Cascade Sierra Solutions, One Answer to Trucking Efficiency

While efficiency is an important issue within the trucking industry, it is not always a priority in making investment decisions, according to experts gathered at Rocky Mountain Institute's Transformational Trucking Charrette.

Challenges that fleet owners face in investing in energy efficient technologies include high up-front costs, fluctuating (and often low) fuel prices, and a sea of competing priorities. According to Kevin Beaty of Eaton Hybrids, "From the fleet management perspective, we live and die by cost-benefit analyses."

The business case for efficiency simply needs to be more tangible. As there is a particularly fast turnover of vehicles in the trucking industry, there must be a short-term payback on new technologies. Fleets don't have a lot of unused capital. "They're tapped-they don't have the resources, they don't have the finances," explains Beaty.

If fuel prices are low, fleet owners and truck owner-operators are going to be hard-pressed to invest in efficiency. But even if the investment case isn't powerful in the short term, the business case for new technologies is compelling in the long run. This divergence of incentives is something that John Gustafson of Cascade Sierra Solutions understands.

One of the main focuses of Cascade Sierra Solutions (CSS) is to identify, promote and finance technology in order to save fuel and reduce pollution from older trucks. According to Gustafson, 80 to 90 percent of trucks in the U.S. fleet were built before 2007, and these trucks hit the road before the latest round of emissions regulations.

Working to overhaul the existing fleet, CSS offers leasing programs on efficient equipment packages that can produce between 10 and 25 percent fuel savings on individual trucks. While CSS's leases can be as much as $300 a month, the improved fuel economy can offer $400-800 dollars in monthly savings.

Innovative initiatives like CSS's leasing program have the potential to both make efficiency more widely available within the trucking industry and to bring much needed capital to the development of new technologies.

Narayan Brach, RMI