How to Prepare the Grid for Electric Medium- and Heavy-Duty Trucks: Lessons from Los Angeles
New analysis of truck data in Los Angeles, California shows how fleets, utilities, local government, and charging as a service providers can prepare the grid for increased power demand from electric trucks.RMI January 16, 2025 Nocona Sanders, Gerard Westhoff, Ari Kahn
Los Angeles (LA) is a hub of freight activity — more than $512 billion in cargo moves through its ports and main airport (LAX) every year. From heavy-duty (HD) trucks beginning long-haul trips to box trucks delivering goods across the city, a wide variety of vehicles contribute to local freight movement. And all of that freight movement contributes to LA having the worst ozone pollution in the nation. Electrifying trucks will help the city reduce overall ozone levels as well as some of the particulate matter (PM) along the interstate 405 and 110 corridors. The air pollution along these highways contributes to the disproportionate amounts of asthma and heart disease in many of the nearby low-to-moderate income neighborhoods. One barrier to medium- and heavy-duty (MDHD) truck electrification is LA’s charging infrastructure: the city’s growing number of electric MDHD trucks will need many more chargers. By 2030, these trucks will need as much as 22 megawatts (MW) in some local areas. New analysis from RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership shows stakeholders how to meet that demand.

Fleets, utilities, local government, and charging as a service (CaaS) providers all know that preparing the grid for increased power demand will require grid upgrades and the installation of new chargers, which will take years to deploy. As fleets wait for these updates, they can take advantage of a complementary solution: managed charging, a proactive, controlled charging strategy that benefits the customer and electric grid. By revisiting their charging practices, trucking fleets can reduce pressure on today and tomorrow’s grid, meet their current and future charging needs, and save money.

Implementing these solutions — upgrading the grid, installing new chargers, and improving current charging operations — will require intense collaboration between stakeholders and robust data and analysis. Specifically, they’ll need to know where and when MDHD trucks currently operate, where future power demand will be, and how this demand will impact the grid. With this information they can make decisions that will meet the power needs of electric trucks as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. A new analysis from RMI and the Mission Possible Partnership (MPP) provides these critical insights. Using Geotab Altitude truck travel data in LA, the analysis can help stakeholders identify areas where new chargers and CaaS solutions will have the greatest impact. It also shows how fleets can use managed charging, a demand flexibility strategy that minimizes charging load during peak demand times, to reduce pressure on the grid while also saving money. Below, we outline our findings and their implications for truck electrification stakeholders.

Where and when will electric truck power demand be greatest?.......Areas with the largest power demand include LA’s ports and its downtown, as well as the city of San Fernando. While many vehicle types are active in these areas, there is a notable concentration of HD truck activity at the Ports of LA and Long Beach, with medium-duty (MD) trucks having more activity downtown.
Both MD and HD trucks have similar usage patterns. Both vehicle types tend to return to their depots around 4 p.m., contributing to the highest unmanaged load peaks at that time. However, their schedules diverge later in the day. HD trucks are more likely to return to their depots late at night and into the early morning, while MD trucks have shorter operational windows for their duty cycles. Additionally, HD trucks consume more power overall and tend to drive more miles per day (roughly 115 miles for urban HD trucks compared to 75 miles for urban MD trucks).

Where should stakeholders prioritize charging deployment?.......Areas with high projected power demand are the same as those where truck logistics facilities exist today, making these locations valuable not only for grid operators anticipating new electric loads but also for stakeholders identifying sites for CaaS facilities. These sites provide fast or multi-hour charging options for fleets that need a quick boost or a reliable daily charging solution. While CaaS may cost a fleet more than owning and operating its own charging infrastructure, it offers valuable benefits for fleets that are unable to charge at their home base. This includes fleets with short facility leases that may not want to invest in charging equipment that is hard to move to a new site, as well as fleets that may not have enough depot space to install new chargers. Strategically placing CaaS facilities in areas with both grid capacity and high trucking demand maximizes the value of those facilities and ensures electric trucks remain feasible. Our analysis shown in the map of LA above can help utilities, local governments, and CaaS providers work together to create effective, well-located charging hubs. Identifying demand is a crucial step but so is working with local communities to ensure that a CaaS site is a good neighbor.

