Battery-powered Trucks for timber transport will increase operating costs

Battery-powered trucks in forestry are proving to be far less revolutionary than we initially assumed. It’s time to reassess our expectations.

The forest industry has ambitious goals for battery-powered trucks to electrify the vehicle fleet. But is it possible to electrify on a large scale? The question has been asked in the ElRutt project and was discussed at a webinar on 3 April 2025.

80,000 Hours

That’s a remarkable amount of work hours for a single machine, the Norcar 600 owned by Erkki Rinne is taken well care of, it even has the original Diesel engine.
Kieran Anders Forestry

Kieran Anders is a forestry contractor working in the lake district. His work involves hand cutting and extracting timber using a skidder and tractor-trailer forwarder.
Promoting safety in the workplace

It is not possible to eliminate chain shot, but there are simple steps that can be taken to reduce the risk.
Glasfryn Fencing and Sawmill

Arwel takes great pride in the fact that the mill has no waste whatsoever, “the peelings are used for children’s playgrounds, gardens and for farm animals in barns in the winter and the sawdust has multiple uses in gardens and farms as well.
Keeping Timber Hauliers Safe

Timber hauliers need to encourage young blood in, and also look after the hauliers we have, we need make the sector a safe and positive place to work.

FIND US ON

The webinar is the first in a series of webinars organized by the TREE project, which has produced several research results in the field. Within TREE (Transition to efficient electrified forestry transport), the overall goal is to contribute to 50 percent of forestry’s new trucks being electric by 2030. There are already examples in several parts of the country where electric trucks are used in practical operation. But before the forest industry’s ambitious goals for the electrification of its transports are met, a significantly larger proportion of the fleet must be electrically powered. Is that realistic? If so, what charging infrastructure is required, and what is the cost picture?

Some of the answers to these questions have been provided by the ElRutt project, which has been running between 2023 and 2025. ElRutt includes the development of an analysis tool that can simulate forest transport in different scenarios with, among other things, varied access to charging and a varied mix of electric and diesel-powered trucks in the fleet. In addition, the project includes five case studies scattered across the country where the analysis tool has been fed with real transport data.

The results from the case studies show that already with today’s ranges and conditions for charging, it is possible to replace up to half of the diesel fleet with electric trucks. However, due to the time required for charging (especially in two shifts), the productivity – the transport work carried out – is low for electric trucks. This means that the fleet needs to be expanded with more vehicles, which leads to an increase in total costs.

In scenarios where the battery size is increased, 80-100 percent of the diesel fleet can be electrified. However, it becomes clear that larger battery sizes than around 700 kWh do not provide more benefits as long as the prerequisites for charging remain unchanged – larger batteries than that simply do not have time to be charged before the next shift. In scenarios where charging speed is increased, there is potential to increase productivity and thus lower the total cost, as the need to use shift time for charging is reduced.

In a possible future scenario, it is assumed that both battery sizes, charging speeds and the number of charging stations have increased. When these factors are allowed to interact, a pure electric fleet is able to carry out all transports in four out of five case studies. If the price of diesel also increases by 50 percent, cost parity is achieved – the total cost of the electricity fleet will be the same as (in some cases lower than) the diesel fleet.

The answers that ElRutt has given may be theoretical, but still provide great value for the practical application. The analysis tool allows for many more and in-depth analyses of how a large-scale transition to electrified forest transport can take place, and is expected to be used in more projects in the future.

Source skogsforsk