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CALSTART CEO Michael Berube on what to watch for in the heavy-duty electric truck space

Up until a year or two ago, it looked like battery trucks would be the preferred option for short-haul trucking and hydrogen was shaping up as a better choice for long-range driving. Is that still the case?

Having worked directly in both areas – I had a front row seat to that – hydrogen has a lot of reasons why it wants to be that choice, especially for longer haul. Its energy density and more familiarity to current fueling, even on bus fleets. However, we have to get the cost of hydrogen delivered down. And I believe for hydrogen to work well, the core of it comes to you can’t be moving the hydrogen long distances. Moving hydrogen is really, really expensive. So if you can make the hydrogen close to where you utilize it, utilizing a little bit more of a hub and spoke centralized fleet approach, that’s where you can have a winner. We’re still not quite there on the durability that we need, but we’re getting better. And we are not there on low-cost delivered hydrogen.

Hydrogen has a role to play. Hydrogen will be part of our clean energy economy. There’s no question. The timing though … we’re not quite there yet.

In the shorter term, battery electric is here and can work right now. That doesn’t mean it will be the volume long-term solution, but it is going to be a solution and it can work well today in a lot of applications.

It’s still not clear exactly which one is the ultimate winner, but what we can say is that electrification does work now and we see paths there. I will also say that battery costs are continuing to drop a lot. It may be that hydrogen is the theoretically better solution, but battery just becomes a more practical, scalable one. Sometimes it’s not the best technical solution that wins out.