Road freight is one of the harder parts of transport to decarbonise, and the problem usually isn’t the trucks, it’s where they charge. Order electric trucks without a depot built to charge them fast enough and often enough, and they sit idle instead of on the road. That’s what WDP is solving for Einride with the first dedicated charging plaza of its kind in the Netherlands, purpose-built around megawatt-class fast charging rather than bolted onto an existing yard.

Einride is a Swedish transport technology company based in Stockholm, specialising in electric and autonomous freight vehicles. The company was founded around a simple premise: road freight can be decarbonised faster by combining electric drivetrains with autonomous, remotely monitored driving technology, rather than treating electrification and automation as separate problems to solve one after the other. Einride has built out electric freight operations for various distributors across Europe and North America, and positions itself as an operator of a full digital and physical freight system rather than only a truck manufacturer.

For a company built around that model, the depot is not a supporting facility on the side. It is where the electric and autonomous parts of the business actually meet the road, which makes the design of the charging site as strategically important as the trucks themselves.

The design evolved as the technology did. When Einride and WDP first discussed the project, 250 kW charging was the standard. Trucks now charge at 450 kW and beyond, and the gap keeps closing. The original design reserved grid capacity for 1,200 kW of charging infrastructure, and WDP installed a 2,000 kVA transformer to stay ahead of that curve. During the design phase itself, new charging hardware reached the market offering more power for the same investment, so the final build increased installed capacity to 2,000 kW, split across the six charging points by an energy management system: five points up to 480 kW each, and one point up to a full megawatt on the new MCS standard, built for the short, legally mandated rest breaks long-haul drivers already take.

The site’s real constraint isn’t power. It’s space. No more than six trucks can be received at once, so 2 MW of installed capacity looks sufficient for Bleiswijk’s own future, and any expansion beyond six trucks will happen on other sites rather than this one. WDP has also applied to raise the contracted grid capacity to 1,500 kW, and WDP and Einride have jointly made provisions to add a BESS installation later, so the site can absorb further growth in charging demand without a redesign.

Einride’s core mission is enabling CO2-free transport, and the company runs a reservation system for truck charging to keep utilisation of the plaza as high as possible. WDP and Einride count CO2 reduction within each customer’s own business case rather than attributing it to a single station, to avoid double counting the same savings twice.

Over time, Bleiswijk is expected to deliver around 1.5 GWh of charging a year, equivalent to roughly 1,000 tonnes of CO2 savings annually. For context, a single electric truck covering 100,000 km a year saves around 125 tonnes of CO2 compared with a diesel equivalent.

By the end of October 2026, all six charging points are expected to be live and ready for testing. The wooden roof structure, a deliberate choice reflecting Einride’s Swedish preference for natural materials, follows no earlier than December 2026, after which the site opens to the wider public. WDP has not disclosed the investment value of the project.