How to build a self-sustaining trucking company and have the government pay for it

What if you could build a self-sustaining trucking business, one that takes fuel completely off the P&L, cuts maintenance way down, and runs at 30% to 40% margins, with every tailwind on the EV and zero emission side behind it? And what if the government paid you back within 12 months because of the tax credits?

This is a thought experiment at this point. I've been looking at different business models that don't need heavy marketing, boring, steady businesses, and at the same time I was looking at the solar deals that have to get done next year, and I kind of put those two together. I'll give you some background on the industry and why trucking usually sucks, then why there's a window over the next 5 or 6 years to make three to four times as much per truck, how I'd set it up, and what the numbers look like.

Why trucking usually sucks

Trucking is a commodity business. A load is a load, the shipper can call anybody they want, and so the price ends up wherever the worst run carrier in the market is willing to haul it. A good trucking company makes anywhere between 5% and 10% margins, a lot of them make less than that, and last year the average truckload carrier made close to nothing. When freight goes soft, the way it did from 2022 into 2025, a lot of them just go out of business.

I've been talking to somebody who owned a trucking company for the last 20 years, and they kept telling me how hard it's been on the diesel side to get any kind of resemblance of a profit, because diesel moves up so fast now. Unless you're running spot loads, you're stuck on fixed contracts, and those get hit really, really hard on margins. Most of them have a fuel surcharge, but the surcharge lags behind the pump and it doesn't pay you anything for the empty miles, so when diesel jumps the way it has this year, you eat a lot of it.

The reason why is the cost side. Your biggest cost is the driver, and you're not getting rid of the driver. Your second biggest cost is fuel, which has run anywhere between 48 and 64 cents a mile over the last four years, and you have zero control over it. In September diesel hit a record $6.53 a gallon, which puts it closer to a dollar a mile. On top of that a diesel truck has thousands of moving parts, and all of them break.

Turning fuel into a fixed cost

That's what gave me the idea. What if one of the biggest line items in trucking could be a fixed cost?

If you own the solar and the batteries, the fuel cost doesn't really go away, it essentially turns into debt on the energy equipment, and that debt is fixed for the life of the panels. You make the investment once, and five years from now, when diesel might be at $10 a gallon, you're still paying the same amount of money, so the economics actually get better over time, as long as the solar keeps working, which I thought was a very interesting situation. And that debt is the part the government is helping you pay down, through the tax credits and through the New Markets money, so the fuel line on the operating company's P&L goes to close to nothing.

Maintenance is a lot cheaper too, because an electric truck has a lot fewer moving pieces and a lot fewer things break. There's no oil to change, no transmission, no exhaust system to clean, and the regenerative braking saves the brakes. When I was talking to some brokers, they told me Volvo will even take care of the maintenance for you, because its electric truck comes with a service contract that covers it. I'm modeling maintenance at 17 cents a mile against about 25 cents for a new diesel truck, which is about a third less and right around where the studies land. The industry average for diesel is closer to 45 cents with tires, because the average truck out there is a lot older than a new one.

Here's what that does to one truck running 85,000 miles a year, with 15% of those miles empty, getting paid $2.90 a loaded mile on a dedicated regional contract, which is right around what the national contract average for a dry van was this summer:

The electric truck keeps three to four times what the diesel truck keeps, hauling the exact same freight, which is nuts. Both of those are before paying for the truck itself, and on the electric side that cost is in the deal numbers further down. And the table is at $3.90 diesel. Diesel was $6.38 last week, and even with a fuel surcharge passing some of that through to the shipper, the diesel truck's margin gets squeezed a lot harder than the table shows.

There's one more thing that might happen on top of this. A lot of these trucks, the Volvos and the other ones, might not ever get self-driving, but if you buy Tesla trucks, you might be an update away from essentially having a self-driving truck once the regulation loosens up a little bit. Musk said in July that self-driving on the Semi would come around the end of this year or early next year, and Aurora is already running driverless trucks in Texas. For a very brief period of time you'd have a tremendous return, because the two biggest line items, the driver and the fuel, would essentially go away. I'm not counting on it, and none of the numbers in here assume it.

That's the window. Over the next 5 or 6 years the whole country is going to phase out of diesel trucks and into electric ones, and once everybody has the same cost structure it goes back to being a commodity business.

