The Federal Government’s ARENA (The Australian Renewable Energy Agency) has announced it has opened a new round of funding under its Driving the Nation Fund focused on trucks, charging, and innovation. The fund provides $500 million to invest in cheaper and cleaner transport.
ARENA has allocated $100 million towards supporting demonstration and deployment of heavy vehicles, charging solutions and other innovations supporting update of BEVs.
Highlighting its commitment to decarbonise road transport, ARENA has announced it is separately providing $28.6 million in funding to two projects with $19.6 million committed to Linfox and $9 million to Toll – unlocking more than $124 million in investment into freight decarbonisation. Both projects were funded under its 2022 Driving the Nation focus areas.
ARENA CEO 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, particularly vehicle availability and infrastructure,” Miller 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.”
“Transport accounts for about one-fifth of Australia’s CO2 emissions, with heavy vehicles a significant share of the transport emissions pool, emphasising why ARENA is focusing in this area of greatest impact” Miller said.
“We know 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,” Miller added.
ARENA says its new focus areas will seek projects that support high impact demonstrations and deployments of electric trucks, the deployment of heavy vehicle charging solutions, and other innovations to encourage the uptake of battery electric vehicles, regardless of size.
Under the 2022 focus areas, Linfox, will receive $19.6 million 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 EV trucks over longer distances, multiple duty cycles per day and at scale.
ARENA said it will also provide Toll with up to $9 million to support its ‘Project TruckVolt’ which will roll out 28 battery electric trucks and required infrastructure at 10 customer and Toll-owned sites across Australia.
“Supporting both Linfox and Toll to electrify their heavy vehicle fleet is a significant milestone in our goal to decarbonise transport. By transitioning to electric vehicles, 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 electric vehicles on our roads,” said Miller.
Both projects will not only contribute to ARENA’s decarbonisation goals but will also assist the industry in assessing the technical and commercial feasibility of electrifying heavy vehicle fleets and showing the transport and freight sectors what is possible when decarbonising heavy vehicles.
The new focus areas under the Driving the Nation Program opened for applications earlier this month on the 9 November 2024.
ARENA says It is focusing specifically on lowering the cost barrier to the adoption of BEV trucks, addressing the operational barriers for the adoption of BEV trucks and the lack of shared charging infrastructure for heavy BEVs, as well as reducing the need for costly upgrades relating to onsite charging, at-scale uptake and integrations of BEVs.
Operators and fleets are urged to reach out to ARENA through its transport@arena.gov.au inbox to initiate discussions regarding potential projects and that they can read more on the website here.
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