Charging or refuelling needs for trucks in Scotland
Project background
Transport Scotland commissioned Heriot-Watt’s Centre for Sustainable Road Freight (CSRF) to work with fleet operators to understand where future zero carbon charging and fuelling infrastructure is most urgently needed.
This project:
- Determined broad locations where on-route charging or refuelling facilities should be developed.
- Provides recommendations for investors on how locations should be prioritised and phased.
The initial report for the first phase of work is published here based on a small sample of HGV fleets in Scotland. The key finding of the report show that:
- Whole fleet Battery Electric HGV (BEV) operation is possible for current routes, provided depot and en route charging infrastructure is developed in key locations across Scotland.
- Based on data included to date, prioritising shared charging on the A9, A90, and M74 corridors maximises the impact for these BEV operations.
- Most modelled routes can be completed with no additional stops for charging and, in the worst case, diversions to charge of no more than 15 km.
- Even when considering only a small proportion of Scotland’s HGV fleet, considerable mitigation for increased peak grid demand, such as reinforcement of grid connections, will likely be required.
- The mapping of locations for hydrogen refuelling is more uncertain than for charging due to an earlier stage of technology maturity and the potential need to site fuelling alongside hydrogen production. Hydrogen refuelling distributors indicate that hydrogen in individual depots will not be commercially viable and shared fuelling sites are required.
Data from more operators will validate the proof of concept, ensuring identified charging or fuelling locations support all operations across Scotland, and creating confidence for investment.
Contact the team at cls-info@hw.ac.uk to have your fleet data included in future iterations of the model.
Read more about the next phase of the project.
Read the full technical report of the research.
We committed to share the full visualisation results publicly. The download links below contain an ArcGIS project with several csv files describing different layers, all large files. If you wish to download them follow the links. visualisation results and GIS information.