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Catalyst with Shayle Kann
The Green Blueprint: Terrawatt Infrastructure’s billion-dollar strategy
00:35:45
Neha Palmer lays out Terrawatt Infrastructure’s strategy to build a national charging network.
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Hi everyone, it's Daniel Waldorf. I'm the producer for Catalyst. There are new headwinds in electric trucking right now. This month the Trump administration sued the state of California over its efforts to electrify heavy duty transport. That is on top of the administration's cuts to funding for charging infrastructure, plus the tariffs that slow down the trucking businesses that depend on the ports. So we're bringing you a deep dive into electrified trucking. It's an episode of the Green Blueprint on another Latitude show that goes behind the scenes with climate tech companies exploring the stories of building first of a kind projects. This one is about Terawatt infrastructure, which builds heavy duty charging infrastructure. Host Laura Pierpoint brings CEO Neha Palmer onto the show to talk about how Terawatt secured a $1 billion investment and built a charging depot near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This was at a time when Nikola Motors bankruptcy really brought a lot of skepticism to the heavy duty electrification space. We'll be back next week with a new Catalyst episode, but for now, here's Lara and Neha.
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Latitude Media podcast at the frontier of climate technology.
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The trucking industry has an emissions problem. Heavy duty trucks make up less than 5% of vehicles on the road, but they generate nearly 25% of transportation emissions. Electrifying these massive vehicles seems like a no brainer, but some skeptics say it's just not possible. Neha Palmer, however, is not one of those skeptics.
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This is a transition that is happening.
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When Neha Palmer co founded terrawatt infrastructure in 2021, she wasn't just building a charging company. She was creating an entirely new category of infrastructure. While passenger EVs had a decade long head start, heavy duty electric trucks were were still in their infancy. But she saw their path to electrification as inevitable.
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The analogy I love to use is transition that happens once every century. So you had the railroads and that required a significant amount of investment very quickly. Then you had the national highway network and now you have an overlay on both of those really, which is the electrification of those modes of transport.
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The complexity of the challenge is staggering. A single site for heavy duty truck charging requires finding the perfect location, securing megawatts of power, navigating the permitting processes that have never seen this type of infrastructure before, and then convincing fleet operators to take a chance on a technology that's still evolving. And the road has been bumpy. Well, this is a trouble sign for the electric vehicle industry as Nikola Motors, headquartered in Coolidge, filed for bankruptcy this morning. Earlier this year, Nikola Motors, once a promising pioneer in zero emission trucks, filed for bankruptcy after a spectacular rise and fall. Critics pointed to it as proof that electrifying heavy duty transport was simply too difficult.
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You know, I certainly hope it's a blip. You know, we need as much investment into the technology of the vehicle itself as we do in the charging to make all of this a reality.
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But in April, terrawatt proved the doubters wrong when it opened its first commercial heavy duty charging depot near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The ports are technically separate, but operate as one big complex. They are the biggest container ports in the US and it wasn't just a charging station. It was the first node in what will become a network of sites across all of Southern California.
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In California, we have built what I think is the best network of sites and, and three of them will be live this year with the Port of La Long beach site being the first one. We'll have a third one that's further north near the intermodals. And so with those three sites, we kind of have amazing coverage of the entire LA basin.
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I'm Laura Pierpoint and this is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We've already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy. But many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don't have decades to get them commercialized. We have years. This week we're talking about the monumental challenge of electrifying heavy duty trucking with Neha Palmer, co founder and CEO of terrawatt Infrastructure.
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We know that this is a trillion dollar investment over years. And so the scale that we're talking about and the impact that we need to make even with a few sites is going to require lots of capital.
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For an upcoming solar or storage project. ANSA is your best source of intel to stay on top of current policy, tariff, domestic content and supply chain issues. ANSA's team of experts is available to help you adjust procurement strategies, secure safe harbor products and find existing inventory in the US as policy continues to evolve. Learn more about ANSA's subscription and service options to help you navigate an uncertain market@go.anzerenewables.com Latitude Terrawatt's approach is ambitious. Shortly after launching in 2021, the company secured a huge chunk of capital from investors. Very amazingly you secured a billion dollars in funding led by Vision Ridge just after you launched. Really this was about a year after you launched as a company. So can you tell us a bit about what convinced investors at that stage to make such a big comm to your vision?
