What ABB E-Mobility is actually taking over
ASKO is not a small operation to electrify. The company runs around 700 trucks and supplies more than 1,800 food stores across Norway. By the end of 2025, roughly 200 of those 700 trucks were expected to be electric. ABB E-Mobility and ASKO have worked together since 2019; the hardware on site is now mature enough that the interesting question has shifted from "can we charge it" to "is it available at 04:00 when the distribution round leaves".
The new contract puts ABB E-Mobility in charge of ongoing monitoring, maintenance and support. The most recent hardware addition was the A400 fast charger, rated at up to 400 kW — a figure that means nothing until you look at how often the cable is actually plugged in.
Our maths: 5.5 GWh spread over 60 chargers
Take the numbers we have and divide them. 5.5 GWh across 60-plus chargers is roughly 92 MWh per charger per year, or about 251 kWh per charger per day. Spread across the 200-odd electric trucks in the fleet, that is 27.5 MWh per truck per year — around 75 kWh per day.
To put that in driving terms: a loaded distribution truck at roughly 1.2 kWh/km covers about 23,000 km a year on that energy budget. That is a plausible regional delivery duty cycle, which tells us the fleet is charging almost entirely at the depot and treating the public network as a backup rather than a fuel station.
It also tells us the load is remarkably low per charger. A daily 75 kWh top-up is nothing for a 400 kW unit. The bottleneck is not cable power, it is when every truck wants electricity at once — which is exactly why site-level load management matters more than headline kilowatts.
€12 versus €50 per 100 km: where diesel stops making sense
Now the part fleet managers care about. Assume an all-in depot electricity price of €0.10/kWh — realistic for Norwegian industrial power with grid tariffs, and the sensitivity on this is easy to check in our charging cost calculator. At 1.2 kWh/km, that is €0.12/km, or €12 per 100 km.
A comparable diesel distribution truck at 28 l/100 km and, say, €1.80/l burns €50.40 per 100 km. We did similar unit-conversion arithmetic when the US finalised its 34.9 mpg fleet rule — the litres-per-100-km translation is always more useful than the official figure.
Over 23,000 km a year, the gap is roughly €8,800 per truck annually. Across 200 electric trucks, that is on the order of €1.7 million a year in avoided fuel cost. Caveat, and it is a big one: this is fuel only. It ignores the higher purchase price of the truck, the depot capex, and the peak-power component of the grid tariff — the cost that punishes a site for pulling 2.4 MW for two hours. That last line item is precisely what a managed service contract is supposed to keep under control.
1.2 MW at Vestby — and what the public network has to add
ASKO's charging estate is not ABB-only. Kempower has installed roughly 190 CCS points and two MCS points across 13 Norwegian depots, with total installed capacity of about 25 MW. The Vestby site alone has 2.4 MW across two MCS and four CCS connections, with the megawatt charging points rated to 1.2 MW.
That is three to four times what the fastest passenger car stall delivers, and it is where the gap between rated and delivered power gets expensive: a truck that has to wait 40 minutes instead of 20 is not a charging story, it is a logistics story.
Scale check: the fleet's roughly 15 MWh of daily demand could, in theory, be delivered by the Vestby site running flat out for about six hours. One depot could cover the whole company's energy need overnight — if the trucks were all parked there, which of course they are not.
Why the service contract is the real news
Heavy-duty charging has moved into the boring, mission-critical phase. If a 400 kW charger is offline for four hours, that is 1.6 MWh of energy missing — around 1,300 km of truck driving, or a full day's work for a couple of vehicles. No planning department can absorb that twice a month.
That is why ABB E-Mobility is selling availability rather than boxes, and why the same logic drove the Nio–Geely charging merger: the money in charging is migrating from hardware margin to network uptime and operating data.
For long-haul work, the public side is where the gaps remain. Our supercharger database tracks 483 locations and the cheapest-tariff view shows how wide the price spread is between sites — a spread that matters far more to a haulier deciding whether to top up en route or wait for the depot than it does to a private driver.
What a fleet operator should do with this
Three checks before signing anything similar. First, model your cost per 100 km at your actual contracted €/kWh, not at a brochure rate — the calculator does it in a minute. Second, ask for a contractual availability figure and the measurement method behind it, because "monitoring" without an SLA is a helpdesk. Third, size the site around peak power charges, not around the fastest charger available: for a depot doing 75 kWh per truck per day, scheduling beats kilowatts every single time.
