It’s the first question most operators ask—and for good reason. In temperature-controlled logistics, failure isn’t just inconvenient. It’s costly, visible and immediate.
Over nearly two years of real-world operation with DistriFresh B.V. in the Netherlands (a temperature-controlled distributor of fresh and frozen food products) we tracked performance via fleet telemetry across more than 1,800 delivery routes.
What actually happens over a full shift?
In most cases, far less battery is used than expected. Median refrigeration runtime sat at around 5.8 hours. Even at the higher end, 90% of monitored routes required around 11 hours or less of runtime.
And perhaps more telling: The typical route used only ~23% of available battery capacity. Which means the system isn’t operating at its limit, but well within margin.
This means it’s not about whether the system can complete the route. It’s about how much unused capacity is sitting there at the end of it. In this dataset, approximately 95% of monitored routes were completed without approaching low-battery risk.
Not because the routes were easy, but because the assumptions about energy demand were often higher than reality.
So what happens if refrigeration runs mid-route? In this monitored dataset, refrigeration continuity was maintained throughout delivery routes.
And that gap—between perceived risk and measured performance—is where the energy transition starts to make sense.
If this is something you’re exploring in your own operation, we’d be interested to hear what questions come up most often.