Why Road Freight Decarbonization Needs a Resilience Lens

Truck electrification is essential to decarbonizing road freight, and the transition will be far more successful if resilience is built in from the start.

Drawing on my work in supply chain resilience with Life-Links, freight decarbonization with Smart Freight Centre and truck charging infrastructure with Milence, I’d like to share what this means at three connected levels: energy resilience, freight network resilience and charging infrastructure resilience. This blog builds on remarks I made as a Supervisory Board Member of Milence at the Energy Resilience on Wheels: Scaling Zero-Emission Transport side event during the ITF Summit 2026. I use Europe as an example, but the same resilience needs apply to road freight electrification elsewhere.

1. ENERGY RESILIENCE:

Electrifying trucks turns oil-price exposure into a manageable electricity-system risk

Electric trucks are not only a decarbonization strategy but also an energy resilience strategy. They shift energy demand from fossil fuel imports to electricity, which can be produced from diverse and local renewable energy sources. For fleet operators, this can make energy costs more predictable than diesel, depending on electricity prices and charging arrangements.

Electrification of mobility, both cars and trucks, creates additional demand for renewable energy, which can drive further investment. This investment can take place through public energy infrastructure, such as large solar and wind farms, and at private business sites, for example through solar panels on warehouse roofs. Locating charging hubs near large solar or wind farms can make better use of locally generated electricity. It can also help manage pressure on the grid, although a suitable grid connection will still be needed.

Electricity can be produced from more diverse and local sources than oil. In 2024, around 71% of EU electricity production came from renewables and nuclear power combined. Gas-fired generation still influences electricity prices, especially when renewable output is low or demand is high. However, ACER (the EU Agency for Cooperation of Energy Regulators) found that renewables reduced the role of gas in setting marginal electricity prices in 2024. Electricity markets are becoming less reliant on gas overall, but remain exposed to gas-price fluctuations when fossil-fuel generation is needed.

In the longer term, electrification of heavy duty transport can provide a sizeable and flexible source of demand in the European energy system. ICCT expects between 290,000 and 340,000 battery-electric trucks in the EU by 2030, requiring 22 to 28 GW of installed charging power across depots and public sites. Milence aims to operate 90 charging hubs with more than 300 MCS (megawatt charging system) charging points across Europe by 2028, illustrating the speed and scale at which electric freight infrastructure is developing. The European logistics and transport system is not very flexible in general, as it is highly efficient and all stakeholders are interlinked. But even a little flexibility in when trucks charge could already have a big impact on grid stability and costs, provided that operational schedules and electricity market incentives allow it.

2. FREIGHT NETWORK RESILIENCE:

Freight transport networks are economic and societal lifelines, and public charging is part of that network

Freight corridors are essential for trade, competitiveness, and increasingly for crisis response, such as floods or war. When freight corridors are disrupted, this impacts access to food, medicine, industrial products, and other essential goods. Disruption can also increase prices, in a similar way as fuel price rises.

Therefore, freight corridors should be treated as strategic assets and not as another standalone sector. They should be reliable and competitive across ports, roads, borders, and other parts of the network, in support of all sectors of society that depend on freight. Charging infrastructure should be planned as part of the strategic freight network, not as isolated commercial charging sites. The question is not only “how many chargers?” but “are they in the right places, with the right grid capacity, along the corridors where freight movement depends on them?”

The EU Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR) already provides a strong baseline. For heavy duty vehicles, it requires publicly accessible charging sites (“recharging pools” in AFIR) in each direction of travel at intervals of no more than 60 km along the core Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T), with phased coverage and capacity targets through 2030. But resilience will require going beyond minimum coverage, with the market helping to identify where extra capacity and alternatives are needed if a charging site or grid connection fails.

Another element to consider is that public charging provides redundancy in the system. Where depot charging is unavailable because of grid constraints, congestion, disruption, or cross-border operations, public infrastructure helps ensure continuity of operations.

3. CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE RESILIENCE:

Public charging hubs must be designed for physical climate risk and operational continuity

Public charging hubs need to be built for the conditions and hazards that transport systems face as they become increasingly strategic freight infrastructure. This includes climate risks such as heatwaves, floods, and storms, as well as grid stress, grid failure, and local disruptions.

Site design, grid connection, modular expansion of sites, battery energy storage systems (BESS), and smart charging are all relevant from a resilience perspective. Modular hub design allows rapid scaling in response to demand surges or rerouting of freight flows. Smart charging can help manage load and prioritize trucks based on urgency, for example time-sensitive goods. BESS can provide peak shaving and some backup power, helping hubs continue operating during grid constraints.

However, BESS alone cannot provide prolonged backup for a heavy duty public MCS hub. A simple four-bay hub charging at 1 MW per bay would use up to 4 MWh in one hour, or 16 MWh over four hours, before accounting for losses. As a standalone solution, this is unlikely to have a positive business case. But when linked behind the meter to renewable generation, the battery can serve more than one purpose, while the renewable asset provides an additional source of electricity.

From a resilience perspective, the policy asks are:

• Grid priority and transparency: priority grid connection for congestion softeners, such as BESS, renewables, and heavy-duty vehicle infrastructure, and improved transparency on available capacity at strategic freight locations, so infrastructure can be built where it is most needed for resilience.
• Support for flexibility solutions such as BESS, renewables, and smart charging.
• A more harmonized blueprint for permitting, safety, and resilience standards. Electric heavy-duty vehicles are not properly recognized in zoning plans today, leading to inconsistency in approval processes.

The wider Life-Links point is: keep logistics flows moving requires resilience across the energy, infrastructure and operations they depend on, and road freight decarbonization and electrification strategies cannot succeed unless that resilience is built in from the start.