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When you think about our sites that we're starting to build out, the billion dollars is not going to last that long to build that many assets. And so it was really the vision from the beginning that this is not just a small scale effort, it's going to be something that requires significant capital and there'll have to be multiple billion dollar raises frankly to get this even off the ground.
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Terawatt doesn't just install chargers, it's it acquires the real estate, works with utilities to secure power, installs chargers and associated infrastructure, and ultimately handles ongoing operations and maintenance.
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Really our business model is investing into these sites and taking that capex burden away from our customers, allowing them to engage on a more OPEX basis and also taking away the pain of working with utilities when they're used to buying fuel of you know, the time that it takes to put the construction together, all of the investment and really making that a seamless process for them as they change to electric vehicles over time.
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Terawatt began piloting its business model in 2022. Then in October 2024 it opened its first full scale commercial site near LAX. This site is for passenger vehicles and in this case that mostly includes rideshare companies. It's not suited for big semi trucks.
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On the rideshare side in dense urban markets where there's a lot of traffic. We're hearing from operators. It's cost accretive for them to run EVs instead of traditional vehicles because of the fuel savings.
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The Market momentum is slower for medium and heavy duty charging. In part, that's because of what we mentioned at the top. The electric semi truck industry has struggled to take off, and it's tough to make the case for building chargers when there aren't trucks to charge. But NEA is optimistic that that market is going to tip with more big trucks being electrified.
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We've had almost close to 20 years of learning on the passenger side. On the electric truck side, it's certainly earlier days. And so you see a lot of the same things you saw on the passenger side. You're seeing improvements in battery pack cost and performance of the vehicles themselves. And as that starts to mature, you're starting to see more and more demand.
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The heavy duty charging facility near the ports of LA and Long beach that Terrawatt opened this year is called Ranchero Dominguez. It features pull through stalls that can accommodate full tractor trailers, which is a unique feature. And up to 125 trucks can charge there in one day. It marks the beginning of what Terrawatt envisions as a network of charging stations all along the i10 corridor, all the way from California to Texas.
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We call it kind of a corridor, but it would start in the Port of Long beach and go all the way to El Paso, Texas. And so allowing somebody in an EV truck to travel that confidently, knowing that they had charging along the way that would accommodate the range of the vehicle.
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I talked with Neha about Tarawatt's audacious plans for heavy duty electric vehicles and her outlook for the industry. I started by asking her about the passenger vehicle side of the business because the LAX project was Terawatt's first full build charging site and a major proof point for the company. So you started off near lax. Can you talk a little bit first of all about why you chose that particular site?
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Yeah. So, you know, Rideshare autonomous vehicles has always been a focus for us from the beginning. And a huge number of rideshare rides are initiated from airports. It's also a location that's near a major stadium and a lot of other good venues that would require rideshare to be part of that ecosystem. So the location just made sense from density of demand. It also was a site that was for sale. Oftentimes we might be excited about a specific geography or geo fenced area, but there may not be any flat lots or open lots or undeveloped lots to go and work with. So this was something that allowed us to to engage in this area and it was the right size for the application we were trying to put in, which was what ended up being about 30 chargers focused on passenger vehicles with enough space for driver's lounge and all the space for all of the electrical equipment chargers, everything else that we needed. So the last piece that is always so important, and I'm making it sound like an afterthought, but it really is the most critical thing, and the thing that we almost always think about first once we identify a location, is it had power. So it had 5 megawatts of power that was available from day one. We just had to start construction on our site, and the utility had to do a little bit of construction on their end. But we knew that we could get that power from day one to allow us to serve that many chargers all at one time. So really had that confluence, I call it the Venn diagram, of the things we need, which are customer demand, available real estate. It didn't have the right zoning at the time, but we worked on that. And then the last piece and the most important piece being the power available at the site as well.
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Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about the development for the sites. Can you walk us through some of the things that you had to do around permitting, site preparation, all that sort of stuff? What did it look like to get ready to build it?
