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Advantages of Electric Lift Trucks

By Trucktruth.com, May 21st, 2009

Electric lift trucks are saving customers 20 – 30 percent a year in total cost of ownership. The savings are substantial in all scenarios, single, two and three shift operations. With skyrocketing prices of oil and petroleum based products, fuel has doubled and in some cases tripled over what is was four years ago.

Today the price for a gallon of gasoline is over $ 4.05 nationally. We are seeing propane pricing average between $ 2.00 and $ 3.00 a gallon, even for the largest users. And while true, the electric truck costs twice as much up front to purchase; fuel costs easily make up that difference in less than three years!

We know many 5,000 pound IC Propane trucks sell for around $ 20,000. We also know that an electric truck with two fast charge batteries and new energy efficient charger or fast charger can easily reach over $ 44,000, more than double.

While battery pricing has been turbulent over the past three years, let’s not forget the battery is still a small portion of the total cost of the truck package. By purchasing your battery(s) up front, the power you buy today can be fixed for the life of the vehicle. With petroleum fueled vehicles you will pay the pricing of fuel over life of the vehicle, years from now, when you do not know what the price will be.

The chart below shows a typical capital breakdown of one truck over a six year life, two fast charge batteries (Replace one after 3 years) and fast charger, something we would typically find in a two shift normal duty application, probably 2,500 hours a year:

Here we accrue the monies up front for a replacement battery. If we can wait until year four that will be great, but we have it if we need to replace the battery. You and your dealers can hold this money. Can you say Incumbency?

Annualizing the capital costs for the two systems from above looks like this:

Here we have two of our three year life fast charge batteries. The 10 year minimum life of the fast charger helps ease the higher initial cost. And because many chargers capable of charging multiple ranges of voltages, a multi-voltage charger provides the flexibility of varying the truck voltage the next time a customer rotates their fleet. This gives you incumbency yet flexibility!

Fuel costs are the largest portion of the total cost of ownership in an IC truck. Here we have an example using a two shift operation, five days per week, one tank per shift. Look at the difference in fuel:

Fuel costs here are almost $ 6,500 per year additional expenses. See how quickly we can recoup the additional $ 10,000 in battery expense of the electric and the $ 10,000 in charger expense? The point comes in less than three years. In your higher throughput operations, and your three shift scenarios the gap widens and fuel gets very expensive.

You can see what adding 33 % (1 more shift) to this $ 8,000 per year spend would do, it would bring the cost to $ 12,000 a year on the IC side, and $ 2,100 a year on the electric. Here the ROI comes back in under two years!

Here is a graphical model of the information from above. This is the new EnerSys web based model to show these lines of comparison.

Even though you have spent twice as much up front, you can easily see where the price of fuel will quickly catch up. And keep in mind; this is catching up using today’s fuel costs. Speculation is oil will hit $ 200.00 a barrel by next winter. Propane will quickly follow as it is a byproduct of converting crude oil into gasoline.

Visit the EnerSys web based IC to Electric tool.

Here’s the final summary of the two areas above and the resulting savings:

In addition to the EnerSys web based tool, our friends at the Electrical Power Research Institute (EPRI) have also launched a web based tool that we feel augments our tool to use with your customers. The EPRI tool is a slide graph where you can change the values and see immediate changes to the effective bottom line costs. Here is an example of EPRI’s web based tool:

Test out the EPRI web-based comparison tool.

Call 1-800 EnerSys today or visit the links above for your own fleet analysis. The links above all use national averages so you do not need to know service costs, kilowatt hour costs, and the price of a truck, battery or charger. Just use the defaults on what you don’t know and you will get a snap shot of what you can start saving immediately.

Just like with the auto industry, the price of oil is causing us to rethink how we get our day to day operation done. Electric vehicles are better than ever with proven performance technologies rivaling their IC truck brethren. Fast and opportunity charging allows you to never change batteries, have a battery room or any of the previous requirements with changing batteries.

Finally, lead-acid batteries are a proven green technology with 97 % of a lead acid battery being completely recycled and reused. No other product in the world has a higher recycle percentage!

Call EnerSys today to help kick start your new green initiative; power company assistance and rebates are available in many states. EnerSys Sales Engineers and Applications Specialists can help you summarize these real savings for your customers.

1 (800) EnerSys