NFI Opens 7 MW Heavy-Duty EV Charging Depot in Ontario, CA
- EVs Fleet & Depot Charging News
Marin Holt
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- 5 minutes read
- NFI Industries and Electrify America opened a 38-port, 7 MW DC fast-charging depot in Ontario, California on February 27, 2024.
- The fleet consists of 30 Freightliner eCascadia and 20 Volvo VNR Electric Class 8 trucks under the JETSI program.
- $27 million in JETSI grants came from California ARB and the California Energy Commission.
- An 8 MWh BESS and 1 MW solar canopy manage the 7 MW peak charging load.
- The fleet displaces 2.75 million gallons of diesel and cuts 4,400 metric tons of GHG per year over five years.
NFI Industries and Electrify America opened a 7-megawatt, 38-port DC fast-charging depot in Ontario, California on February 27, 2024, deploying 50 Class 8 battery-electric drayage trucks for the Los Angeles and Long Beach port corridors. The facility is the first of its scale in North America.
What Was Built
The depot runs 38 DC fast chargers at speeds up to 350 kilowatts, delivering 7 megawatts of simultaneous charging capacity. Each charger serves two trucks via dual ports. The fleet consists of 30 Freightliner eCascadia and 20 Volvo VNR Electric trucks, funded under California’s Joint Electric Truck Scaling Initiative (JETSI) with $27 million in grants from the California Air Resources Board and the California Energy Commission. A 1-megawatt solar canopy and approximately 8-megawatt-hour battery energy storage system are included in the full project scope, enabling off-peak charging and peak demand management for the 7 MW load that would otherwise peak simultaneously when multiple trucks charge at once.
Each truck makes two port runs per day, charging 90 minutes to two hours from near-empty between trips. Volvo VNR Electric units charge at up to 250 kW; Freightliner eCascadia pulls up to 170 kW per port. The project required a Southern California Edison interconnection for a 7-megawatt industrial load in a port-adjacent corridor and took 3.5 years to develop from planning to opening.
Critical Perspective
Commissioning $27 million is the straightforward milestone; sustained performance over the first 12 months under real dispatch conditions is the harder test. Comparable battery systems have achieved 78–85% of projected round-trip efficiency in year one as BMS calibration and thermal management are refined — the 182.5 MWh Elkhorn unit at Moss Landing required 18 months of post-commissioning adjustment before reaching nameplate throughput. The question energy professionals should be asking: what performance guarantee is in place, and at what efficiency threshold does the warranty trigger?
Why It Matters
California ARB verified the fleet displaces more than 2.75 million gallons of diesel over the project’s five-year term and cuts approximately 4,400 metric tons of greenhouse gas per year, along with 5 tons of criteria pollutants, including particulate matter and nitrogen oxides that drive air quality violations in the Inland Empire and South Coast air basins served by the ports. The JETSI program funded a full tranche of 50 trucks; NFI has an additional 10 Volvo SWITCH-ON trucks at the same location, bringing the total planned zero-emission fleet to 60 units.
NFI VP of Assets Jim O’Leary described the site as “first-of-its-kind in Southern California, and maybe even North America.” The Ontario depot demonstrates the scale of grid infrastructure needed to electrify even a single mid-sized fleet operation: a 7 MW SCE interconnection and an 8 MWh battery buffer. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach together handle 40 percent of U.S. container imports, and the drayage sector represents one of the largest remaining sources of diesel emissions in Southern California.
