Centurion’s Hamish McHaffie, is its group manager for sustainability and corporate affairs, and the man that has steered the WA based transport giant to its groundbreaking solar powered battery electric truck charging hub in Perth.
McHaffie along with his colleague on the project Ralton Benn have worked together to bring the massive 4.4 megaWatt project to fruition.
Benn’s job title is project manager, head of Centurion’s truck electrification program and business lead.
McHaffie took us through many of the complex details of the project during a media briefing at the Centurion HQ in Perth last week and gave us an insight into the many challenges it threw up.
He explained how the massive solar arrays on the rooves of Centurion’s supersized sheds generate between them , 4.4 megaWatts of power and how the arrays are split into two separate 2.2 megaWatt systems, one servicing trucks charged overnight at the depot after a day on the road, the other tasked with the role of ‘topping’ trucks up during the day as is required.
The North site which boasts ten 75kW chargers handles the overnight charging for 20 trucks, while the Centurion South site, which is just 100 metres or so away from the North network, handles the twn other trucks that might need charging during the day.
Centurion had literally commissioned and pushed the South site into operation the day we flew into Perth for the briefing
McHaffie explained to us that the duty cycle for those trucks on the South network would be to go out in the morning and return in the afternoon, plug into the charger using the sun and that direct generation, in time to redeploy again in the evening. While the North facility has a larger array, the south side has a much smaller one, at around half the capacity of the North side.
“We will potentially see trucks that will come back later in the day and will use the battery storage to give them a quick squirt,” said McHaffie.
“As the project gets more and more embedded into the business, we’ll be making decisions based on, say X truck just coming back, that it’s got so much charge, and the plan for that truck tomorrow is this, so it needs X amount of charge, which means we will put it on the south side, give it a quick top up and save the north side charging locations for the trucks that will be returning with the least amount of battery charge,” he added.
It’s safe to say that McHaffie was being flexible, with the South side only just having come on line that day, so the company was still playing it by ear to see how the practicalities of the giant new system pan out over time and use.
“We haven’t quite got to the maturity stage and being able to make some of those decisions just yet,” said McHaffie with a smile.
“There have been some discussions about things like what type of truck makes sense in this location at this stage, and these decisions are being made, but the reality is we will start to understand the energy demand of the trucks and how to make the best decisions,” he said.
The work for the Centurion eActros trucks, all 30 of them, which includes 25 rigids and five prime movers, is based around metro runs in and around Perth.
The range during the first five months of operation sine they came on fleet in February, has not been an 
issue, with the longest delivery run seeing the truck operate 100km out from the depot and 100km back, without any issues.
“That’s under load, so the truck went out loaded and came back, loaded as well, in a training run to see if they could,” McHaffie said
“So they went out with six tonnes on board and they actually ran the trucks for about seven or eight hours, with load, two guys on board with the air con running, because when we first got the trucks it was February, so it was quite hot,” McHaffie added.
Daimler loaned Centurion a truck to trial and they ran it for seven or eight hours a day on typically tough runs on metropolitan duty around Perth.
“We are super confident in the range of the trucks after that,” McHaffie said.
“They were governed 85 km/h and came back with almost 30 per cent state of charge but
we’re really just learning about the management of the truck batteries, depending on the types of routes being serviced and the clients that they have and so forth,
The Centurion e Actros fleet includes a total of five 4×2 rigids, 15 6×2 Rigids and the five 4×2 prime movers which are deployed on supermarket runs for Coles and Woollies.
Centurion says it designed the project with plenty of redundancy for cloudy and rainy days which are often a part of Perth winters, as it was when we visited the company last week.
“In discussions with ARENA it was all about us achieving an array that gave us the energy security throughout the winter,” said the project manager for the Centurion electrification program, Ralton Benn.
“So we modeled out very early on what it would look like through typical winter periods and then translate to the size of the array we would need to build, and in some cases you could talk about it being maybe seven or eight times bigger than what was required for a typical summer sun-shiny day, but we also know that we now have that energy security through the winter,” Benn explained.
“So on the north side, we had a couple of days where we throught that backup generation, and it would be necessary, but spread out over the winter we probably wouldn’t need backup generation,” he added.
Benn explained that while the large scale Atlas Copco back up gen sets, which are on site to ensure that none of the charging duties on the Centurion site have to, or are connected to the electricity grid, are actually operated and run on hydrated vegetable oil HVO as well, to minimise carbon output from the system.