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Yeah, and so this is something that's always fun when you're starting a new industry. I came from data centers, and we had this whole pattern of recognition for data centers, too. When it was early days, we'd go into new jurisdictions, and people would say, I don't even know what that is. So certainly everyone knows what that is in the world now. But for EV charging, there's oftentimes not any code available in the planning code for how do you permit. How do you entitle a EV charging hub? So we worked very closely with the city of Englewood, who is a fantastic host for us here in this site, to understand what their existing code was and how we might fit into it. And had to go through a whole process with the city council, the planning council, to have them understand what the project was, what kind of benefits it would bring to the community. And then they had to actually put new language in their code to allow the entitlement of this. And so that's something that we find in many new hjs, or authorities having jurisdiction that we enter. They may have never seen this before. So we have the benefit of having done it now. We could hold up this template, but this was the first time. And so we did have to work through that process with the city again. They were super, super collaborative. And so we were able to do that. But that did take time. So it wasn't like day one, we have closed on this real estate site. We know exactly where to go to file for the permit, et cetera. There was a little bit of legwork to do ahead of that in the entitlements to get the right zoning for the site. And then there was a whole permitting process and kind of a little bit same thing again, there have not been many of these installations at this scale built anywhere. And so it takes some time to work with the city engineers to get them to understand, here's what this looks like, here is our electrical design. This is what a typical site looks like. And so we ran that process with the city again. Again, very collaborative. But anytime you have to do a little bit of educating and collaborating, it does take more time.
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Sure. Okay, well, and then let's talk for a second about your hardware supply. So there are a lot of different charging companies that supply hardware for pass passenger vehicle charging. So how did you think about that? How did you select your hardware provider? And is it kind of a single provider that you always work with, or how do you think about your supply chain here?
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Yeah, so it's interesting you say supply chain because there's so many components, not just the chargers for this site. For the chargers, we wanted to make sure that we had a partner that was going to be working with us to maintain that high uptime. And so we worked with that partner really closely to make sure that, you know, any kind of visibility software we were building was going to be very compatible with their chargers. That's a level of integration that's generally not there. Generally there's probably call it 4 to 8 would be a large, large installation of chargers in one location. This is a much larger deployment than I think most charger companies are used to doing in one location. So the concept was a little bit different for them as well, I believe. And so working really closely with them to make sure that our software worked with their hardware, that we were able to do what we needed to do to have the remote network operating center have the visibility they needed. So there was a lot of work upfront to make sure. And again, we're also deploying our software for the first time. So a lot of work to make sure that there was a level of collaboration. So when we look for hardware providers, obviously the hardware has to work, it has to be high quality. But the real table stakes for US is collaboration, and so ensuring that they were willing and able to do that level of collaboration. Another piece is spare parts. It seems really simple that if you create chargers, you would have a full spare parts program, but that's not the case for all charger providers. So making sure that they had a robust program here in the U.S. oftentimes you have chargers coming from other geographies. And so they might be deeper there, but not here in the US So deep spare parts program. And then also just techs that are available and understand that technology. Again, it's a very global supply base. And so you might have depth in Europe, but you may not have very many techs that know that equipment here in the US So really thinking through that whole aspect of how do we make sure that we're going to have the highest uptime we possibly can?
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And so kind of one last question about this. Well, a couple questions actually about this commercial site. So one of the things that comes up pretty frequently on the show is the question around, do I use an engineering, procurement and construction firm to build something or do I do it myself? And some really interesting impacts flow from those decisions, particularly when you're building things that are effectively first of a kind. So can you talk a little bit about how you were thinking about managing the construction on this first site and what you ultimately decided?
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So for this first site, we did work with an EPC firm, and I think we learned a lot about working with an EPC firm. One thing that we learned is, you know, the civil aspect of our sites is very heavy. If you look at a site, it actually, I think sometimes people look and they're like, oh, that's interesting. It's like, you know, 30 chargers. They're nice and pretty standing on the ground, but you don't see what's happening below ground, which is massive duct banks. We oftentimes put in extra capacity. So when the charger power might go up, we would have the capability to actually make that changeover pretty quickly. So future proofing underground. And so there's a lot of stuff happening below the grade. And I think that's one thing that we learned. And that epc, if you think about it, the civil trade, and I'm actually a civil engineer, is very local. So having that local expertise is very, very critical for the types of things we build. Because the type of soil that you're dealing with, the codes that are related to how much rainfall ends up in an area, et cetera, is oftentimes really contingent upon local expertise to understand those characteristics and how the local planning commissions and engineering leaders in those planning commissions will think about our construction. So something that we had to kind of learn the first time and so how we contract in the future would be really taking that lesson in hand.
