COP26 electric bus tour from London to Glasgow commences

An electric bus tour from London to Glasgow has commenced to celebrate low carbon energy and transport projects along the route.

The 11-day tour kicks off at Go-Ahead’s Northumberland Park bus garage in north London to showcase the people and places driving the transition to net zero.

The site is also home to the Bus2Grid project, led by SSE, BYD, UK Power Networks, TfL, and other partners, which could enable electric buses to become two-way chargers capable of putting power back into the Grid. Northumberland Park can charge 100 electric buses overnight and London currently has 950 electric buses on the road or on order.

The vehicle being used on the ‘Road to Renewables’ tour is a BYD ADL Enviro400EV double decker built in Britain by BYD and Alexander Dennis with a range of 160 miles. It is the UK’s best-selling electric double decker electric bus and one of 1,000 BYD ADL electric buses already on the road or on order.

Trudy Harrison, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Transport (DfT), said: “This event is a wonderful example of the collaboration and innovation required to reach our net zero targets ahead of COP26, and Northumberland Park is already playing a huge role by bringing cleaner air to London with its 117 EV buses in operation.

“The Government has recently pledged a further £2.8bn to support the switch to cleaner vehicles and the Bus2Grid project based here is precisely the kind of research we need to power up the electric vehicle revolution, not just for cars but for public transport too.”

The tour includes meeting the young green engineers who are based at the 500MW offshore windfarm at Greater Gabbard at the UK’s most easterly point; as well as the businesses and local authorities driving the decarbonisation of cities like Oxford and Peterborough.

The ‘Road to Renewables’ journey concludes in Glasgow on October 29th three days before COP26 gets underway where the bus will open an official charging garage for the climate change summit. 

SSE is a major partner at COP26; and alongside the Go-Ahead Group, BYD/Alexander Dennis and SWARCO will use the EV bus tour to showcase examples of the national effort already underway to decarbonise.