It’s amazing what can happen in three short years with a new federal government and an acceptance that the emissions generated by transport activities is having a significant impact on climate change.
One person that has been caught up in the whirlwind of activity is Alex Bowler, Sector Lead Bus and Heavy Vehicles at JET Charge. He was speaking at TruckShowX to share the challenges faced when building the very first large scale electric truck depot for Team Global Express. It was a great opportunity to ask some question about the increasing scale of charging infrastructure projects.
“You can almost tell the story in the job title,” suggests Bowler. “I was brought on as an electric bus infrastructure specialist. And now the position I have is Sector Lead Bus and Heavy Vehicles. So that kind of tells the story of the way the markets have developed.”
“For JET Charge, we’ve gone from providing specialist expertise specifically around the bus transition, to providing support to an industry of bus and heavy vehicles as they start to electrify. There’s a string of projects that you can look back on that we’ve delivered. And some that are coming in the pipeline that speak towards the increasing size and scale of projects for electric buses and trucks.”
“When I joined, we were just starting to deliver the Clarks Logan City Bus service depot which was 10 buses. The following year we picked up another eight bus deployment. And now we’ve almost finished 20 buses in WA; we’re doing 60 trucks with TGE; and we’re working on projects now which are sized for 200 or 250 electric vehicles running in a depot environment. So it’s a obviously a very exciting time to be working in the industry and we are starting to see some of that growth and the opportunities in the market as well.”
Bowler points out that the truck and bus industries are very different and they’re trying to achieve different things with their transition to zero emission vehicles. The one common area is charger reliability.
“Fundamentally, the thing to acknowledge is that the industries are very different and they’re trying to do different things,” explains Bowler. “The companies that you work with; the goals that they need to meet; and the way that they run their businesses are all very different. So there’s a degree of specialisation in the way that you approach those projects.”
“Fundamentally for us that comes down to some high power charging requirements, although you can get away with a lot of AC charging trucks, whereas buses are mostly DC.”
“But the critical thing about both of them is that charger reliability is completely key to our customer’s business. So if we provide a charging system that we can’t support; which doesn’t work; then vehicles don’t get charged. And the customers, the bus operator or a truck operator, can’t make money.”
