Following the recent announcement that Fleete has started construction at the Port of Tilbury of a new 16 bay charging hub, Freight Carbon Zero caught up with Fleete’s CEO Chris Morrison to hear more about the project.
Fleete was established in 2022 by Macquarie Asset Management’s green investments team as its road transport decarbonisation arm. The investment company has a long history of backing renewable energy projects including solar and wind.
Morrison says: “The goal of the business is to help fleets transition towards electrification and in doing so, reduce some of the complexity, simplify the business model and make it cost effective. Our primary purpose is to invest Macquarie’s money into building out charging energy infrastructure and Macquarie seeks to get a return on that over a long period of time, typically 20 to 25 years.”
Fleete is taking a two-pronged approach to building charging infrastructure. “One is to support companies who want to electrify their depots and for reasons of complexity, cost, or various other reasons are looking for someone else to finance that. We will design, build and operate the depot charging infrastructure within any company’s depot,” Morrison explains.
Secondly, the company is working on point of origin and destination public charging hubs that are located close to several potential customers, a port or logistics hub. Morrison says: “Typically the sites are between 3MW and 9MW with 10 to 15 charging bays. We’ll be open 24/7/365 to allow truck operators to use those sites. Our competition for those hubs is not companies like Gridserve, Shell or BP, it’s competing against people building charging at their own depots.
“We think, in the long run, it’s not actually sensible for people to electrify their depots. In most cases, it will be much the same as diesel now, you’ll have locations where people choose to charge their vehicles. We typically try to be within five minutes drive of the depots and that’s easy because we’re focused on destination and origin locations for our customers and that’s where Tilbury is a great example of trying to do that.”
Port of Tilbury charging hub
Due to be live in January 2026, Fleete has exclusive rights for charging infrastructure at the port. Morrison explains: “The Port of Tilbury has a significant amount of solar and wind renewable energy and has 5MW of spare capacity to provide for electric vehicle charging. From their perspective, they didn’t know how to efficiently allocate that to individual users at the port, all of whom have different needs and schedules of when to electrify their fleets. The best way to do it was to have us build the hub right at the entrance of the port providing 16 bays that allows fair allocation of the resource.”
Morrison also notes that the Lower Thames Crossing planned for 2032 is not far away and the project has a significant focus on decarbonisation. He adds: “They’re going to need a lot of electric plant, cement mixers and trucks going in and out of that construction site, which will need charging as well. So, there’s a number of reasons why that location is strategically important and a great flagship site for us.”
When the charging hub opens, it will be capable of charging at up to 360kW, with the ability to increase that to 500kW. “We’ve designed in the ability to provide megawatt charging with a relatively small upgrade,” Morrison says. “We definitely think that will be happening in the next three to five years.”
Since there are welfare facilities right next to the new hub, Fleete won’t be installing these itself at the Port of Tilbury, but for future projects it plans to include male and female toilets and vending machines for drivers to use.
Fleete sees one of its key differentiators being its payment structure which asks fleets to pay a subscription fee and commit to a number of megawatt hours of charging they expect to use annually. “If you go over that, you just pay for the additional megawatt hours. If you go under that, you still have to pay for the amount that you’ve committed to,” Morrison explains.
This structure allows Fleete to anticipate the power that will be used throughout the year so it can offer more competitive rates for the fleets that commit to using the most energy. Morrison says: “If you’re buying the most amount of power, the pricing we’ve got is around £0.36/kWh which we believe is the lowest in the market.” At this price, Fleete has modelled total cost of ownership parity with diesel trucks.
Other pricing tiers include fees of around £0.40/kWh for lower usage commitment, and above £0.50/kWh for infrequent use.
More to come
The Port of Tilbury is planned to be Fleete’s first operational site. The company is hoping to get financial approval and begin construction at another six to eight locations over the next 12 months. “We’ve got a number of sites in the South East, the Midlands and the North West,” Morrison says. “Our current pipeline focus is the UK, then next year we’re looking to start building in Europe.”
While Morrison is confident in grid capacity, the challenge is identifying where this capacity is. “It would be better if there was a lot more transparency from the network operator saying: ‘We have 5MW at this site.’ Then we would go and identify the land next to the substation.”
Currently, the company first has to identify the land for a potential charging hub then find out from the network operator where the grid connection is. “The model we’ve got with the hubs is we’re saying we can move our hub to the grid rather than move the grid to the hub. It’s a lot cheaper to do that and have a truck drive an extra five minutes than lay a 5km cable,” Morrison says.
How will fleets book charging?
While the practical implementation of booking systems can only be fully explored once the first charging hub is live, Fleete is planning how to facilitate booking. “In addition to building the charging infrastructure, Fleete has its own software as a service operating system. That enables our customers to look at the sites they’ve signed up to with us.
“They can also add in their own chargers, so they can look at all of their charging of their vehicles on one platform. That system also has booking capabilities and billing integration so we can provide direct billing,” Morrison says.
Rather than booking for an hour slot, for example, he foresees longer booking periods to account for traffic and dwell time on site. The first year of operation is expected to be a huge learning opportunity to work out the most efficient processes and establish how to effectively scale the use of the site as more eHGVs hit the road.
Looking ahead at the next 12 months, Morrison concludes: “We’ve got a pretty aggressive plan in order to build out the sites. So, I’m most excited about being able to build out more of a network across the UK, and excited about being able to provide that network to our customers and increase our customer base. We’ve already got a lot of customers that are excited about the price point we’re offering and the locations we’re proposing, and I’m just very keen to get those sites in the ground, up and running and serving our customers.”
