Equity must be considered in early stages of fleet electrification

September 21, 2023

This fireside chat recap is from FreightWaves’ Enterprise Fleet Summit on Wednesday.

FIRESIDE CHAT TOPIC: Creating equity in electrification

DETAILS: Zeina El-Azzi, founder and CEO of Gage Zero, chats with Thomas Wasson, enterprise trucking carrier expert for FreightWaves, about challenges and opportunities in creating equitable electrification outcomes. Gage Zero describes itself as a company that helps truck fleets navigate the path toward electrification in a way that also benefits communities.

fleets navigate the complexity of electrification and maintain reliable, safe operations with no upfront costs, while benefiting communities.

KEY QUOTES FROM EL-AZZI:

“I think [fleet electrification] is a very exciting space and it’s fairly nascent, so there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity. It’s in its very early stages. I call it in the warm-up stage, if you will, when it comes to fleet electrification. We’re looking at over a billion dollars of necessary investment into fleet electrification.”

“Similar to EV transition in the passenger space, fleets really need to consider the how in terms of the transition. We want to make sure it benefits everyone in the community, not just the wealthy. We were founded with equity in mind. We focus on doing what’s best for our customers, while keeping the communities that we work with front and center. We do workforce development and job training … . We think that the electrification ecosystem can really be fertile ground for a new way of doing business while we help to create a cleaner planet.”

“When you think about some of the smaller companies, whether it’s logistics operators or maybe local companies or regional companies … they’re really going to need that help in terms of finding a partner that’s going to look at [fleet electrification] as an investment and really deploy the capital that is necessary in order for those resources to be available for fleet operators. And that’s really where we come in … . We’re able to look at a particular project and design and engineer that project and deploy the capital, so then we can contract with customers for their usage and their charging needs, and they don’t have to take on the burden of that significant capital investment.”

“One of the things that I like to mention is that it’s really not just about charging. It’s also about energy management. And so, when you think about what is the price of power going to be for charging over a longer period of time, do I need to think about what time of day I should be charging my vehicle, do I need to think about how I change my operations according to what’s going on in terms of energy prices and energy management — there are companies like ours that are there to engage with trucking companies and operators to help them understand what I think is a complex environment and one that’s going to be more complex as the future evolves.”