Electrifying heavy transport: Why infrastructure, not vehicles, is the real challenge
James Kennedy, Founder & CEO, Virtos Wednesday 28 October 2026, 2:00pm to 2:30pm EV Tech & Infrastructure Theatre, Exhibition Show Floor All Energy Australia, MCEC Melbourne
Virtos Founder and CEO James Kennedy will take the stage at All Energy Australia this October to argue that the heavy transport sector has misclassified its own biggest problem.
The session runs on Wednesday 28 October at 2:00pm in the EV Tech & Infrastructure Theatre on the exhibition show floor, hosted by the Electric Vehicle Council. It is a 30-minute presentation drawn from what Virtos sees across depot and fleet charging projects nationally, and it is aimed at fleet operators, site developers, network planners and anyone whose electrification timeline depends on getting power to a depot.
What the session covers
Heavy vehicles are 24 per cent of Australia's transport emissions. Trucks and buses produced 22 million tonnes of CO2-e in 2022, from a small fraction of the vehicles on the road, according to the Climate Change Authority's Sector Pathways Review¹. No credible national decarbonisation pathway leaves that number where it is.
The sector knows this. Fleet operators have targets, boards have committed to them, and the vehicles to meet them are arriving. Electric prime movers, rigids and buses are maturing quickly, and the economics are turning.
And yet depots are not electrifying at anything close to the pace those commitments imply.
Kennedy's explanation is direct. Heavy transport electrification is being managed as a vehicle transition when it is an infrastructure and energy systems challenge, and that misclassification is costing the sector years it does not have. The reason electrification stalls is rarely the truck. It is what the truck plugs into.
Depot charging is a different class of infrastructure
Passenger EV charging and heavy transport charging share a name and very little else.
A home charger draws a few kilowatts. A public fast charger might draw 350kW. A depot charging a fleet of electric trucks moves quickly past hundreds of kilowatts into multiple megawatts. That is a different class of infrastructure, with different demands on the grid connection, the site design, and the energy management system behind it.
The grid connection is where projects stall. Securing a high-capacity connection can take years, depending on the network, the location, and the headroom on the local feeder. Depots, distribution centres and workshops were never designed to draw megawatts. Fleet operators are working to targets set in board papers and tender responses. Distribution networks are working to their own delivery timelines. The gap between them is where electrification plans quietly slip.
Multiply that across a national freight task and the scale becomes clear. This is not a series of isolated site issues. It is a structural mismatch between how quickly transport wants to decarbonise and how quickly the energy system can deliver the capacity to let it.
Reliability is a commercial requirement, not a feature
The session also covers a second constraint that gets less attention and matters just as much.
Passenger charging is flexible. If a public charger is out of service, the driver finds another one. Heavy transport charging is operationally critical. A depot with fixed daily schedules, contracted delivery windows, and vehicles that must leave at 4am with a full battery cannot absorb a failed charging session.
Uptime and predictability are commercial requirements, and so is the ability to diagnose and resolve faults remotely rather than waiting on a site visit. Infrastructure that performs well on average but fails occasionally does not get deployed, because no operator will put a contracted freight task behind it.
Together, the two constraints lead somewhere unavoidable. Fleets cannot wait for the ideal energy system. They have to electrify using infrastructure that performs under the grid and site conditions they have today.
How electrification actually happens
This is the part Kennedy expects to be most useful to operators, because it is where the problem becomes tractable.
The transition will not look like a single conversion event where a depot goes from diesel to fully electric in one step. It looks like a sequence. A first tranche of vehicles supported by charging infrastructure sized to the connection currently available. Onsite energy management to shape load, shave peaks and stay within the connection limit. Battery-integrated charging to deliver power beyond what the feeder alone allows, so multi-megawatt sites become viable on constrained connections without waiting for a network upgrade. Then expansion, as fleet numbers grow and network capacity catches up.
Staged infrastructure is not a compromise. It is the mechanism that lets fleets start now rather than in five years, and it changes the economics considerably. Deferring or removing a grid upgrade reduces capital cost and shortens approval timelines. Managed import and export opens up tariff optimisation and market participation revenue. The site earns while it waits for the network.
Why the framing matters
Kennedy's closing point is that how the industry classifies this problem changes who needs to be in the room.
If heavy transport electrification is a vehicle replacement exercise, it belongs to fleet procurement. If it is an infrastructure and energy systems challenge, it spans transport planning, energy strategy, network engagement and site development, and it has to be planned on those timelines. Grid connection applications, site design and energy system architecture all carry long lead times. They need to start well before the first truck order is placed.
Australia has a strong policy tailwind and a maturing vehicle market. The constraint sits downstream of both.
Attend the session
Electrifying heavy transport: Why infrastructure, not vehicles, is the real challenge Wednesday 28 October 2026, 2:00pm to 2:30pm EV Tech & Infrastructure Theatre, Exhibition Show Floor All Energy Australia, MCEC Melbourne
Registration for All Energy Australia is free at all-energy.com.au.
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¹Climate Change Authority, Sector Pathways Review, Part 1: Transport, 2024, Table T.1, page 3. Figures are for 2022 and cover rigid trucks (8.7 Mt CO2-e), articulated trucks (11.7 Mt) and buses (1.6 Mt). Australia's total transport emissions were 90 Mt CO2-e in the same year, or 21 per cent of national emissions. Available at climatechangeauthority.gov.au.