Why solar and trucking only work together

A lot of people have told me trucking is a horrible industry with low margins, and they're 100% right. Solar by itself doesn't usually work very well either. If you didn't have the tax credits, solar wouldn't make any sense from a financial standpoint, and the big issue is that you end up selling the power to the grid, and when you sell to the grid they pay you the wholesale price, a few pennies a kilowatt hour, rather than what you'd pay for that same power.

The best use for solar is when you're the end consumer of a lot of energy. Then you have your own microgrid, you zero out your energy cost, and if energy is a huge piece of your P&L, which fuel is in trucking, it starts to make a tremendous amount of sense. Trucking gives the solar the basis it needs.

Nobody's told me this is a dumb idea yet. What they're not seeing is that you can take a horrible industry that's fragmented, put a few layers of improvements and some economies of scale on top of it, and get returns you just don't normally see in trucking.

Getting the contracts

The part I was most unsure about was the revenue, because that's always my concern. For a deal to pencil out you need to understand who your end customer is, and I didn't really, until I took a deep dive on SAM.gov.

There are a lot of programs out there. As an example, the military has small business offices, and their whole job is to help small businesses get contracts, and freight is a big piece of what the military buys. There are all these little niches where you can make a lot of revenue on a consistent basis and not really worry about marketing and advertising. The revenue here is an email, or you just show up at the place, and you might walk away with a contract that runs up to 5 years, usually a base year plus four option years, at a very favorable rate per mile. The catch is that most military freight goes through the Army's carrier registration program, and that wants three straight years of operating authority, so I'd plan on the military being a year three customer rather than a day one customer, and on the shippers carrying the first couple of years. That's what I was unsure about, and we kind of patched that up.

Trucking is extremely tight right now on top of that. Carriers have been turning down somewhere around 13% to 15% of the loads they'd already agreed to haul for their contract shippers, which is a level that never showed up at any point in 2024. Regulators are pulling drivers off the road over the non-domiciled CDL and English proficiency rules, and J.B. Hunt estimates that takes anywhere between 214,000 and 437,000 drivers out of the market over the next two to three years. Shippers are having a really hard time finding trucks.

The demand from the big shippers is there as well. A lot of the biggest companies in the country have public goals to cut their scope 3 emissions, meaning the emissions in their supply chain that they don't own directly, and freight is one of the biggest pieces of that. About a third of the S&P 500 has a specific scope 3 target, and a lot more of them report on it. Walmart's goal is zero emissions across its own operations by 2040. In September the biggest electric truck order in American history, 2,500 trucks, which would nearly double the number on the road all by itself, came from an alliance of shippers that includes Microsoft and PepsiCo, rather than from a trucking company. A lot of the government mandates got rolled back in 2025, and it doesn't really matter, because the pull was always going to come from the shippers, since they're the ones with the goals and the ones paying for the freight.

So say you bid the same exact price as a diesel truck. You're making 30% margins instead of 8% to 10%, and the company on the other side of the table is trying to over index on zero emissions, so you're making it a no brainer for them. They're going to say, okay, you're the same price and you're zero emission, so I have to go with you, because the board is going to kill me if I don't.

The other federal piece that's real today is location. The SBA's HUBZone program is for small businesses in underutilized areas, which a lot of rural, low income areas are, and those often overlap with the tracts you want to be in anyway for the New Markets money. A certified HUBZone business gets set aside contracts, sole source awards, and a 10% price evaluation preference in open competitions. To qualify, your main office has to be in a HUBZone and 35% of your employees have to live in one, which is very doable for a depot in a rural area hiring local drivers.

Why trucking still isn't consolidated

What annoys me about trucking is that it's still run by a bunch of mom and pops. It's a heavy asset industry, and about half the carriers in this country are literally one truck. More than 9 in 10 run 10 trucks or fewer, so a fleet of 50 is bigger than about 98% to 99% of the carriers out there, and that's not a significant investment in the grand scheme of things. You can get 50 diesel trucks for less than $10 million. Electric ones cost about double that, which is why the AssetCo owns them and the write offs on them go to the investors, but either way, a check that size puts you at the top of an industry this fragmented, and that's very interesting to me. And with only somewhere around 2,500 to 3,000 electric heavy trucks in the whole country, 50 of them would make you one of the biggest electric fleets in America.

It kind of annoys me how lazy the industry is. Nobody advertises, so there isn't even a marketing line item, nobody has consolidated it, and it's mostly written off as a boring and laborious business. I think with a little bit of intuition and novelty you could turn the whole industry upside down very quickly.