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With the first commercial site built, Neja and the Terrawatt team turned their attention to their flagship heavy duty project, Rancho Domingos at the Port of Long beach, which had actually already been underway for years. More about that after the break.
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So it's interesting. Our vision for the company really from the very beginning was focused on being able to electrify the heavy freight industry. And so the gleam in our eye was this segment. You know, we started engaging the search for sites right when we started this business, you know, in early 21. Heavy Duty fleets tend to focus on locations that are near ports, in warehouse hubs, near intermodals. And so the port of La Long beach was a location where there already is an intense push for electrification. There's a green lane at the port. So if you are in a zero emission vehicle, you actually can get into the port faster with less wait time. Time is money for these guys and so there's some significant upside for them to be able to do that. In Southern California you also have something called the ware rules where non zero emission vehicles going in and out of warehouse hubs can start to incur fines for those warehouses. And so there is a push in the area for electrification with the port kind of being ground zero, the nexus of a lot of those efforts. And so finding a site near the port was kind of our first order of business when we started the, you know, started the company. And so it took us a while to find an ideal site. And when we did, it was pretty expensive. It was probably going to be the biggest single real estate investment we had in the portfolio at the time. As a result, we had to look really carefully at this investment and make sure it was the right location. Again, close to the port, but not in the port or on top of the port. So really understanding the characteristics of the flow of traffic from the port to different locations that those vehicles go to, understanding the density of the flow of traffic. Because, you know, the port of La Long beach is the biggest container port here in the US Freight goes in every single direction from that port. Are we on the right trajectory coming out of that site? So we did a lot of interesting things. Everything from, you know, looking at anything that was available publicly from the Department of Transportation on freight flows, all the way to having someone just stand on the corner one day and count how many trucks went by in a specific two hour period. So we really put a lot of thought and energy into deciding on this as a location for that really important first heavy duty site.
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I love that story so much because I feel like so often we tell the stories of guts and glory for startups. And then it's really important to remember that some of what makes startups successful is exactly that. As an employee with a lawn chair, sitting on the side of the freeway, casual counting trucks at various points to influence how this decision went and can you say a little bit about how that felt to kind of finally make a decision on this site? Because this was a pretty huge moment for the company to ultimately make this down selection and put as you put it, like a fair amount of money on the line to make this site acquisition happen.
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I mean, the location has to be there and that's why I talked about the Venn diagram. So we got comfortable with the location. This site also had something really incredible where you don't find this in many locations, which is 7 megawatts of power available from day one. So that amount of power allowed us to do a lot of great things with this site. It was a corner lot, it had the right dimensions, it had a lot of space. So the site characteristics were great as well. We had started to build these other sites and so we kind of had an idea of what that process is for entitlements. So kind of everything started to tick all the boxes and that got us comfortable with it. But ultimately we got super excited, actually not just comfortable, excited about this location based on everything I just said. And we're excited to get this into our portfolio and under construction, so.
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And then you're starting to design the site. So let's talk a little bit about this. One of the things that you had mentioned earlier was that you offer the opportunity for folks to pull in not just with these bobtail sort of front end of the trucks, but really a fully loaded truck that actually has a trailer behind it. So were you already sure at that point that you wanted to offer that kind of charging capability or were you really thinking about what would the site layout look like? What were some of the trade offs around these different options for charging?
