What happens to Europe’s electricity grid if every heavy long-haul truck on the motorway network runs on batteries? A study by Ludwig-Bölkow-Systemtechnik (LBST), commissioned by the HyMobility project of the German Hydrogen Association (DWV), puts hard numbers behind that question. Its conclusion is unambiguous: a purely battery-electric heavy-freight fleet would push charging infrastructure and the power grid to their limits — and hydrogen is the complement that makes the transition workable.
A note on framing first. The goal here is not to take sides between combustion and electrification, but to drive fossil carbon out of road freight. Batteries, renewable hydrogen and hydrogen-derived e-fuels are all tools for the same job — defossilising how goods move.
The direction is settled — the route is not
There is no longer any argument about where heavy trucking is heading. Under EU Regulation 2024/1610, the CO₂ emissions of new heavy trucks must fall by 90% by 2040 relative to 2019, with milestones of 15% by 2025, 43% by 2030 and 64% by 2035. Manufacturers that miss the targets face penalties of €4,250 per vehicle for each gram of CO₂ per tonne-kilometre over the limit — turning even small shortfalls into billion-euro liabilities. Zero-emission fleets are becoming the only viable option, and the diesel long-haul truck is being phased out of the market.
That answers the what. The study takes on the far harder question: can the power system actually carry an all-electric long-haul fleet?
The scale is hard to overstate
Start with a single vehicle. An electric long-haul truck consumes about as much electricity in five to seven days as a four-person household uses in an entire year.
Now multiply. LBST models roughly 129,000 long-haul trucks in Germany today, climbing to around 130,000 zero-emission long-haul vehicles by 2040, of which some 100,000 are on the road on any given day. Fully electrified, that fleet would draw more than 60 GWh of electricity per day in 2040 — over 19 TWh a year. That equals about a quarter of Germany’s entire solar generation in 2024, or one and a half times the annual electricity consumption of Berlin. Scaled to the EU’s roughly 800,000 long-haul trucks, daily demand exceeds 375 GWh by 2040 and annual demand tops 115 TWh — comparable to the gross electricity generation of the Netherlands.
The bottleneck is the charging infrastructure
Energy is only half the story; power and timing are the real constraints. In LBST’s demand scenario, trucks recharge around half their daily energy during a four-hour midday window. For the German fleet in 2040, that means delivering roughly 31 GWh in four hours — a sustained load of about 8 GW, the output of several large power stations running flat out.
Spread across the 350 motorway charging parks currently planned, that implies more than 22 MW per site (or around 1,000 parks at 8 MW each). And because each truck occupies a charging point for its full 45-minute break rather than only while charging, avoiding gridlock at the plug would realistically require on the order of 18,750 megawatt chargers nationwide, plus 60,000–80,000 overnight AC charging points at rest areas.
Even the planned network falls short
How far does the official build-out reach? Germany’s Nationale Leitstelle Ladeinfrastruktur and transport ministry plan around 350 charging parks averaging 8 MW by 2030 — about 2.8 GW of connected capacity in total, equivalent to two nuclear plants the size of Isar 2.
LBST’s verdict: by 2030 this network would already be running at full output 3.7 hours every day just to serve the early electric fleet. By 2040, covering daily demand would require 11 to 22 hours of full-load operation across every charging park in the country — simply not achievable in practice. Substantial expansion in both connected power and the number of charging points is unavoidable.
Where hydrogen changes the equation
This is where a second pathway transforms the picture. A hydrogen refuelling station needs less than 1 MW of grid connection, against more than 8 MW for a megawatt-charging park — because hydrogen decouples electricity production from the moment of refuelling. Each station can deliver up to around 50 MWh of energy per day, and a truck refuels in 10 to 15 minutes rather than tying up a charging point for an hour or more.
LBST proposes turning the 350 planned charging sites into “Clean Energy Hubs” by adding hydrogen refuelling and around five tonnes of on-site storage each. Without claiming any extra land, that single move could fuel more than 40,000 hydrogen trucks per day across Germany — roughly 40% of the long-haul fleet — dramatically relieving pressure on the battery-charging network and the grid behind it. The on-site storage doubles as a buffer, soaking up surplus renewable electricity and feeding it back when needed.
Efficiency versus resilience
None of this disputes that batteries are the most efficient option. Well-to-wheel, a battery truck needs about 138 kWh per 100 km, against 450 for hydrogen and 1,050 for an e-fuel such as renewable e-diesel. But efficiency is not the only metric that matters. Even at one megawatt, recharging a battery truck for 500 km takes over half an hour; hydrogen does it in under four minutes.
The study frames this as a deliberate trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Hydrogen’s higher electricity demand is the legitimate price of making renewable power storable, decoupling supply from demand, and building an energy system that stays robust under peak load. Combine the efficiency of batteries with the speed and grid-friendliness of hydrogen, and you get a freight system that actually works.
Why this matters here
For Switzerland — a transit country whose Alpine corridors carry some of Europe’s densest heavy-freight flows — the message lands close to home. The same physics that strains Germany’s motorway grid applies to the routes crossing our borders.
The deeper point is the one at the heart of Power-to-X. Defossilising heavy transport is not a single-technology project. Renewable electricity feeding batteries, renewable hydrogen, and hydrogen-derived e-fuels each have a role, and they reinforce one another. As LBST concludes, without a hydrogen complement an all-battery scenario is barely realistic — technically, economically or in market terms. Only a dual infrastructure path delivers both the CO₂ targets and the planning certainty that fleet operators and energy providers need.
Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026 — Reality Check with Net Zero
Join us on 22 September 2026 at the Kursaal Bern for the Power-to-X Congress Switzerland 2026, co-organised by energie-cluster.ch and the Swiss Power-to-X Collaborative Innovation Network (SPIN), in partnership with Réseau H2 Suisse Romande. Find out more and register here.