Running the park is a lot of why I think that. I was a good marketer before, and I became a much better one running the park, because the whole job is understanding what people need and want and building the product around that. The park had a bunch of infrastructure in place before I got there, and it had never been packaged in a way people wanted to buy, and I had to get people to come to Jay, Oklahoma, which is not a traditional hospitality hub by any means. That's a big lift, and trucking is ten times easier than that. You're a hundred emails away from booked out revenue if you hit the right audience with the right offer, meaning companies that need a fleet the size of yours, and then you hit them with scope 3 as the angle. You'll be busy till kingdom come.

The tax credits

There are four pieces here, and they come from four different parts of the government that don't talk to each other, which is a big part of why nobody puts them together.

1. The energy credit, Section 48E. You get 30% of the cost of a solar system or a battery system back as a credit if you pay prevailing wage and use apprentices. You get another 10% if the site is in an energy community, meaning an old brownfield site, an area that leans on coal, oil or gas jobs and has higher than average unemployment, or a spot near a coal mine or coal plant that closed. Another 10% if enough of the equipment is made in America, which is 50% of the manufactured cost for projects that start this year and 55% next year. And another 10% if it's in a low income community, which covers the batteries attached to the solar too. That one's an allocation you apply for, and the 2026 round already closed in August. Do it right and you get to 60%, and I'd plan on 60%, because the whole point is to go pick a site where you can get it.

2. Bonus depreciation. You can write off 100% of qualifying equipment in the first year, and that's permanent as of July 2025. That covers the solar, the batteries, the chargers and the site work, after you take half the credit off the cost. It also covers the trucks. Buildings don't qualify, they depreciate over 39 years, but a cost segregation study can pull the equipment pieces of a building out into the shorter lives.

3. New Markets Tax Credits. This is essentially a forgivable loan. Investors get a 39% credit over seven years for putting money into a Community Development Entity, the CDE lends it into a business in a low income census tract at around 1% interest only, and at the end of the seven years a piece of it, usually somewhere around 25% to 30%, gets left behind and never paid back. Congress made it permanent last year. Usually you'd get a consultant to do the New Markets application for you rather than doing it yourself.

4. USDA's REAP grant. This used to be up to $1 million for renewable energy in a rural area. USDA rewrote it on September 30, and now the project has to be fully built and running before you can even apply, with 12 months of production data to show for it. Under the new rule, which kicks in October 16, the most you can get for a renewable energy system is $500,000, and you have to cover at least 75% of the cost yourself. A brand new depot with no history of using power probably doesn't qualify at all. So it's not money you'd have at closing, and this deal doesn't count on it.

The reason this is a next year opportunity is the solar deadline. The solar credit only exists for systems that are fully up and running by December 31, 2027, and after that it's gone. The other way in was to start construction by July 4 of this year, and that window has already closed, so this is a race. The batteries keep their credit through 2033, but the solar is where the big number is. The credit for electric trucks themselves ended in September 2025 and the one for chargers ended this June, so the trucks don't get a credit anymore, they just run on fuel you're making yourself.

How I'd set it up

The perfect spot to do this is right around Fort Smith, Arkansas, and I was specifically looking at Van Buren, right across the river. It's a big manufacturing area, steel, wire and food processing, you've got Walmart's home office about an hour and fifteen minutes north up I-49 in Bentonville and the whole retail corridor around it, you've got two National Guard installations right there, Ebbing Air National Guard Base and Fort Chaffee, and you've got I-40 running right through the middle, so Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Little Rock and Dallas are all a day's run. It's also a place where you could stack the credits very easily, and if the tract gets picked as one of the new opportunity zones that start in January 2027, that stacks on top too for any investor rolling over capital gains. The other place I'd look is the Texas Triangle, where Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin are all within about four hours of each other, and where the batteries can also make money on the Texas grid by buying power cheap and selling it back when it's expensive, although that's gotten a lot less profitable as more batteries came online.

Two things to know about that spot. Crawford County, where Van Buren is, isn't on the federal energy community list, but a handful of tracts on the Fort Smith side are because of old coal mines, so that 10% comes down to exactly which parcel you buy. And the USDA loans need the site to count as rural, which Van Buren might not, because it sits right next to Fort Smith, so you'd check the USDA map parcel by parcel and maybe look a little further out of town.

Either way, you're buying about 60 to 70 acres that are already zoned commercial, ideally in a low income tract and an energy community too. You're going to pay anywhere between $2 million and $3 million for that, and you'll probably have to patch it together from a few parcels. Then you put solar canopies over the truck parking and the rest of the solar on the ground, put in a battery system big enough to charge the fleet overnight, put in the chargers, and build the depot and the shop.