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So again, there's very few sites that have this scale of power and size that would allow that many chargers in one location and that many trucks to charge in one location. So we're kind of, I won't say making it up, but we were doing a lot of kind of product assessment and design to understand what would customers need. And if you look at a lot of the sites that are out there today and even sites that, that customers have behind their fence when they have the charging, it's usually just for a bobtail stall. So this was a little bit of a tug of war between the finance team and the product team. The product team came from places that had worked with semi trucks before and so they really were pushing for those pull through stalls, saying, hey, if you look at the traffic flow patterns, they're going into the port or out of the port with the trailer attached to their tractor. It's gonna be a really big lift for them to have to find a place to put the trailer, detach it, come in and charge, or just be in a position where they don't have the trailer for whatever reason, they're between loads to come back to the site, charge, and then go back and get their trailer. Just a lot of work. And so wouldn't be really a great customer experience if they had to do that. The tussle with the finance team was, well, if you have more chargers, you can potentially make more revenue from a site. Right. And have more utilization. So we landed kind of on a compromise, but we wanted to optimize the site for the pull through. So we got as many pull throughs on the site as possible. And then when we had more power and space left, we added in some bobtail charging that will also allow, you know, smaller box trucks or even light duty vehicles that need a huge amount of power, a high power charge to charge there. And when we had, you know, the kickoff event, we had a bunch of customers in the site and they were all just marveling and really kind of gleeful about the fact that we had that many pull through stalls.
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That's awesome. I can't wait to ask you a year from now how the utilization goes on both sides of those. I'm sure you all are dying to know that too. Very cool. Let's talk about those customers for a sec, because they're obviously very key to the equation here. So can you say a bit about what your customer interactions were like, particularly for this project? When did you start engaging them to understand what they might want and what sort of contracts they might be willing to sign up for and when and how did those negotiations go?
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Yeah, so we started engaging customers the minute we had the site. It is really hard to have a conversation with a customer if they can't and imagine the location. So generally speaking, we don't start conversations until we have the specific site in mind and even a layout. That said, what's interesting is it takes us call it 18 months to 24 months to find a site, get it entitled, permitted, constructed, and then an operational. Most vehicles make vehicle purchasing decisions at the most a year in advance, sometimes six months in advance. So they may decide that they want to buy a few EVs and you know, have those six months later. Charging doesn't come that quick. So for this first one, it was a little bit of lining up those timelines. And so one thing that we did see is we got closer and closer to project completion. A lot more engagement from these fleets because they could actually come to the site and see, oh, you've got this thing paved and this is what the flow looks like. And it's really going to come to fruition. I think there is in any industry that's new and nascent, a lot of discussion of we could build this or we could build that, but by having actually done it and it's in site and operational, we actually saw even the week before we launched, we were doing site tours with lots of customers. And that turnaround from site tour to contract was starting to happen a lot faster because of course it's ready to go from day one. But also just being able to see it is everything. Very cool.
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So can you say a bit more in detail, when was the first customer contract signed? What had you done or completed at the site that got the first person in the door to say yes and actually sign on the dotted line?
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It honestly was about two years ago. So it was a customer that has pretty good experience with electric vehicles. They're one of the first movers in the industry. They have a larger fleet of EVs than most fleets do. I think they have well over 50 right now. And so they had some good experience and they were at a point where they were starting to outgrow their on site charging and they're also located close to us. So again, it was a good validation of that location selection. But the conversation really was like, hey, we've never done this off site. We don't know how it's going to work. We'll take a chance with you guys. There was some pre existing relationships there that maybe help grease the skids, but they really were taking a chance that we were going to do what we said, build the site, deliver it and that it would fit into their operations. And so now that it's live, I'm super excited to see how it fits in. I think it's going to be a lot more utility than they probably thought. This does open up a lot of different use cases like top off charges, the amount of power we have per charger, allows it to charge a vehicle to charge much faster than most behind the fence chargers. And so having that capability can sometimes allow for a double shift of a vehicle where if it was a slower charge they could use it for one run, has to come back to the yard, spend six to 12 hours charging and then can go out again. But if you can top off, you might be able to get two runs in a day and all of a sudden that utilization of that vehicle is doubled. So, you know, I think those are the types of conversations we were having, the hopes that they had, that we had. And now we'll see how this actually plays out.
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So my next question is how as you're building this site at the port, you're obviously, I'm sure in the process of thinking about your next site and the one after that and the one after that, and a whole fleet of sites to come, particularly on the i10 corridor in California, but maybe elsewhere too. So tell us about what comes next. What is the next site that's going to come online? How are you thinking about your future? Build out? How many sites are you working on all at once?
