Electrified trucks now use half of Yunnan's roadside charging power
The electric trucks haul at mines, a hydropower project on the upper Mekong and border crossings, served by 1,435 charging and battery-swap stations.
Electrified heavy trucks accounted for nearly half of the electricity used at charging facilities in Yunnan, a mountainous province in southwestern China, in the first nine months of 2026, according to China Traffic News (中国交通新闻网). The province had more than 20,000 of these trucks (what China calls new-energy heavy trucks) in use at the end of September, more than six times the count at the end of 2024.
Heavy-truck charging facilities in the province used 1.854 billion kWh from January through September, up 501.84% from a year earlier, China Traffic News reported. The fleet stood at 18,600 at the end of May, up more than 300% from a year earlier, Xinhua (新华网) reported.
The trucks work at mines, border crossings and a hydropower construction site. At a Huaneng Lancang River Hydropower (华能澜沧江公司) project on the upper Mekong, they carry sand, gravel and concrete, and a nearby charging station charges 12 at once. Each truck saves more than 100,000 yuan (about US$15,000) per year on energy, an official of the project's construction bureau told the paper. Others work at the Xiaolongtan coal mine in Kaiyuan, in southeastern Yunnan, and at the border crossings of Mohan, Ruili and Hekou, which face Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Behind the trucks are 1,435 charging and battery-swap stations, with combined power of more than 2.89 gigawatts, the paper said. State-owned groups are among the builders: the provincial expressway investment group (云南交投集团) runs four truck corridors with 113 supercharging stations along them and seven megawatt-class stations. Huawei said in November 2025, in a release reported by MyDrivers (快科技), that the corridors' first phase used its supercharging technology.
China Tower (中国铁塔), the state-owned tower company, says its Yunnan branch runs more than 210 heavy-truck charging and swap stations, China Energy News (中国能源报) reported in August. The Yunnan unit of Sinopec (中国石化) and CATL (宁德时代), the world's largest electric-vehicle battery maker, opened a station in Pu'er, a city in southern Yunnan, that can swap batteries for at least 200 trucks per day.
Sources: 中国交通新闻网 China Traffic News, 新华网 Xinhua, 中国能源报 China Energy News, 快科技 MyDrivers (via ifeng)
Editor: Ian Lamont