Everything physical goes into an AssetCo, meaning the land, the solar, the batteries, the canopies, the chargers and the trucks, and that's what gets syndicated to investors. It's set up as a partnership where the investors get 99% and the sponsor gets 1%, so the tax credits and the depreciation flow straight through to the investors' own returns, and after seven years it flips to 5% for the investors and 95% for the sponsor, which would most likely be me if I set this deal up. The reason it's seven years is that the energy credit can get taken back if the assets change hands in the first five, or if an investor's share drops by more than a third in that window, and the New Markets compliance period runs seven.

The operating company sits underneath it, as a 100% owned subsidiary of the AssetCo, which means the IRS disregards it as a separate entity for tax. It runs the freight, and the AssetCo doesn't just lease it the trucks. It's a services and leasing agreement, where the AssetCo gives the operating company the trucks, the maintenance, the charging and the power, so it's giving real material services, not marginal ones. And since the operating company is disregarded, for tax purposes the AssetCo is the one running the freight business, so it's an active trade or business rather than somebody collecting rent on trucks. I'd also create an MSO under the AssetCo, 100% owned like the operating company, and have the MSO hold the leasing and services contract with the operating company, which helps on the asset protection side.

So the operating company is asset light, it doesn't own the trucks or the solar, and it grows by leasing more trucks out of the AssetCo rather than raising money to buy them. I'd start with 32 trucks, and the solar in this mockup is big enough to run about 50, so you're building the site for the fleet you want to end up with and adding trucks into power you've already paid for.

One more thing about how I'd do it. We wouldn't use the tax credits to lower the amount of money we raise. We'd make the full investment, and then the tax credits go to the investors to offset their equity, rather than shrinking the equity check that comes in. That way the project is never short on money because it was counting on the credits to show up.

The numbers on a $40 million deal

Here's the short version before the detail:

I'd lever it up. Put $10 million in, and finance the other $30 million with New Markets money and USDA guaranteed loans.

That's about 3 to 1 debt to equity at closing, which is pretty normal for a deal like this, except half of the debt is at 1% interest only. Once the forgiven piece of the New Markets loan comes off in year seven, it's about 2.6 to 1.

The fleet uses about 5,400 megawatt hours a year and the solar makes about 9,200, so there's extra power to sell. I'd size the hookup at just under 5 megawatts AC, which keeps it inside what Arkansas lets a business net meter and under the size limit for the low income bonus. I'm assuming half of it gets sold as charging to other fleets at 25 cents a kilowatt hour, which is about what the cheapest public truck charging costs and well under the 40 cents or more you'll pay at a lot of them, and the rest goes back to the grid at the cheap export rate.

EBITDA, meaning the cash profit before interest, taxes and depreciation, is about 32% for the whole thing and about 38% for the fleet by itself, and it covers the loan payments about 1.35 times, which clears what a USDA lender is going to want to see, but not by a lot.

The debt doesn't go to zero in this mockup. By year seven the USDA loans are down from $15 million to about $10 million, the forgiven piece of the New Markets loan is gone, and you've got about $21 million left against about $2.6 million a year of cash profit, which you refinance into a normal loan. Getting the fleet up to 50 trucks on the power you already built is what really moves that number.

What the investor gets

Let's say you've got an investor who's looking to offset their taxes, but who's also looking to make some income.

Assume everything is running by the end of 2027, so the credits and the depreciation land on the 2027 tax return. If you do the 60% right, the credits alone come to about $11.4 million, which is more than the $10 million the investor put in. So within about 12 months they could get all of their money back in tax credits. As long as the tax credits hit, they're essentially out of the deal, they've already been paid back. That assumes they owe enough tax to use them. Credits can only wipe out part of a year's tax bill, so it takes an investor with a big tax bill, or a group of them splitting it, and whatever they can't use carries forward or gets sold to somebody who can.

Then the depreciation is on top of that, about $30 million of write offs in year one on the solar, the batteries, the chargers, the site work and the trucks. What that's worth depends on the investor's tax rate. Somebody paying 40% between federal and state saves about $12 million, so with the credits they're anywhere between $20.5 million and $23.5 million better off on a $10 million check:

After year one the investor gets cash every year from the whole business, the freight, the power the AssetCo sells and everything in between, since the operating company sits underneath the AssetCo, and that's the income part.