“Biofuels are a key component for the green credentials of the project,” Benn told us.
In the network of family owned and run companies which are a part of Centurion parent company CFC, which loosely stands for Cardaci Family Companies, now operates a wide range of companies across various complimentary industries. Some of these companies have played a role in implementing and delivering the equipment to make the Centurion electrification project a reality.
CFC subsidiary Cape Dunstans delivered the solar component the project and the project management of the overall delivery, while another subsidiary delivered the HVO fueled back up gensets.
But it’s not just CFC companies that have supplied the Centurion project. Energy giant BP supplied the Tritium chargers for the project while local Perth battery company Switch, supplied the electricity storage.
“Although the batteries have been built in China, Switch designed and supplied them, along with doing the micro grid design and implementing and managing all this, the brains behind the system is all this local company, Switch,” said Benn.
Installing and implementing the off grid solar battery charging facility at Centurion was no easy task given the company’s massive and always busy site in Perth still hat to operate while the systems were installed and brought to a point of being up and running.
“We were not allowed to create delays or downtime for Centurion and there was no trenching, or excavation of any tarmac,” said McHaffie.
Instead the company used directional drilling under the facility’s hardstand to connect the solar arrays on top of the giant sheds with batteries, charging bays, inverters, transformers and other equipment in the facility.
In the end there was about two kilometres of directional drilling work, cable running and conduit placement underground on the North side, and about half of that on the South side. There were no trenches dug for the project and the installation achieved zero downtime.
“That was perfect for a company that operates 24-7, on a hard stand at a brownfield site that cannot tolerate downtime,” said McHaffie.
Benn believes that this is the only project of this type in Australia so far and that there would be very few places in the world on this scale, with the possible exception being in China.
“There’d be places, probably in China, but it’s very unusual to see such a significant system servicing a fleet of 30 trucks operating completely off grid,” McHaffie said
“There’s certainly nothing of this size I know of in Europe, and certainly nothing in the US,” he added.
“A big driver for us and ARENA’s interest around it, despite the fact that there was a bit of risk around it, is that you’ve got to be able to create a system that has energy security, and to not rely on the grid,” McHaffie said.
“But it’s also the acceleration, because if we had had to connect a fleet and complex charging microgrid type system of this nature to the normal grid, it would have meant at least another 12 to 24 months in terms of being able to delivering it,” he said.
“So we’ve been able to accelerate that by having it off grid, and also the biggest comfort for us is we know we’ve got 100 per cent green electrons going into these trucks,” he emphasised.
“It’s all our own solar into the batteries and on to charging the trucks,” he said.
“No one’s ever done enabling infrastructure like this before, and obviously this is a brownfield situation as well, so you have to add a premium for work on a an old used site, compared to a greenfield site. It’s always a bit cheaper when you do things new,” Benn added.
“I calculated the other day that if we’re able to use all of the electrons these arrays
can produce over15 years, in fact we have 30 year warranties on the arrays, but let’s say 15 years, which I think is the life cycle we’re claiming, and because I reckon we’ll get the trucks for 15 years, and certainly, for the inverters and the batteries, then I think 15 years is well within their remit.
“Having said that however if we’re able to use all the electrons over 15 years then it’s going to cost us about 13 cents per kilowatt hour across the lifecycle of operations,” he said.
“Now that’s obviously not the reality though, because we won’t use all the electrons that the arrays are capable of generating, so then the challenge for the likes of whoever scores these types of systems is to find other ways to monetise the generation capacity,” Benn said.
Benn has worked full time in green energy for about six years but has been involved in the green energy industry for close to 20 years.
He actually gave third party advice on the project plan to Centurion and CFC, when he was with another firm, which was a condition precedent for ARENA.
“ARENA loved the opportunities the project presented, but they wanted a bit more due diligence. Then I left my other job and was wandering around for a little while, and then I got a call from Hamish McHaffie and here I am,” said Benn.
“My role in this project, is building a business, managing the transition space, because obviously the experience that we’ve had on this project is unique, but I’d say, from the from the response we’ve had from people who we’ve brought here, is that there is a demand here beyond just transport,” he said.
“Then CFC, as an entity, also has quite an ambitious net zero strategy as well, which is what Hamish leads, which ishelping CFC understand how they get to that and some of the commercial opportunities in that as well,” Benn added.
