Electric Trucks and Buses Are Getting a Charging Network of Their Own

Heavy vehicles have been the awkward part of the electric transition. Vans went electric early and cars followed, but lorries and buses waited for chargers that could take a 44-tonne load without blocking the rest of the forecourt. This week brought three signals that the waiting is ending, and the story has moved from whether the infrastructure can be built to how quickly it can be paid for.

The public network joins up with depot charging

The first signal came on 17 September, when GRIDSERVE and the electric haulage firm Voltloader announced a charging partnership. GRIDSERVE's Electric Freightway network of public chargers will be added to Voltloader's depot-based network, so an electric haulier can use a public hub on a long run and its own yard overnight without running two systems.

The announcement describes a move from "demonstrating the viability of electric freight" towards "supporting real-world commercial operations at scale". That is a shift of phase rather than a new pilot.

Electric Freightway grew out of the Zero Emission HGV and Infrastructure Demonstrator programme, funded by the Department for Transport and delivered with Innovate UK, with more than 30 industry partners. Dedicated eHGV charging now operates at Extra Baldock, Moto Exeter and Moto Tamworth, with provision at the Markham Vale and Stevenage Electric Forecourts. Six further eHGV charging hubs are due to open by the first quarter of 2027, and those sites already form part of the public network we checked over in our end-of-summer charging round-up.

The case for the work is set out in the programme's own framing. Freight accounts for just under 20% of the UK's transport CO2 emissions, while HGVs make up around 1% of the vehicles on the road, which is why a small number of trucks matter so much to the emissions arithmetic. Data gathered during the demonstrator suggests a single electric HGV can cut roughly 1,000 tonnes of carbon emissions by 2034 against a diesel equivalent.

Bus depots are the next build-out

The second signal landed two days earlier, when Kempower expanded its partnership with Charge Hub to deliver fast charging for buses and trucks across the UK. Kempower, a Finnish maker of DC fast charging equipment, will supply the hardware as part of Charge Hub's turnkey package covering site design, installation, operation and maintenance.

The first projects are underway, with electrified bus depots due to be commissioned in the coming months at Bexleyheath, Croydon, Sydenham, Thamesmead and Peckham, all in South London. Charge Hub set up its UK entity last year after building the same model in Australia and New Zealand, where the two companies have delivered 100 projects covering more than 900 active connectors, 52MW of installed capacity and 99.4% uptime.

Bus depots are a different problem from a motorway hub. Vehicles return in a block, usually in the evening, and every one needs charging before the morning peak, so the work is mostly about power management on site and software that schedules a whole fleet rather than a single car.

The demand behind that work is already on order. Zero emission buses took a record 37.3% share of new bus registrations in the first quarter of 2026, according to SMMT data reported at the time, with the local authority pipeline pointing to a further 23,381 deliveries by the end of 2035.

The money has started behaving differently

The third signal was financial. On 16 and 17 September, the Irish charging operator EZO confirmed it had reached financial close on a €150m senior debt facility to expand its network across the UK and Ireland, reported by electrive. The money, €80m of it provided by Aberdeen Investments and anchored by Standard Life, will fund more than 3,000 charge points with a combined capacity above 100MW.

Two details make this more than a funding announcement. The infrastructure will mostly be deployed through long-term concessions with public sector partners, and the revenues from those chargers will be ringfenced to repay the debt over seven years. EZO estimates the network could generate more than €1bn in electricity sales over 20 years, part of it shared back to the public sector. Charging is being financed like a utility asset, which is the clearest sign yet that lenders treat it as one.

The UK context matters too. In June, EZO won a £176m contract covering four Midlands councils, a 15-year project expected to add 250 rapid and ultra-rapid chargers. The company expects the UK to become its primary market by 2027.

Where the truck numbers actually stand

The truck figures supply a reality check. Zero emission trucks reached 587 registrations in 2025 out of 40,504 new HGVs, a market share of 1.4% in a year when the overall HGV market fell 10%. That was still a record, up 170.5% on 2024, and it took the UK past its 1,000th zero emission truck. Of those, 161 were delivered through Electric Freightway, so more than a quarter of last year's electric truck registrations relied on a government-backed programme.

The scheme matters because the charging problem for trucks is harder than for cars. Depot grid connections can take years, which is why the SMMT has called for road transport depots to be prioritised in the same way as data centres and renewable energy projects. A haulier weighing up an electric truck needs certainty about power at its own site rather than a promise of chargers on the motorway. That is the gap the depot-side announcements start to close.

The policy backdrop is fixed. The government plans to phase out sales of new non-zero-emission HGVs up to 26 tonnes by 2035 and all new non-zero-emission HGVs by 2040, which gives the freight industry a timetable whether it likes the dates or not. Vans face their own binding targets under the ZEV mandate, and the review of how those flexibilities should work is one of the arguments we followed in our look at the mandate's van rules. Buses and trucks sit outside the car market entirely, and their charging build-out runs in step with the wider network we surveyed in our mid-year check.

What to watch next

Whether this week marks a turning point rather than a good week for press releases comes down to a few checks.

The first is hub count against truck count: six more eHGV hubs by the first quarter of 2027 will be easy to audit. Some of those hubs have already carried an electric truck convoy across Britain on the route we covered in our report on the EV Rally results. The second is depot power. Every electric truck or bus that arrives needs somewhere to charge overnight, and the timeline for grid connections is the constraint that no amount of charging hardware can fix. The third is price transparency. Fleet fuel costs are straightforward to forecast today, and electricity for a 500kWh truck battery is not, particularly for operators without off-peak depot tariffs.

Freight is the strongest case for electrification in road transport, and it is where the charging model for everything else gets worked out. The hubs at Baldock, Exeter and Tamworth are sites that cars already use, and the depot systems being installed for buses in South London will eventually serve delivery fleets and drivers without driveways.

The honest read

Electric freight has spent several years being demonstrated rather than deployed. This week public hubs, depot operators and institutional lenders all moved at once, and the language shifted from proving a concept to running a service. The volumes are still tiny, at 1.4% of the truck market, and the six hubs promised by early 2027 will not by themselves electrify Britain's haulage fleet. The sequence looks like the one electric cars went through a decade ago, only compressed. Watch the hub openings and the depot commissioning dates.