What could go wrong

1. The solar deadline. It has to be fully running by December 31, 2027 or the solar gets nothing, and this is the one that scares me the most. Berkeley Lab just put out numbers showing the median wait to get a 1 to 5 megawatt project hooked up to the utility is close to four years, and we've got about fifteen months. You'd need a utility that can move fast, or a site where the hookup is already there, and if the solar misses, the numbers in here don't work the way they're laid out. The batteries are fine on timing.

2. New Markets has to come through. If you don't get the allocation, that $15 million becomes a normal loan at around 7%, the payments go from about $150,000 a year to over $2 million, and the business can't carry it. That's the first thing to lock down, with a CDE that already has allocation and likes the deal.

3. REAP isn't there at closing. USDA stopped awarding REAP grants on March 31, 2026, and the new rule it put out on September 30 means you build first and apply after a year of production data, with no date yet for the next round. That's why it isn't in the sources at all, and if it ever comes through later it's a bonus.

4. The investor has to be able to use the write offs. A $10 million investor can't automatically write off $30 million. The losses are capped at what they actually have at risk in the deal. Running the freight business inside the AssetCo keeps it from being treated as a rental, but material participation still gets tested investor by investor, and most passive investors won't pass it, so for an individual the passive loss rules can still lock the depreciation and the credits up unless they have passive income to put them against. On top of that, credits can only offset part of each year's tax, so an $11.4 million credit needs somewhere around $15 million of federal tax to use it all in one year. The credit can also get clawed back if the equipment gets sold or stops being used in the first five years. You need a CPA who does energy deals for a living to go through what each investor can actually use before anybody signs.

5. The 60% isn't automatic. The low income piece is an allocation you have to win, the 2027 round hasn't been announced yet, and it only covers facilities under 5 megawatts AC, the energy community depends on exactly where the land is, and the made in America piece depends on what equipment you can actually get your hands on. The equipment also has to clear the new rules on Chinese content just to get the base credit.

6. The trucks themselves. An electric Class 8 truck runs anywhere between $250,000 and $450,000, which is why I'm using $400,000 a truck to stay on the safe side, and nobody really knows yet what one is worth used after seven years.

And then there's getting the trucks at all. When this came up on a call with a distributor a few weeks ago, the answer was that there's really one manufacturer worth buying from and the backlog is long, and that same manufacturer was just named the main supplier for that 2,500 truck order.

Sources

• Diesel prices, including the $6.53 record on September 21 and $6.38 on September 28: U.S. Energy Information Administration, weekly retail prices

• Fuel, maintenance, driver and insurance costs per mile: ATRI's 2025 operational costs of trucking, via Transport Topics

• Truckload margins last year: ATRI 2025 report, via Trucking Info

• Tender rejections: FreightWaves SONAR, September 2026

• The 214,000 to 437,000 drivers estimate: J.B. Hunt

• Fleet size breakdown: American Trucking Associations, American Trucking Trends 2025

• The 2,500 truck order: Electrek, September 22, 2026

• Scope 3 targets across the S&P 500: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, July 2026

• Walmart's 2040 goal: Walmart

• Volvo's electric truck service contract: Volvo Group

• Electric truck maintenance savings: ICCT

• Musk on self-driving for the Semi: Electrek, July 27, 2026

• Public truck charging prices: Xos

• The low income bonus: IRS

• Energy communities: U.S. Treasury

• Bonus depreciation: BDO

• New Markets made permanent: Frost Brown Todd

• The limit on how much tax credits can offset: IRS, Form 3800 instructions

• The end of the electric truck credit: IRS

• Rental activity rules: 26 CFR 1.469-1T

• The new REAP rule: Federal Register, October 1, 2026

• HUBZone: SBA

• Five year federal contracts: FAR 17.204

• Military freight and the three year requirement: Overdrive

• Interconnection wait times: pv magazine on the Berkeley Lab study, October 5, 2026

• Arkansas net metering: Act 278 of 2023

• Commercial solar prices: SEIA, Q3 2026

• Texas battery revenue: pv magazine, November 2025

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This is a thought experiment, written for informational purposes only. It isn't tax, legal or investment advice, and it isn't an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or investment. The numbers are projections from a hypothetical model I built myself, not results from a real deal, and real deals can and often do turn out differently. No CPA or tax advisor has reviewed them. The tax rules and programs described here change often, and everything is current as of October 2026, so anybody looking at a deal like this should have their own CPA and tax attorney go through it first. Companies mentioned here are named for information only, and none of them are affiliated with me or this article. I look at deals like this as part of what I do and may end up involved in one.