Amazon’s ambitious plan to deploy 100,000 electric delivery vans by 2030 is sometimes held up by an immovable object: the electric utility industry, which doesn’t exactly move at the speed of next-day delivery. The company has already unleashed 10,000 e-vans onto streets around the U.S. and elsewhere, after it struck a deal in 2019 with Rivian Automotive to develop them. That partnership yielded a finished truck in just two years, an astonishingly short period in the world of automotive manufacturing. The time-consuming hassle has been installing 12,000 charging stations. “We’re the constraint for a lot of expansion plans,” said Vijay Goveia, an Amazon EV infrastructure manager, during a recent tour of a delivery warehouse in Seattle that is home to 100 of the blue-and-gray vehicles. Amazon’s hurdles matter to the massive effort to electrify commercial vehicles. These beasts — from modest doorstep delivery vans to the giant tractor-trailers that convey merchandise from seaport to city — must switch from combustion engines to zero-emission motors if the U.S. is to meet its carbon-reduction goals and manage the climate threat. All those trucks need the same kind of plugs that Amazon is now struggling to get built. It takes Amazon at least a year, and often longer, to outfit each Amazon warehouse with chargers. A team of up to 15 people must prod utilities to issue approvals and wait for their yellow-vested workers to string new power lines and install electrical equipment. Once that infrastructure is built, Amazon has found, the actual refilling of the vans’ batteries isn’t so hard. Like other logistics firms contemplating an electric future, Amazon officials fretted that the vans wouldn’t have enough time to recharge amid a busy delivery schedule. The company contemplated fancy solutions like big onsite batteries and orchestrating charge times by computer. But the solution turned out to be much simpler. In Seattle, Amazon charges its vans with plugs similar to what regular EV drivers use in their home garages.
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