Following a prominent opening with Thomas Zurbuchen, former NASA research chief and world-renowned specialist for innovative solutions, this year's GS1 Excellence Day at the Kursaal in Bern culminated in the presentation of the Swiss Logistics Award to Hugelshofer Logistik for their electric truck fast charging park.
Moderated by Thomas Müller, head of the science program "Einstein" on SRF, the most important award in the Swiss logistics industry, in a race against the two other nominees Savvy Telematic Systems, which presented a "Smart Bogie" that warns of train failures, and intralogistics specialist Kardex, which presented an "Intuitive Picking Assistant", ultimately went to the transport company Hugelshofer in the final.
The Hugelshofer team - winners of the SLA 2024
Managing Director Martin Lörtscher accepted the award to great applause. A special prize, so to speak, was awarded as part of the Swiss Logistics Award to Thomas Bögli, the long-time mentor and organizer of the most important national logistics prize.
At Hugelshofer, it was only a few days ago that what is probably the largest electric fast charging park in Europe, combined with a gigantic photovoltaic system, officially went into operation.
The jury of the Swiss Logistics Award celebrated it as a pioneering example of decarbonization in road freight transport.
As previously reported, the newly constructed charging park offers a professional charging infrastructure with 14 fast-charging stations, each with a connection capacity of 360 kW. Three transformers in a dedicated transformer station allow up to 28 trucks to be charged simultaneously. The jury, represented on stage by new member Claudia Wagner, praised the almost epochal scale of the facility, not only for the electric charging stations but also for its overall integration with the rooftop solar power plant, which covers an area of over 7,000 square meters using bifacial photovoltaic elements. A specially developed load and charging management system also automatically optimizes the vehicles' state of charge, electricity production, and electricity demand in accordance with route planning.
The overall concept also incorporates the trucks with their on-board batteries and the corresponding storage capacity available in the management system. To contribute to the decarbonization of freight transport, the charging park is also available to external users.
