Greenlane expands electric truck charging infrastructure to Texas

“We’ll be expanding to locations in Dallas and Houston and extending the network along the I-45,” Greenlane CEO Patrick Macdonald-King said during a press conference here at ACT Expo. “This is one of the most high-volume freight corridors in the country."

Greenlane develops EV charging depots for the trucking industry. While its two open locations are located in Southern California, with several additional California locations in the works, the company also has plans to develop a site in Las Vegas. These locations, along with its Houston and Dallas location openings, will electrify multiple critical freight corridors in the southern half of the U.S. along Interstates 10, 15, 45, and more.

The expansion announcement comes one year after Greenlane’s flagship location opened in Colton, California. The public commercial EV charging site features 41 OEM-agnostic chargers with 12 pull-through lanes and 29 bobtail lanes. It also includes driver amenities such as a driver lounge, food and beverage options, clean restrooms, Wi-Fi, overnight parking, and more. Greenlane plans for future sites, including those in Texas, to have similar features.

MacDonald-King also announced the addition of megawatt charging to be placed at all sites in the future. “We see [megawatt charging] as the next phase of charging for commercial vehicles, and will deliver charging speeds on par with diesel and allow the industry to move forward,” he said.

It takes a village to deploy electric commercial vehicles across the nation

Greenlane is backed by Daimler Truck, NextEra Energy Resources, and BlackRock. The charging depot developer has also partnered with electric fleet customers, Nevoya and Einride, both represented at the press conference.

“If there was anything that I would say that is often found to be the bottleneck of being able to deploy an electric freight service, it is the availability of reliable charging where freight needs it to be,” Sean Ackley, Einride’s VP of energy and infrastructure in North America, said. “On top of that, it needs to be at diesel parity or better. … Our partnership with [Greenlane] has been able to unlock that diesel parity of fuel, and not just in one location.”

The more locations Greenlane can open, the more Einride’s business will grow, Ackley said, as its freight business model depends on it. “Our business grows when we can create corridors, lanes, relay points, and charging that is during the transit of freight from A to B, not just overnight and dwell.”

Nevoya, an all-electric carrier, was the recipient of a grant last year, funded by the Center for Green Market Activation (GMA). The award allows Nevoya to “focus on the corridors where we know there is freight capacity, where we know there is high volume, and more importantly, where we know there is cheap electricity,” Sammy Khan, Nevoya CEO, said during the press conference. “Texas is the perfect commercial state for battery-electric vehicles because you actually have zero incentives. You have to do everything based on economics. So when we won this grant and we started thinking about how we're going to do this and who we're going to charge with, Greenlane just emerged as the obvious partner.”

Nevoya will rely heavily on Greenlane’s hubs in Houston and Dallas, but Khan said he’s also happy that the hubs will help spur growth for other electric vehicles in the area, too.

Greenlane’s chargers experience an average uptime of 99%, which Khan says is an outlier from most EV charging providers, and the company recently received SOC 2 compliance, which reinforces Greenlane’s commitment to “security, data integrity, and system reliability.”