolling bomb except in limited range applications like gabage trucks fueled by landfill gas.

And that presents a huge problem when excluding normal diesel trucks from everywhere except California that are the backbone of the entire national economy.

 

Forget Mexico, build a wall around CA.

Pro tip for Californians: invest in horses.

 

Look, I will let you have your opinion and not argue with you about that here, but the point I would like to make is, if it came down to either electric battery or natural gas
--if those were the only two options--
then natural gas would make a much more sense and be more practical than electric.

We can look at this another way. A tank of compressed natural gas may have 6 times less energy density than liquid fuel, but a lithium battery has 100 times less.

And my other point was, even if you believe natural gas is not practical, recognizing that it is still more practical for a very large vehicle than it is for a small vehicle.

Hopefully that is a little bit more nuanced than just "this good", or "this bad".

Logic tells us that option A can still be much better than option B, even if both options are bad and you think option C is the best choice.

 

That's certainly true and nothing wrong there. Logic though would actually encourage the citizens of California to tell thier government to go pound sand. If the rest of the 50 states aren't running either natural gas or electric, it destroys California's ability to participate in interstate commerce. Even if 17 states have jiggered thier climate regulations to match what California does instead of Federal regs.

It's all a disaster that you can see coming from space.

 

California is counting on the fact that they are so large and economically important that it will force the other states to get with the program. Half of the entire population in the Western half of the United States lives in California. California also has a monopoly on half the coastline of the west coast. It would make it very impractical for the area in several other states if they had to have things coming from the Pacific Ocean shipped through Portland or Seattle. Not impossible but it would be very out of the way and add significant expense.

 

Electric cars have gotten better but electric trucks and for that matter electric motorcycles are not feasible because of battery volume and charge times.


Diesel powered rigs Hall 40 tons. And when you burn up all of your fuel you take a few minutes to add more and you're back on the road.

A battery operated truck would require probably about another 6 tons of batteries they wouldn't be able to haul as much for as long a period and charging them would take hours possibly days.

Impossible future for 18 wheelers would be gas electric or diesel electric like a locomotive. At that point it wouldn't matter what kind of fuel you use you're just turning a generator. But even that would require a sacrificing load capacity for storage batteries.

I used to be a mechanic and I did work on quite a few diesel rigs. These things were immensely complicated a Bosch fuel pump for example is probably supremely complicated compared to an entire Tesla. So why would it manufacturer build all of this complicated stuff if they can just hang out some electric vehicles? They've always been around longer than a gas powered vehicle but they never replaced the diesel powered semi. And that's because of the diesel powered semi is it far more useful.

 

Because design complication and maintenance is just one factor of the equation. You are indeed right. Those are two advantages that electric has over diesel.

Those batteries are very expensive to produce, and eventually do have to be replaced. Longer range, especially for greater carrying weights, will require more of an initial investment. If the battery for a regular electric car costs $10-15,000, expect a battery for an electric large truck to cost $40-60,000.
And while it is true electric power is currently cheaper than liquid fuel, expect that to change if 100% of electric power begins being produced by renewables. (The only reason electric power is cheap to produce right now is it is being produced from coal or natural gas)

 

I imagine an electric semi would involve about $500,000 in batteries. Truck drivers drive for 14 hours a day. To make a truck operate that way with electric it's impossible at this point. You can't charge them fast enough if they have the energy to produce that much travel they would be charging for days it's just not feasible.

They pick a year far enough out into the future where they can change their mind

 

Again, not to contest what you said but rather to highlight and sharpen the point (I've been an automotive engineer for 35 years with a fair amount of experience in both light duty and heavy duty) but you're right on the edges (correctly) of much of the real issue.

Heavy duty is a world of difference away from light duty in both the way they are used and the way they are regulated. A typical heavy duty truck is custom built to the application. They can easily cost a quarter of a million dollars new. Their purpose is strictly commercial, tools to make money not mileage. As such they are built to be modified as the required application changes. A typical heavy duty truck can last in service 50 years or more maybe going through 9 or 10 configurations from semi to eventual yard jockey. Resale value is a huge consideration. The frame can be shortened or lengthened or reinforced as need be. Engines can be reprogrammed with different power curves to serve different applications. Drivetrain components can be swapped in and out at will. The emissions certification is engine only (as compared to light duty which is entire vehicle) which means you can buy a rolling chassis without an engine and just drop in whatever engine you've got lying around, regardless of age, and not lose your emissions certification. The heavy duty market is roughly a tenth of the size of light duty (1 million or so compared to light duty which is 15 to 18 million annually). And cost of fuel is, while important, not quite as important as driver retention and getting the job done efficiently.

This is where the idea of electric trucks really collapses. A chassis built around a big chunk of batteries that might fail in 10 years and need to be scrapped and replaced for a couple hundred thousand dollars is simply a non-starter. A diesel engine can be rebuilt virtually endlessly. A diesel engine can be easily converted to really anything that can flow and burn (natural gas, alcohol, the stuff that come out of rotting wood-the Swedes call that "black liquor"- literally anything). That's why some places use landfill gas to fuel garbage trucks (most of those have a duty cycle of 10-20 miles a day and it's all local). And importantly, CO2 and water are the intended exhaust components of a well functioning engine- there's literally no way to physically regulate CO2 out of internal combustion. And like the other gentleman said, a few minutes to refill your 200 gallon tanks while you go inside to grab a sandwich and take a leak beats the heck out of losing several hours of making money.

So, like the light duty requirements I expect this nightmare to do what so many of California's crazy schemes do- crash and burn just about the time the first milestone comes into view.