Electric truck charging: Germany, California and FedEx move as grid queues stall

Germany's Bundesnetzagentur approved the market integration rules for storage and charging points (MiSpeL) on 2 October, according to pv magazine. Batteries and bidirectional charging points can take electricity from the grid and feed it back later without losing support for the renewable power already stored. Volumes drawn from the grid get lower levies and network charges. Two metering options exist: one for general users, and a flat-rate option for households with PV systems up to 30 kW. That second option still needs European Commission approval under state-aid rules.

The decision matters for trucks. Depot charging is where most heavy electric vehicles plug in, and the economics of that depot depend on what the electrons cost. Carsten Körnig, managing director of the German solar association BSW-Solar, called MiSpeL a long-awaited regulatory key for using renewable and grid electricity at the same time, per pv magazine. The association said the focus now shifts to network and metering operators, who have to implement it quickly.

Grid queues are the bottleneck, not the chargers

Europe's ports and airports illustrate the problem. Transport & Environment, writing on CleanTechnica on 1 October, put the scale bluntly: 375 GW of clean energy projects and 455 GW of battery storage projects are sitting in connection queues. Demand-side sites such as factories, data centres, ports and airports wait in a separate queue facing the same constraint. The cause is that building new grid infrastructure takes longer than connecting generation or demand. The EU has told ports and airports to electrify under AFIR and FuelEU Maritime, but the cable may not arrive for years.

Truck charging has the same shape. BloombergNEF's 30 September analysis notes that long-haul battery-electric trucking depends on high-power charging, that stations face cost and grid-connection hurdles, and that network growth has yet to eliminate patchy coverage. BNEF estimates operators need to charge roughly $0.10 to $0.22 per kilowatt-hour on top of electricity costs to recover their investment, and that utilisation varies widely between stations. In other words, the charger is the easy part.

There is a counter-argument in the same BNEF note: financing is adapting. Transactions are increasingly underwritten against a truck's contracted transport operation rather than its resale value alone, a structure that was relatively unused in diesel truck financing. That helps because residual values for electric trucks are uncertain, mainly due to questions about battery degradation.

California signs a price-transparency law

On the vehicle side, California moved last week. Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1213, authored by state Senator Eloise Gómez Reyes. From 2027 it requires truck manufacturers to share pricing data with state agencies if they want their trucks to be eligible for incentive programmes including CARB's Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project and the California Energy Commission's Clean Transportation Program, Canary Media reported on 30 September.

The background number is stark. A 2024 California Air Resources Board report found the average price of a zero-emission Class 8 truck in California was $436,000, about $87,000 more than the average price in Europe, according to Canary Media. Ray Minjares of the International Council on Clean Transportation told Canary Media that commercial trucks are sold through business-to-business transactions that do not operate under a high degree of pricing transparency. SB 1213 also instructs state agencies to explore residual-value guarantees so lenders can price used electric trucks.

The state has roughly 1.8 million commercial trucks on its roads, almost all diesel, and about 2,000 zero-emission heavy trucks, more than any other state. Those two numbers explain why the law exists.

FedEx orders 2,000 trucks, with a fuel-savings claim attached

The largest single fleet order in the dossier came on 30 September, when FedEx ordered 2,000 medium-duty electric trucks from California startup Harbinger, InsideEVs reported on 1 October. Harbinger estimates the trucks will save FedEx $40 million a year in fuel, with $800 million over a 20-year service life, and avoid more than 1.7 million tons of CO2. The order is worth over $200 million, with deliveries in the US and Canada by the end of 2027 and all 2,000 vehicles built within 18 months, according to the company. Harbinger's step vans start at $103,000 before incentives and use 35 kWh battery packs rated at 800 volts, configured in four to six packs for 140 to 210 miles of real-world range.

That is the demand signal. The charging side is less settled. EVgo previewed a 750 kW DC fast charging system on 29 September, Electrek reported, but deployment is now expected in 2027, later than the second-half 2026 rollout the company projected when it announced work with Delta Electronics in 2024. EVgo says the system could charge the fastest-charging EVs sold in the US in around 10 minutes, without specifying the battery percentage range. The true test, as Electrek noted, comes when several vehicles plug in at once.

The cost case is already there in parts of Europe

Transport & Environment's analysis, published on 28 September, found electric trucks have a lower total cost of ownership in six of nine major EU markets, which together account for 46% of new heavy truck sales. Savings over five years reach €100,000 in the Netherlands and €85,000 in Germany, with payback after two years; at current diesel prices T&E puts those figures at €123,000 and €106,000. The report argues the EU's 2030 target of a 43% CO2 cut for heavy vehicles is what forces manufacturers to scale up and cut prices, and that Italy, France, Spain and Poland should implement the Eurovignette Directive and exempt zero-emission trucks from tolls.

Stef Cornelis, T&E's director of freight and fleets, said Europe's truckers are on the front line of the diesel crisis and that reintroducing fuel rebates would prolong the sector's dependency on diesel. The group's position is that charging infrastructure and grid connections need to accelerate alongside vehicle supply.

The US picture is different. BloombergNEF describes the US battery-electric truck market as at a near standstill, with policy and cost headwinds limiting uptake. US light-duty electric vehicle electricity consumption grew 8% in the first half of 2026 compared with the second half of 2025, down from the 13% to 24% growth seen in earlier six-month periods, according to the US Energy Information Administration, after federal tax credits ended on 30 September 2025. New electric vehicle sales fell 19% in the first half of 2026 versus the previous half.

Globally, the trucks keep coming: 158,000 medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks were sold in the first half of 2026, up 75% year on year, with more than nine in ten in China, per BloombergNEF. Charging those trucks is now the constraint that policy is chasing, in Berlin, Brussels and Sacramento at once.