Electric Island: See First Charging Site Designed For Big Trucks

It's located on Swan Island in Portland, near Daimler Trucks North America headquarters.

The Electric Island heavy-duty electric truck charging site

Mark Kane

By: Mark Kane

Apr 22, 2021 at 8:55am ET

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Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) and Portland General Electric (PGE) officially opened to the public the “Electric Island” - the first-of-its-kind heavy-duty electric truck charging site, announced in December.

The station is located across the street from DTNA headquarters (on Swan Island in Portland,) less than one mile from I-5 and it will be open to public for all levels of EV charging.

There are eight high-power chargers in total (up to 350 kW, we guess), supplied by various manufacturers. The majority of chargers are available for public use.

The Electric Island heavy-duty electric truck charging site

The key point of this station is to offer a proper charging solution for big electric vehicles and help accelerate the development, testing and deployment of electric commercial vehicles like semi-trucks or buses.

"The site is built to immediately provide charging for EVs of all shapes and sizes, and will serve as an innovation center, allowing both PGE and DTNA to study energy management, charger use and performance, and, in the case of DTNA, its own vehicles’ charging performance."

The Electric Island is also future-proof - ready for installation of "planned 1+ megawatt chargers, when they are released."

Those 1 MW or higher charging power will be a game-changing solution for electric trucks because they will significantly lower the charging time of big battery packs (500-1,000 kWh or more).

The next step will be also the installation of an energy storage system to keep the peak power demand under control.

Gallery: The "Electric Island" project

The Electric Island heavy-duty electric truck charging site

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Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA) has recently opened the order books for its first two electric truck models, the Freightliner eCascadia and Freightliner eM2.

The company is also engaged in other types of electric vehicles, including transit buses (with Proterra) and school buses (Thomas Built Buses subsidiary).