On April 15, WattEV celebrated the grand opening of its new heavy-duty electric truck charging depot in the City of San Bernardino, its second facility in Southern California. Thanks to a unique partnership between the Mobile Source Air Pollution Reduction Review Committee (MSRC) and the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), WattEV received nearly $3 million through SCAG’s Last Mile Freight Program to purchase 20 Class 8 electric trucks – 10 of which will be based at the San Bernardino site. SCAG’s Last Mile Program is designed to support “last mile” technologies to help those in the goods movement industry invest in cleaner trucks and infrastructure.
The charging depot is four acres and has 12 dual cord CCS (combined charging system) 360 kW chargers that can charge 24 trucks at one time. The site also integrates solar generation to support the chargers.
Located at 1388 South E Street, the station is off I-215 and adjacent to the busy freight corridors of I-10 to Arizona and I-15 to Nevada. Developed as a leasing facility to help owner-operators charge their electric trucks, the publicly accessible site is operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are plans to expand the site to add megawatt charging to enable faster charging times. Currently, the typical charging time is two to three hours.
MSRC member Dr. Bill Robertson was on-hand to celebrate the ribbon-cutting. Since 2021, the MSRC has invested more than $16 million in the Last Mile Program, as part of its larger efforts to help reduce harmful heavy-duty truck emissions from the goods movement industry.