Fleet Decarbonisation Lessons Learned

Benoit Laflamme: The BetterFleet Academy is aimed at supporting operators through their transition to zero emission fleets. We hear insights from industry experts to accelerate with confidence and avoid costly mistakes. Today’s episode features Chris Demetriou, Assistant Director of Corporate Fleet Transport and Accessible Community Transport at London Borrow of Islington. Chris is also a board member of the Association of Fleet Professionals. Islington Council was seen as an early mover in the transition as they adopted their first EVs 20 years ago. They are still seen as a fleet decarbonisation leader in the local authority sector as they continue to adopt different kinds of vehicles assigned to different duties and grow their charging infrastructure. Let’s hear from Chris. Chris, could you tell us about your fleet decarbonization journey? 

Chris Demetriou: In 2019, this local authority like many others up and down the country declared a climate emergency. But it’s one thing declaring a climate emergency, and actually another thing doing something about it. So about a year after that the council put together a net zero vision 2030 strategy and that was how we are going to decarbonize not only the council’s fleet but everything else within the council’s portfolio whether it’s buildings, homes, you know basically try to decarbonize absolutely everything we can before 2030. 

Our fleet for us was obviously really important. We knew we were contributing about 3% of carbon emissions in this borough of our fleet vehicles. It doesn’t sound a lot but actually that’s nearly 3,000 tons per annum of CO2 per year. So really important for us to do to reduce emissions. Also we’ve got a huge problem of health inequality in this borough. So for us that is probably the paramount reason of trying to decarbonize our fleet. Because there is a huge health inequality in this borough. We’ve seen rates of admissions to A&E with respiratories particularly with children go up over the last few years. So again, really important for us to tackle that problem. 

And then after 2019 we tackled bigger vehicles really because it’s the bigger vehicles like the HTV vehicles, your refuge vehicles, your buses which cause the most pollution. So we’ve been dabbling in electric vehicles or zero emission vehicles for about 20 years. I think the first electric van here 20 years ago was a Citroen Berlingo electric. Absolutely terrible van. You can do 60 miles in it, and he had a liter petrol tank on the side. Maybe that was the first hybrid, but yeah, that was the first electric vehicle we had on the fleet. 

Benoit Laflamme: What fleet size do you operate and how many of those vehicles are zero emissions? 

Chris Demetriou: We’ve now got 130 full battery electric vehicles in the fleet. However, the fleet is growing. It’s growing because we’ve been sold services over the years, whether it’s waste services or housing services and that fleet’s growing. We’re only six square miles. So, to have 563 vehicles, which is what we’ve got in the fleet now, is a lot of vehicles. So, to sort of counter that, we are trying to reduce the fleet where we can. So what we want to do is work with different directorates and departments across the council to see how we can reduce their fleet because actually reducing their fleet also means less cost to us in terms of transitioning vehicles to electric. 

Benoit Laflamme: How do you plan to manage your energy when your fleet becomes decarbonised and at scale? 

Chris Demetriou: We’re in the main depot here now. We’ve got parking space of about 200 vehicles. So you know hopefully by 2030 all the vehicles on this site will be fully electric. This is our operator’s license site as well. So all our HV vehicles have to live here and this is the site where ultimately the big batteries will live. So for us it’s trying to see how we can tap into that into these vehicles and tap into that energy in these vehicles and use it across this building. We’ve got two refuge collection vehicles which are vehicle grid enabled and we are currently conducting a trial to see how we discharge energy from these vehicles at the moment into the building. But actually can we, when regulations allow, can we put it back into the grid? Could we create enough energy here to trade it back to the grid? That’s our ultimate goal. Hopefully in the next year or two. Because we’re investing so heavily now in vehicles and infrastructure, we are trying to future proof at the same time and for us vehicle-to-grid is going to be the ultimate energy solution for this building, maybe for the local area. So again, we completely decarbonize this building. We’ve got no gas whatsoever. We’ve got solar PVs on the roof. We’ve got a new high voltage substation which cost over a million pounds to build a few years ago. We want to completely decarbonize this building. We want to use the energy. We want to make sure that we can tap into the batteries in these big vehicles cuz ultimately that it is energy on wheels. So that is for us the journey really. 

Benoit Laflamme: What advice would you give to other local authorities or municipalities who are starting on their decarbonization journey? 

Chris Demetriou: If we’re giving advice to those who maybe’ve not started their journey yet, I’d probably say stick with the low hanging fruit or target the low hanging fruit. So you know we did that. We knew the vehicles that lived on a council site overnight and we’ve got six or seven council sites. Nothing as big as this. With other sites where you got 20, 30 vehicles parked there. We know these vehicles are parked there overnight. So in theory, they’re parked there overnight. You know, you can transition them, cars and vans first. You can put chargers in. They don’t have to be expensive DC chargers again because they’re parked overnight. So that’s the low hanging fruit. And we also use telematics to know where the vehicles are going. And again, that helps with that low hanging fruit transition. How are you dealing with vehicles that spend the night at your depot? 

