Battery-as-a-Service: A Business Case Perspective for Long-Haul Logistics in Sweden

Sammanfattning

With increasing pressures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, heavy-duty freight is moving to electrification, but this shift remains challenging due to high energy demand, long operating hours, strict delivery schedules, and limited tolerance for charging downtime. This thesis examines whether battery swapping combined with Battery-as-a-Service can contribute to the sustainability transition of heavy-duty truck operations in Sweden, and whether it can become economically feasible and cost effective for long-haul operators. Using mixed-methods, this study focuses on the Stockholm-Gävle corridor. Through semi-structured interviews with logistics operators, companies’ representatives and experts, qualitative data was collected,together with secondary sources and scenario-based cost calculations comparing diesel, high-power cable charging and battery swapping. The analysis applies the MLP (Multi-Level Perspective) to understand battery swap as a niche configuration within the wider freight transition, and a business model perspective to examine how value, cost, and risk are distributed across different actors. The findings show that battery swapping and BaaS may support heavy-duty freight electrification, but only under specific conditions. The cost calculations showcase that with the two-truck DHL baseline, battery swap is not competitive. A sensitive analysis where the fleet is scaled shows that with eight trucks it becomes comparable to diesel, with twelve trucks it becomes the lowest-cost alternative under the model assumptions. The thesis concludes that battery swapping is better understood as a conditional and scale-sensitive corridor niche rather than a universal solution. Its success depends on high station utilization, shared infrastructure, predictable routes, compatible vehicles, ownership arrangements, long-term contracts, and actor coordination. Battery-as-a-Service is therefore not only a leasing solution, but an ecosystem configuration that redistributes value, cost and risk between actors.