On Tuesday, 16 September, transport and infrastructure ministers from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands adopted a declaration in order to make progress in the transition to zero-emission road freight transport along the trans-European transport network (TEN-T).
They consequently approved European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism Apóstolos Tzitzikóstas’s ‘Clean Transport Corridor Initiative’, which aims to accelerate the deployment of recharging infrastructure for heavy-duty vehicles on the main freight corridors. It will begin with the Scandinavian-Mediterranean and North Sea-Baltic corridors, which will serve as pilot cases.
The nine ministers have committed to take measures to fast-track recharging infrastructure projects for heavy-duty vehicles that have received funding from the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility (AFIF) (see EUROPE 13574/18). They are notably going to be collaborating with local authorities to simplify environmental procedures and building permit procedures. They are also going to be working with distribution system operators to improve transparency of grid hosting capacities and accelerate the provision of grid connections.
Finally, these nine Member States will work with the other Member States situated along the corridors and with the European Commission, within the framework of the Competitiveness Coordination Tool, as well as relevant stakeholders to develop a comprehensive ‘roadmap’. They are giving themselves until March 2026 to decide on a set of measures, exchange best practices, cross-utilise platforms developed at the national level, and put monitoring mechanisms in place so as to achieve their ambitions.
By 2030, one in three new lorries is expected to be a zero-emission vehicle – which will represent more than 400,000 zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles on the roads (see EUROPE 13650/6). The ministers acknowledge that despite persistent problems, the lack of recharging infrastructure must not become a stumbling block to this transition (see EUROPE 13708/2).
In addition, the targets set in the ‘AFIR’ – the regulation on the deployment of alternative fuels infrastructure adopted in 2023 (see EUROPE 13229/24) – provide for a minimal deployment of the necessary recharging infrastructure. Nevertheless, additional infrastructure along busy corridors will need to meet higher demand, particularly in terms of energy demand.
Read the declaration: https://aeur.eu/f/igj
See the map of the involved corridors: https://aeur.eu/f/igk (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)