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Yeah, so for this, this definitely is the first of a couple of projects. We have our next site that will come online in the summertime that will be in the Inland Empire, which is after a vehicle goes to the port, it generally goes to the Inland Empire, which is the giant warehouse district for the port here in California. And so we'll have a second site there in a few months. And it really is thinking about this as a network. Right. These are moving assets. I mentioned that top off charge that could be really beneficial to higher utilization of these pretty expensive vehicles for now. And so really excited that that will allow a lot more operational flexibility for EV fleets to move freight around the area. And so we call it a lane in the freight industry. So the lane between the port and the Inland Empire is a very important lane. And having charging on both ends just allows a lot more confidence. Electrification, having the capability to maybe have a contract that allows access to both sides, which we're seeing the demand for now is also really freeing and exciting for customers. If they had to do that on their own, they would have to figure out a location that they had to find Nexus to near the port and one near the Inland Empire. And oftentimes these are drayage companies where their main operations may be near the port, but they are just delivering to their customers in the Inland Empire and so don't really have access to sites there. So super exciting that this will be the first node in the network. You mentioned the i10 project and that's also super exciting. And this is also the first node in that. What's interesting is, you know, we know that the site's going to corridor will take a little bit of time to build. And already as I mentioned at the top of our discussion, that technology is starting to change so those sites are generally about 150 miles apart. We know that the range is generally much, much longer than that. Another thing that's happening is we're starting to see standardization of the charging infrastructure. Seems really simple, but the connector has to be the same from all the charging providers. And all of the trucks have to use the same connector. And so there's a global body called Charon that has been working on that protocol for quite a while now. It does seem like that they're finally at a place where that specification is built out enough that we have confidence of what to build along that corridor that can serve any kind of truck. Our customers are not generally going to have just one type of vehicle. They will have multiple models in their fleets. And so they want to know that if they have a contract with us or anybody else, or even if they're putting in infrastructure behind their fence, that they don't have to put in different infrastructure for different vehicles. That sounds crazy to a fleet, right? But we are starting to get that maturity in technology and the industry that's really making that project super exciting and viable.
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If I wired $100 million into Terrawatt's bank account tomorrow, what would you do with it?
- [33:24]
B
You know, I mentioned the location piece and I think that we're already doing this and so maybe it's not different. And we have raised quite a bit of capital so we have a little bit of freedom to do this. But you know, I would make sure that we're investing into the next generation locations where we know this will be needed. So sometimes there's places where there are just, just is no power. It will take four to plus years to get there. So if you're able to have that site and start to develop it quicker, you would have that when that demand comes to that market. But I think the thing that we are really thoughtful about right now, and I think that we're going to be able to do a lot of great work with, is how we use the energy that's available at a site. So there's a lot that we're learning again from seeing the utility of these sites. And these sites are designed for every vehicle to come in at the exact same time. It'd be the top of the charge curve pulling the full power of the charger at the same time. And that just doesn't happen. And so there are ways that we can actually. We have 7 megawatts in the street of power from the utility at our heavy duty site. But maybe Instead of serving 20 chargers, we can serve 25 chargers with that, or we can serve higher power at each charger with that. So I would invest it into making sure that we're being really thoughtful about that piece of it, because again, I mentioned that power is the first thing that we always look for once we find those two other things. And being able to be more efficient with that is great for us. We have more capability at a site, but it's also great for the utility. You know, we're in an era where they are under pressure to do all kinds of things and, you know, build really fast for lots of increasing electricity demand. And so removing some of that pressure for them allows us to work more collaboratively with them as well. So I would invest it into that. I don't think it takes $100 million, but sometimes money is speed. But I love that a piece of.
- [35:13]
C
Your answer is making your financial team happy by making sure that you're optimizing and increasing utilization. So that's awesome.
- [35:19]
B
I always have to keep them happy.
- [35:20]
C
Thank you so much. This has been such an awesome interview. It's really interesting to hear about all the things that you've done on your journey and the challenges you've overcome. So we wish you all the best. Neha Palmer is a co founder and the CEO of Terawatt Infrastructure. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Laura Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardik. Anne Bailey is our Senior editor. Sean Marquand is our Technical Director. Stephen Lacey is our Executive Editor. If you'd like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to the greenblueprintatitudemedia.com you can listen to the Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is the Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.