The greater Los Angeles area is the epicenter of electric truck adoption in the United States, and two of its ports are leading the charge.
Under a cooperative agreement approved by the governing board of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s two busiest container ports, have agreed to set planning targets for electric drayage trucks and develop charging and refueling infrastructure plans to support their deployment.
The agreement is another milestone for medium- and heavy-duty (MHDV) vehicle electrification in the greater Los Angeles area, where despite federal policy reversals, state and local governments as well as ports and private investors have kept their zero-emission truck commitments.
Now the ball is in the electric utility’s court to ensure sufficient charging infrastructure and timely grid connections.
LADWP is planning ahead—but is it enough?
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the city’s public electric utility, is planning ahead. It forecasts that electric MHDV chargers in its service territory will consume 124,000 MWh of energy in 2030 and 528,600 MWh in 2035.
These numbers are higher than our estimates: based on a “market potential” scenario for electric MHDV adoption consistent with California’s goals, we projected that electric trucks in LADWP service territory would consume more than 81,700 MWh of electricity in 2030 and almost 192,000 MWh in 2035.
That means that LADWP is planning for the right magnitude of MHDV charging needs, possibly with room to spare. This is a positive sign that LADWP is prepared to provide the necessary grid infrastructure so that zero-emission trucking initiatives—like the cooperative agreement between the Air District and the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—come to fruition.
LADWP also has several programs in place to facilitate charging infrastructure buildout. It lays out clear guidance for charger installations, provides a commercial EV charger rebate program, and publishes a power capacity map showing how much load capacity is available on its distribution lines.
These are exactly the measures we recommended in our earlier research analyzing how Seattle’s public utility could better support MHDV electrification.
The gap between planning and reality
But it’s not all good news: warning signs suggest that gaps remain between system-level demand forecasts and distribution grid investments. In other words, there’s a disconnect between what LADWP is planning and what it’s building on the ground.
Case in point: the Prologis truck charging depot in Torrance, California. Because receiving electricity from LADWP would take too long, Prologis uses generator-battery storage microgrids to provide 6 out of 9 MW of the power it needs for its operations.
Examples like this illustrate how LADWP’s service upgrade timelines—ranging from 2 to 10 years depending on the extent of upgrade—are out of sync with the schedules that fleets operate on.
Prologis found an alternative solution, but not every fleet or investor can afford the cost and complexity of microgrids. The result? Project delays, relocations, and even cancellations. These outcomes will undermine the port’s zero-emission drayage truck goals and prolong exposure to harmful diesel pollution currently impacting local communities.
Clearly, delivering charging infrastructure on the scale of 500,000 MWh requires a more detailed distribution planning process and a faster approach to customers’ energization requests.
The old “wait and see” investment planning approach is ill-suited for today’s economy, in which cars, trucks, buildings, and other sectors are all undergoing rapid electrification. Meanwhile, utilities across the country—publicly owned and investor-owned alike—are struggling with aging infrastructure and congested local distribution grids.
What LADWP can do
So what’s the fix? LADWP has tools at its disposal—it just needs to use them more strategically. As a start, LADWP’s 2023 LA100 Equity Strategies report recommended MHDV electrification and infrastructure deployment targets.
Aligning and breaking down the MWh numbers from system-wide planning with these goals would be a good first step to connect two important planning processes and ensure consistency.
The utility could also consider reflecting its demand forecast for MHDV charging in its Power Strategic Long-Term Resource Plan and disaggregating this information to the substation/feeder level. Breaking down demand neighborhood by neighborhood would allow the public and potential developers to know exactly where LADWP expects truck charging loads to emerge on the network.
Next, LADWP can overlay load forecast maps onto improved power capacity maps that show more accurate and up-to-date grid capacity information.
This would give customers dependable capacity data to plan and site charging infrastructure projects. LADWP could also prioritize distribution grid upgrades to achieve 40% zero-emission drayage trucks by 2028 and 100% by 2035 along the high-volume I-710 highway, which is part of its objective under the Transportation Electrification Partnership.
LADWP’s leadership in this high-profile project can help inject confidence into other truck electrification efforts. LADWP could also take a few pages out of investor-owned utilities’ playbook.
For example, it might explore flexible grid connections in situations where local distribution grids cannot meet a customer’s full energization needs today. This means LADWP would accept customers that can operate their chargers within grid capacity limits.
Think of it like allowing cars to use a new highway exit during off-peak hours while construction continues—limited access is better than no access, and it prevents drivers from waiting years for the ‘complete’ infrastructure. These flexible grid connections allow utilities to grow their customer base even before grid upgrades are complete, minimizing project delays.
Furthermore, to facilitate smooth and efficient energization processes, LADWP can better communicate grid connection timelines and processes to charging developers for assessing and tracking project opportunities. And for investments further down the line, LADWP can identify and approve proactive grid capacity expansions for high confidence “pending loads” that will likely materialize in the next couple of years.
As LADWP’s own data reveal, new infrastructure takes years to plan, design, and construct. This work needs to start today to meet MHDV charging loads in the 2030–2035 timeframe.
The stakes are high
There is a lot to be gained from keeping MHDV charging loads on track. The agreement between the ports and South Coast Air Quality Management District will bring relief to local communities, which have borne the brunt of harmful health effects from diesel particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution from diesel trucks.
With the port’s large-scale electrification of drayage trucks on the horizon and more fleets and charging providers ready than ever, utility grid infrastructure from LADWP will be the critical link to a cleaner future for the residents around these ports and in the greater Los Angeles area.
LADWP now stands at a crossroads. It can either be the utility that powered the nation’s first major port electrification—a model for cities everywhere—or the bottleneck that delayed it.