We talked a bit about locations. Do you want to space TeraWatt charging stations out across I-10 or does it make more sense to cluster them in hot spots? Some combination of both?
You want to be spaced out enough where if someone truly wants to go from Long Beach to El Paso, they can do that with the technology available. Over time, we’re seeing larger battery formats that allow them to go longer distances. But we also see there’s a lot of local demand. Eighty percent of truck routes are less than 200 miles, and there are lots of trucks that can go 200 miles on one charge.
So if you think about that, you realize it could be a phased approach with how these fleets adopt. They’ll start with shorter routes, and then think about the longer routes over time.
If you are out in the middle of the New Mexican desert, can you get enough power for a charging station or is that a slog? Can you supplement with renewable energy or is that too cost prohibitive?
We certainly know there’s other technologies we’ll want to integrate, whether that’s to offset power prices or provide more on-site power generation. So we are certainly looking at different things like solar, batteries or a combination of the two to supplement what we get from the grid. Those rural use cases could really be interesting to start to implement some of those things.
Along the lines of alternate energy sources, do you see hydrogen in trucking’s future? Might we one day find hydrogen fueling equipment at a TeraWatt station?
It’s definitely early days for hydrogen. There is a significant amount of infrastructure required. When you think about the maturity of each market and how much time the market needs to scale, EV trucks are already there. There’s lots of people incorporating them into their fleets. And while electricity is not as ubiquitous as I’d like, it is definitely a known commodity.
You’ve raised $1.1 billion and are planning to have your first charging station up and running by the end of the year. What does the horizon look like?
I hope it’s just a drop in the bucket, because when you think about the vast amount of infrastructure required to truly electrify every vehicle in the country, it’s in the trillions of dollars. We’re super excited to have that money to start to build out this network. But we know this is early days. There’s a lot more investment required. We’re excited about starting to build the initial part of that backbone.