Maximizing today’s grid: Why fleets should transition to managed charging.......Managed charging is a powerful way for fleets to power their electric trucks......read on    

https://rmi.org/how-to-prepare-the-grid-for-electric-medium-and-heavy-duty-trucks-lessons-from-los-angeles/

Unlocking Nature-Based Solutions. Tackling heat and water stress in Indian cities. RMI August 28, 2025 Shreya Nath, Namitha Nayak, Mrinal Shrivastava, Akhil Singhal Additional Contributors: Kaylea Brase Menon, Tarun Garg, Anam Husain Prabal Muttoo, Radhika Sundaresan Context...... Indian cities are experiencing heightened stress from extreme summer heat and increased flooding during monsoons. Rapid and often unplanned urban expansion has transformed natural landscapes into dense built-up areas, intensifying the urban heat island effect, water scarcity, and flood risks. Addressing these converging climate and development pressures requires a systems-level, locally grounded approach. Nature-based solutions (NbS) — including integrated blue-green-gray infrastructure (BGGI) — offer a strategic alternative to conventional gray urban development. While their benefits are increasingly acknowledged, the pathways for mainstreaming NbS in Indian cities remain unclear, fragmented, and uncoordinated. To address this, WELL Labs and RMI convened a multi-stakeholder workshop that brought together practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and private-sector actors working across water, biodiversity, planning, design, and governance domains. The goal was to identify barriers to NbS adoption and co-develop actionable, context-sensitive solutions across the building, neighborhood, and city scales.

Objectives of the Workshop....
Understanding the barriers: Identify barriers hindering the adoption of blue-green-gray infrastructure in urban spaces.
Policy, governance, and finance and incentives barriers: Challenges to integrating solutions into urban development plans, climate action plans, heat action plans, etc.
Challenges from the design and implementation perspective
Challenges that hinder community acceptance as well as effective operations and maintenance
Mapping solutions and levers: Determine key levers to unlock blue-green-gray infrastructure at the building, neighborhood, and city scales and move toward implementing the solutions from a multi-stakeholder perspective.
Identifying resources to execute solutions: Explore innovative models for promoting collective action for implementation and the operation and maintenance of blue-green-gray infrastructure and passive cooling solutions.

Analysis and Synthesis.....This document presents a detailed overview of those deliberations. The core output is a structured table that maps..........

On-ground problems and lived implementation challenges
The underlying systemic barriers impeding uptake
Practical and policy-relevant actions designed to address those barriers
Descriptions of the interventions needed to operationalize those actions
Key Insights from the Workshop
Many challenges such as poor uptake, weak maintenance, or low community support are symptoms of deeper misalignments between governance, financing, and implementation systems.
Localized approaches are essential, given that effectiveness of NbS depends heavily on urban morphology, climate zones, hydrology, and socio-spatial density.
Critical enablers include data accessibility, performance-linked financing, ecosystem valuation, updated codes and bylaws, and life-cycle accountability......read on- extensive indepth coverage on this issue      https://rmi.org/unlocking-nature-based-solutions/

To drive the scale-up of EV infrastructure, DISCOMs should consider the following priority actions:

• Conducting long-term EV load planning to upgrade grid infrastructure strategically
• Streamlining processes to reduce barriers to entry for CPOs
• Providing infrastructure and pilots to support future load mitigation
• Assessing innovative business models to become CPOs

Despite challenges around grid upgrades, load forecasting, and viability, international examples showcase that DISCOM leadership can catalyze the market and accelerate the deployment of necessary infrastructure. With focused action and stronger coordination, DISCOMs can help build a robust, scalable, and inclusive EV infrastructure ecosystem.   READ THE REPORT   https://rmi.org/insight/plugging-in-advancing-ev-infrastructure-in-india/   or    Your download should start automatically. Please click here to manually start the download. If you'd like to stay informed with the latest RMI news and insights, sign up for our weekly e-newsletter here.