The costs and benefits of e-roads versus battery-only trucks when costs are uncertain

This paper compares the cost of diesel trucks, battery electric trucks, and trucks that rely on overhead lines in a decision context where the developments of battery costs and overhead line investment and maintenance costs are uncertain. The user costs contain the truck capital cost and the energy costs, the possible vehicle-to-grid benefits, driver costs, and other distance costs. User costs are compared for optimized battery sizes for trucks with different distance profiles. The possible user cost developments serve as input to an analysis of investment decisions in electric motorways (e-roads). The economics of e-roads are analyzed for two representations of the EU TEN-T network. In the first analysis, average EU truck density and truck trip characteristics are used. In the second representation, we consider domestic and international truck transport between two neighbouring countries with strongly diverging traffic density and the share of international truck trips on their TEN-T network. This allows for the analysis of the non-cooperative and cooperative solutions of the two countries. The installation of e-roads appears to be a robust investment decision for the motorways of large countries that have dense truck traffic but not for less dense counties. Cooperation between large and small countries may increase total benefits depending on future battery costs and overhead line investment and maintenance costs.