About 30,000 semi trucks, some owned by large fleets and others by small operators with a single rig, shuttle imports and exports to and from California’s shipping ports to the distribution centers that pass the goods to the rest of the nation and much of the globe. Long truck queues can mean idle time burning fuel and sending up tailpipe emissions while waiting to load and unload, and that’s on top of the some 1 billion annual miles these haulers collectively log. In response, statewide mandates call for older, higher-emitting heavy-duty vehicles (14 years old or more than 800,000 miles) to be cycled out of service beginning in 2023 as part of stricter greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution laws in California.
The new rules have ramped up a private-sector response to update trucks on California roads in favor of all-electric fleets and single vehicles, including from Forum Mobility, which this week announced new funding rounds from commercial real estate giant CBRE Investment Management
CBRE,
-1.64%,
a stakeholder in shipping due to its distribution warehouse properties, and the climate-change funding arm of major delivery retailer Amazon.com
AMZN,
-2.11%.
The port communities of Long Beach and Oakland will be among the first to integrate Forum Mobility’s fleet upgrades. Both Long Beach and its neighboring Port of Los Angeles have long held the top two spots as America’s busiest ports, and Oakland ranks in the top 10. But new reports show some Northeast docks taking over the heaviest volume for now. Related: Amazon is funneling more money to women fighting climate change. Statistics show better ROI. Still, there’s no denying the significance should California succeed in converting more of its trucking fleet to electric. For one, the state clocks in as the fifth-largest economy in the world and is arguably an incubator for climate-change initiatives that might be scalable in other parts of the U.S.; it was a first-mover on personal EVs, for instance. Under California’s rules, new short-haul, heavy-duty trucks must be all-electric …