Truck charging

Charging is one of the biggest running costs in an electric truck fleet, and how the depot is set up decides both what it costs and whether the trucks leave on time.

​

Overview

Truck charging succeeds on three things:

• Every vehicle charged and ready when its shift starts.
• Drivers authenticating without friction, at the depot and on the route.
• Energy bought at the cheapest hours, inside the grid capacity you already pay for.

The four phases below take a depot from configuration to cost allocation: The last two repeat for as long as the depot operates. A final section covers the same fleet charging out on the road.

​

Before you start

This guide is for an operator running a heavy-duty or medium-duty electric fleet: logistics companies, freight carriers, distributors, and municipal fleets. Grid connection, civil works, hardware installation, and vehicle procurement sit outside it. Quick start for fleets is the shortest path to a working depot if you want that first. Who owns and operates the chargers shapes where the depot sits in the platform:

• You own and operate them, on a site you own or lease. The location sits under your own account.
• The property owner operates them and your fleet charges as their customer. You sit in their hierarchy, and they set the tariff and access.
• You operate them on a leased site where the landlord takes a share of what the chargers earn.

Settle this before you configure anything. It decides who holds the operator role, who receives any payout, and whose service commitment covers the site.

​

Configure

​

Upfront decisions

​

Choose an access tier

A depot doesn’t have to be closed. These three tiers cover most cases, differing in who can find the site and who can charge there. A private depot declines an ordinary registered token, so admitting anyone beyond your own fleet means adding their tokens to a bound group or issuing them a voucher. A voucher carries its own price, which is how a partner fleet charges at a negotiated rate while your own pricing stays untouched. Opening hours are the tier worth understanding before dismissing it. A depot whose trucks are out between 06:00 and 18:00 has capacity sitting idle through the working day, and other logistics operators nearby have vehicles that need charging in exactly those hours. Publishing the site for that window turns an idle asset into a partnership: local fleets charge at a rate you set, your own drivers keep guaranteed access around the clock, and neither of you pays for infrastructure you only need part of the day.

​

Set up authentication and pricing

Issue each driver or vehicle a token: RFID for a card, virtual for an app, or vehicle for Autocharge by VIN or MAC address. At a depot, Autocharge removes the friction entirely, since a driver plugs in and walks away without finding a card at 05:00. See Token authentication. Every location bills against a tariff, including a depot charging its own fleet, where a 0 EUR tariff is the usual answer. Where you’ve opened the site, the public tariff and any voucher tariffs sit alongside it. See Pricing options and logic. You set scheduled charging up yourself in Connect. The rest of energy management — load balancing and programmatic charger control — is enabled on a location by Spirii, so ask your Spirii representative to factor it into your timeline rather than assuming it’s ready on the day.

​

Validate

Before the depot carries a shift pattern, confirm it behaves for the vehicles that depend on it.

​

Operate

Three levers carry the cost of running a depot and the reliability of what leaves it: the charging schedule, the power available, and how quickly you know something has failed.

​

Charge to the duty cycle

Trucks sit plugged in far longer than they need to charge, and that slack is what a depot runs on. Charging windows use it in one of two ways: you set the window yourself, or you set the hours and an end time and let the platform pick the cheapest intervals inside them. Either way the vehicle is full before the window closes, and the energy is bought when it costs less. Energy management covers the mechanics. Where some vehicles have to be ready whatever else is happening, prioritised charging gives a vehicle with a priority token maximum power first. It takes effect only while a power limit is active, so it works alongside load balancing.

​

Get more out of the connection you have

Load balancing distributes power across the depot within the circuit’s fuse limit, which is what lets you add chargers inside an existing grid connection instead of waiting on an upgrade. In markets where connection queues run long, that wait is often what limits fleet growth. Programmatic charger control opens the depot to your own energy management system, so on-site solar and battery storage drive charging directly: charging follows generation, leans on the battery at peak, and the site stays inside its connection limit. A battery is also how some depots avoid a connection upgrade altogether. A depot fleet charging between shifts suits grid balancing, which earns revenue for brief adjustments to charging power when the grid needs them. You control the vehicles and the schedule, so you know how much slack there is to sell, and you choose the hours you expose. That page carries the market, hardware, and portfolio requirements.

​

Monitor the depot

A charger that failed overnight is a truck that doesn’t leave. Where the depot feeds dispatch or route planning, the same live data is available through the API, including state of charge and expected readiness per vehicle. That’s how charging state reaches your transport management or telematics system.

​

Settle

A depot charging its own fleet on a 0 EUR tariff produces no payout, so settlement here is about cost rather than revenue: what each vehicle, driver, or sub-fleet consumed, at the depot and on the route, and what it cost. Model the cost centres you want to report on as customers, and link each token to the one that should carry it. Every session then produces a charge detail record carrying the token and the customer, so an export splits consumption by vehicle, driver, or depot without joining it to anything else. The Dashboard covers depot utilisation over a period. On-road charging is where the cost sits. Sessions your drivers run on other operators’ networks reach you as a single consolidated invoice from Spirii covering all outbound roaming, rather than separate bills from each network your trucks happened to stop at. Sessions on Spirii-connected chargers outside your own sites are billed the same way, against the token that started them and to the customer it belongs to. Both land in the same records as depot charging, so cost per vehicle covers the whole route and not just the yard. See Roaming settlement. Where you’ve opened the depot, revenue reaches you as it does at any public location: Spirii collects and pays out monthly via a self-billing invoice, net of platform and payment fees. See Understanding your payout. Where a property owner takes a share of what the chargers earn, configure the split on the location and each party receives their own invoice — see Revenue sharing.

​

On the road

The same drivers charge away from the depot, on other operators’ networks, with the tokens you already issued. Enable roaming on each token, keep it active, and label it in the format Roaming connection describes. An incorrectly labelled token is a common reason a driver can’t charge on another network. Autocharge doesn’t travel, so a vehicle relying on it at the depot needs a roaming-enabled token for the road. Drivers find charging through Spirii Go or your branded app, where the map covers your own sites alongside public and roaming chargers. A heavy-vehicle filter narrows it to sites that suit the vehicle, across truck with trailer, rigid truck, bus, and semi-tractor, so a driver isn’t routed somewhere their vehicle can’t physically use. What appears depends on the vehicle types each operator publishes for their sites. In Connect, the Charge Map shows the same coverage for planning a route. See Network coverage. Sessions on other networks land back in Connect against the token that started them, billed to the customer it belongs to, so on-road charging appears in the same records and exports as depot charging.

​

Continuous optimisation

A depot is sized for a fleet, and the fleet changes. Adding vehicles pushes against the circuit before it pushes against the chargers, so revisit the load management design each time the fleet grows, ahead of the day a fuse trips. If the groundwork covers more bays than you built, adding chargers means mounting the units and bringing them online. If it doesn’t, the yard has to be opened up again. Duty cycles shift with contracts, which moves the charging windows. And a depot whose utilisation drops is a candidate for opening hours, turning idle bays into revenue without giving up guaranteed access for your own trucks. The monthly rhythm: check depot utilisation and uptime against the preceding period, pull an export where a figure looks wrong, review consumption per vehicle against what the routes should require, and act on whichever lever the data points at.

​

Next steps