Australian government invests $124 million to electrify heavy vehicles

The Australian government has revealed plans to invest more than $100 million to help electrify the nation’s heavy vehicle fleet.

Transport currently accounts for about one-fifth of Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions, with heavy vehicles comprising a significant share of that.

The government has identified 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.

Major investment

Through its Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), the government is making funding available under the Driving the Nation program through three focus areas.

ARENA is separately providing $28.6m in funding to two projects as part of a $124m investment in freight decarbonisation.

ARENA chief executive officer Darren Miller said 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 (EVs), particularly in vehicle availability and infrastructure,” he said.

“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.”

Electric truck deployments

Mr Miller said ARENA’s new focus areas will seek projects that support high-impact demonstrations and deployments of electric trucks, charging solutions and other innovations to encourage the uptake of battery EVs, regardless of size.

Under the 2022 focus areas, Linfox will receive $19.6m 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 electric trucks over longer distances, multiple duty cycles per day and at scale.

ARENA will also provide Toll with up to $9m to support its ‘Project TruckVolt’ that will roll out 28 battery electric trucks and required infrastructure at ten customer and Toll-owned sites across Australia.

Decarbonisation goals

“Supporting both Linfox and Toll to electrify their heavy vehicle fleets is a significant milestone in our goal to decarbonise transport,” Mr Miller said.

“By transitioning to EVs, not only are these companies able to reduce their carbon footprint, but it also sets a new standard for sustainability in freight.”

“This is what our Driving the Nation program is about—providing support to businesses to electrify their fleets and, in turn, accelerating the uptake of EVs on our roads.”