PGE Calls Electric Trucks 'Batteries on Wheels' for Grid — SkimNews
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Portland General Electric (PGE) framed electric medium- and heavy-duty commercial trucks as "batteries on wheels" — grid-ready assets that can help the utility manage peak demand and keep electricity costs low.
- Karla Hendrickson, PGE's transportation electrification manager, singled out electric school buses as especially promising because their schedules are predictable and they spend "long stretches parked," allowing energy to flow back to the grid.
- Oregon hosted its first fleet-focused electric ride-and-drive event this month, putting Class 8 electric semis, medium-duty last-mile delivery trucks, and battery-powered equipment like wheel loaders and excavators in front of fleet buyers and operators in one place.
- PGE is already testing vehicle-to-grid dispatch using the state's deployed electric school bus fleet, returning stored energy to the grid during high-demand periods.
- Nearly 150,000 EVs are registered on Oregon roads today, but electrifying medium- and heavy-duty commercial trucks is still in its early stages despite representing a disproportionate share of the state's transportation emissions, per Oregon Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson Gerick Kransky.
- Kransky noted that heavy trucks and buses are a relatively small slice of Oregon's overall vehicle fleet but account for an outsized share of transportation-related emissions, making them a high-leverage electrification target.
Why it matters: If PGE can reliably dispatch energy from electric school buses and commercial truck batteries back to the grid, fleet electrification stops being a one-way cost burden for utilities and becomes a distributed storage asset — a direct answer to the EV-overloads-the-grid critique. Oregon's early-stage focus on heavy-duty vehicles targets a small but disproportionately polluting slice of the on-road fleet, per state environmental regulators.
Ask SkimNews
