A boost for green vehicle procurement

Philip Richards, programme manager at Cenex, gives an update on the government funded Low Carbon Vehicle Public Procurement programme

The Low Carbon Vehicle Public Procurement programme aims to validate the use of low-carbon vehicles in real world situations. While the benefits of introducing more low carbon vehicles onto our roads have been espoused far and wide over the past few years, hybrid electric and all electric vehicles still make up just a tiny percentage of the UK’s public and private sector fleet.

There are three main reasons for this. The first is cost, with low carbon vehicles still priced significantly higher than petrol or diesel-engined cars and vans. The second is availability, with hybrid and electric vehicles manufactured by only a handful of suppliers, all contending with the challenges of an immature component supply chain. The third is unfamiliarity or the ‘shock of the new’, with both consumers and organisations often regarding low carbon technologies as being unproven or inferior to existing vehicle options.

Government incentives
However, there are a number of government-sponsored initiatives in place aimed at addressing these issues. One of these is the Low Carbon Vehicle Public Procurement (LCVPP) programme currently being run by Cenex, the UK’s Centre of Excellence for low carbon and fuel cell technology. Funded by OLEV, the government’s Office for Low Emission Vehicles, LCVPP’s main objective is to foster a culture change in public sector procurement policy by both encouraging the purchase of more hybrid and electric vehicles within their fleet and validating the use of low carbon vehicles in real world situations.

LCVPP also has a broader objective of increasing the ‘demand signal’ for low carbon vehicles within the wider market – in other words, by increasing the number of such vehicles in the public sector, and thus reinforcing the perception of hybrid and electric technologies as being proven to work, it is hoped that this will be have a positive knock-on effect in the consumer and commercial sectors. Another anticipated benefit of this would be to drive demand in the UK’s low carbon vehicle manufacturing industry, thereby increasing the capabilities and production volume of the manufacturers, which in turn should lead to more vehicles being available and at a lower cost than at present.

In the UK, transport contributes around 25 per cent of CO2 emissions. While there are over 31 million cars on the road in the UK, compared with only 4 million HGVs, LGVs and buses, the CO2 emissions per vehicle for the heavy fleet are significantly higher. Ownership of fleet is also less fragmented, with much of it being concentrated within the public sector. As such, and as with other Cenex initiatives, it made sense for LCVPP to target this segment of vehicles for the first phase of the programme, starting with large panel vans.      

How it works
What the programme actually provides is grants to local authorities and public sector organisations that make up the difference between the cost of a conventional diesel van and its hybrid or electric equivalent. This aims to remove the additional financial overhead and help manage any possible risk of purchasing low carbon vehicles for public fleets. Not only do programme stakeholders not have to pay any excess for the low carbon vehicles, but they also enjoy fuel savings straight away, which actually makes vehicles bought via LCVPP more cost-effective than standard fleet additions.

This also highlights another broader objective of the programme – as well as encouraging the use of vehicles that produce less CO2, it’s also important to start decoupling our transport system from its reliance on oil and move to a model that enables more vehicle power to be drawn from electricity generated from renewable sources such as wind or nuclear. Low carbon vehicles either use fuel much more efficiently or remove the need for oil-based fuels altogether.

Success so far
So what has been achieved so far? The first phase of the programme is to provide grants for over 200 vehicles, with stakeholders ranging across city, borough and county councils plus organisations such as the Environment Agency and the UK Borders Agency. The UK manufacturers participating in the programme are Allied Electric, Ashwoods, Modec and Smith Electric Vehicles, which between them produce a variety of vans and LGVs from which the stakeholders have ordered the vehicles most appropriate for their requirements.

For example, Leeds City Council have ordered 19 hybrid and five all electric vehicles. Recognising the urgent need to reduce CO2 emissions and the risks of climate change, Leeds has been a pioneer in green transport policy – for instance, piloting two of the first bio-methane refuse vehicles in the UK. With transport being the most difficult sector to reduce emissions in, Leeds believes that active promotion of low carbon vehicle technologies is required to help the city achieve its emission reduction targets. The new vehicles form one part of the council’s climate change action plan, which aims to reduce CO2 emissions across the Leeds district by 40 per cent by 2020 as well as improve air quality.  

Richard Crowther of Transport Policy at Leeds says: “We’ve already done a lot to improve the efficiency of our fleet vehicles and reduce unnecessary mileage, but we’ve reached a point where that in itself won’t be enough to meet our environmental targets. Factors such as increased recycling trips and mobility issues around an aging population mean that mileage will inevitably go up in the future, so we knew we needed to embrace low carbon technologies too.”

The 200 LCVPP vehicles have either been delivered or are in transit, with the great majority expected to have arrived by the end of May. This in itself has highlighted one of the current issues with hybrid and electric vehicle production, in that it has taken longer than anticipated to get the vehicles in fleet and on the road. The main reason for this has been the length of the supply chain, with parts such as the battery cells having to come over from the Far East – this inevitably builds up time within the manufacturing system, particularly one that’s still in its infancy. Once all the components have arrived in the UK, power electronics and battery pack integration and manufacture have gone smoothly, but sourcing parts from overseas has definitely created an initial bottleneck. This is something that Cenex will investigate further as the programme progresses, looking for smarter ways to speed up the supply chain.

User feedback
The initial feedback that Cenex has received from those who’ve taken delivery of their vehicles is that they’re nice to use, reliable and practical. However, as stated, a major element of the programme is to validate the performance of the vehicles in real world situations beyond just anecdotal evidence.  

Vehicle monitoring and testing will happen over a 12 month period, with interim reviews at three and six months, by which time they should have clocked up plenty of miles and have operated through all the seasons. Various methods of monitoring will be used, including log book recording of trip data such as date, mileage, fuel/energy levels and weather conditions, plus telemetry and test track. The analysis of the results will look at whether the various vehicles have delivered the reduction in CO2 emissions anticipated as well as overall reliability and performance. This analysis will directly influence how the programme proceeds and which vehicles and technologies will continue to be invested in.

Richard Crowther at Leeds comments: “Hybrid and electric vans are ideal for a lot of the Council’s driving work, much of which consists of short, stop/start journeys in city centre traffic – we’re hoping for an overall CO2 reduction of at least ten per cent from these vehicles, but in the city centre we think this might be as high as 30 per cent compared with petrol and diesel engines.”

Spreading popularity
Even as the first phase of the LCVPP programme rolls out, Cenex has continued to receive enquiries from local authorities and organisations such as charities that are keen to participate in the future, which indicates that the importance placed on low carbon vehicle procurement has grown even further from when the programme started in 2008. And the fact that many fleet operators are increasingly being set carbon reduction targets by their parent organisations means that we may see a surge in public sector demand for hybrid and electric vehicles, whether that’s inside or outside of initiatives such as LCVPP.

The main conclusions that Cenex have reached so far from the programme is that, with the initial kick-start of a grant, the UK public sector has shown itself to be keen to invest in low carbon vehicle technologies, and that the nation’s specialist manufacturing industry has responded well to the challenge of producing and delivering these vehicles. It is our hope that the cost of ownership and environmental analyses that we will produce next year will demonstrate further the business case for low carbon vehicles within the public sector and also the wider commercial world.

For more information
www.lcvpp.org.uk