When Your Fleet Becomes a Power Station

MAN's SPIRIT-E project proves heavy-duty electric trucks can feed energy back to depots, other vehicles, and Europe's public grid

15 May 2026

Near Regensburg, a lorry did something unremarkable and remarkable at the same time. It sat still. And as it did, it sent 325 kilowatts back into the public grid while simultaneously powering the depot and charging another electric truck beside it.

MAN Truck & Bus validated this in April 2026, marking the first demonstration of bidirectional charging by a European commercial vehicle manufacturer. Behind it was a government-funded research consortium anchored at the Technical University of Munich and including Shell's logistics subsidiary, grid operator TenneT, and several energy management firms.

Striking in their modesty, the numbers make a case. MAN estimates that bidirectional energy management could reduce depot electricity costs by 10 to 20 percent. For a truck covering 100,000 kilometres annually, that is roughly equivalent to driving 20,000 of those kilometres at no energy cost. If energy prices rise and grid flexibility markets open further, fleet operators may eventually earn revenue by selling stored power during peak periods, a prospect MAN expects to become commercially viable before 2030.

Regional operators stand to benefit most. Trucks with annual mileage below 100,000 kilometres tend to spend long enough at depots to make meaningful energy exchange possible. Long-haul fleets, by contrast, rarely sit still long enough.

Caveats remain significant. Wider adoption requires reforms to grid tariffs and regulatory frameworks not yet in place at scale across Europe. Most countries have not created legal or market structures allowing commercial vehicles to participate in energy flexibility trading. Without those structures, a lorry's battery is simply a battery.

All three applications tested under the project, vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-site, and vehicle-to-vehicle, worked. What remains is the slower, less photogenic task of rewriting rules governing how electricity moves and who may sell it. Engineering problems have been solved. Policy ones have not.