Long Beach-based electric vehicle charging station deployer WattEV Holdings Inc. has opened its first charging depot for heavy-duty trucks at the Port of Long Beach.
The depot, located next to the port’s Pier A terminal, is designed to serve heavy-duty electric trucks with routes connecting to inland destinations throughout Southern California. It is the first of four depots that the EV charging company is developing in the region.
The station, which cost roughly $9 million to develop, features 13 dual-cord 360 kilowatt chargers with the ability to charge 26 trucks concurrently with 5 megawatts of power provided by Southern California Edison, the utility subsidiary of Rosemead-based Edison International. The chargers are designed to provide an 80% charge within 90 minutes for most heavy-duty trucks.
The depot will also have the capacity to upgrade to the faster, higher-capacity “megawatt charging system” as the ability for trucks to handle that high-capacity charge becomes more widespread.
WattEV Holdings, which was founded in 2020 invested roughly $5.5 million toward the depot’s construction and electricity infrastructure connections; that was supplemented by a $2 million grant from the Harbor Community Benefit Foundation and $750,000 from the California Energy Commission. Most of the remaining $750,000 came from an SCE incentive program, though the exact amount of Edison’s contribution was not disclosed.
According to WattEV co-founder and Chief Executive Salim Youssefzadeh, this is the first to open of four heavy-duty truck charging depots that the company is developing throughout Southern California. The other three sites are in Gardena, near San Bernardino and north of Bakersfield.
Youssefzadeh noted that the Port of Long Beach charging depot was the last one of the four to go under contract, just 14 months ago.
“There was a tremendous amount of effort that went into getting this site operational within 14 months,” he said.
The Port of Long Beach charging depot is intended to serve as the southern anchor of WattEV’s planned electric-truck charging freight corridor, which will incrementally connect to major freight routes throughout the Western United States.
In addition to the charging network, WattEV Holdings has ordered or procured dozens of electric trucks that it rents out to shippers and carriers on a per-mile basis. In March of last year, WattEV signed a 50-truck deal with Gothenburg, Sweden-based Volvo Group. The company has an ambitious goal for this rent-an-electric-truck program of putting 12,000 heavy-duty electric trucks on California roads by the end of 2030.