One of the bigger problems that we’ve got and no doubt others across the UK have got the same problems is we’ve got half the fleet which goes home overnight. So drivers take them home and home is not necessarily South End or Islington or you know around the corner. It could be places like South End, Milton Keynes, etc. How do we transition them? So we’re about to kick off a trial of about 20 or 30 champion drivers who want an electric van who have got a driveway. So where they have, we’ll install a charger on their property. We’ll re-charge the energy back to us and obviously we’ll give them if we can like a van and you know there’s a lot more options out in terms of that van electric van option than there was a few years ago. So they’ll be our champions, but we’ve got drivers who live in Milton Keynes who don’t have a driveway, maybe live on a third story flat. The problem is what do we do for them? How do we transition their vehicles? And that’s probably the same problem that, you know, lots of us up and down the country who have vans are going to need a solution for, and actually we’re probably going to need an individual solution for each driver who doesn’t have that luxury of having a driveway. So to tackle that again we’re using telematics. If we know a housing repairs driver is working on an estate maybe two, three times a week then we can try and see if we can install a destination charger there ‘cause we know he’s parking there for a few hours and that could be one way to charge his vehicle. We can also give him an e-card, so we currently work with Allstar so we can give drivers an Allstar card. Ideally, we don’t really want them topping up on an expensive motorway. But it is just a bit of a stop gap until you know there’s more infrastructure available. 

Again, we can offer these drivers the opportunity to come here and other depots. We’ve got both AC and DC chargers to charge their vehicles. So there are a few options but again for drivers who don’t have a driveway and live maybe further afield it is trying to find an individual solution for them. 

Benoit Laflamme: What’s your approach to infrastructure sharing? 

Chris Demetriou: And another thing we’re doing is opening up our chargers here our DC chargers for commercial organizations to share that infrastructure with them. So we know it is costly to install chargers and if they haven’t got that capital cost to do so now, then they can come here and use our chargers and we won’t charge ridiculous rates. It’s just helping other commercial organizations and contractors to make that transition into electric vehicles and we’re happy to do that. We’re about to kick off a trial with the Met Police who are going to be bringing a few vehicles here and we’ll see how that develops. For us, we’ve got the infrastructure out, we’ve paid for it. We’re not really doing this to generate any income per se, but actually, if there’s organizations who were thinking about it or thinking that it’s too expensive to install expensive DC chargers and actually maybe if you can open up your chargers to them, then actually it could help pay for the chargers over time as well. 

Actually there is a real lack of having the ability to charge bigger vehicles across the UK across London and that’s where we want to help with really so in particular we want to help commercial organizations bring their vehicles here get them charged up and off they go and likewise we want the same so we need the resilience here. If we have a power outage how do I get a 26 ton electric refuge collection vehicle charged? I can’t get it charged so we do need other local authorities. We do need other organizations to start thinking about making that transition ‘cause it will help us as well really. 

Benoit Laflamme: What are some of the pains you’ve experienced early in your transition? 

Chris Demetriou: It’s a difficult one that. We’ve had a lot of pain with electric vehicles over 3 and a half ton because a lot of them are bespoke vehicles and a lot of them are generation one vehicles really and we’re just heading towards gen two vehicles. So we bought our first Dennis e-collect refuge collection vehicles 5 years ago and they were really problematic. So they were more here parked in the depot off the road than they were on the road. So back and forth back and forth back and forth for quite a long while. But now we’re in a better place with Dennis and with these vehicles because we’ve almost gone through the pain of trying to work out what the problems are and you know half the time we didn’t know what the problems are. So you’d get a driver come to the counter here in the workshop and say the vehicle won’t work or the vehicle won’t charge and it’s like what do we do? Where do we start? So, we’d ring up Dennis and say the vehicle won’t charge and they’d look in the system remotely and say, “Oh, it’s not the vehicle, it’s the charger.” But half the time it is the vehicle. But, you know, everything needs a firmware update. It’s trying to understand what the problems are. So, you know, we’ve had 100 years of diesel vehicles here and our a diesel vehicle in a workshop. You know, our technician can identify the problem within minutes. With an electric, it’s like where do you start really? 

Benoit Laflamme: What are some of the biggest fears you’re facing when operating zero emission vehicles? 

Chris Demetriou: Not really understanding what issues are and how you deal with those issues. And again, we’ve been through that pain. So, we can help in terms of saying, “Right, you could do this, you can do this or look out for this, look out for that.” And that’s what I’ve been doing personally. But it’s still a fear. And it’s a fear because it’s still quite expensive to buy, these large refuge collection vehicles. They still cost £380,500,000 each. So, you know, it’s a big dilemma of getting it right. And we’ve got a big responsibility. We know we’re a local authority. It’s taxpayers money ultimately, and these are frontline vehicles, they are used every single day. If I can’t get waste collected, if I can’t get a child to school, it’s a big problem. And the more electric vehicles we get through the door, the less reliance we have on diesel vehicles getting us out of a hole. And we we don’t really want that, you know, we want these vehicles to work. 

Benoit Laflamme: What’s your relationship like with vehicle manufacturers? What requests would you make to them? 

Chris Demetriou: We learned a lot in terms of who we can rely on and on who we can go forward with. So I’ve had this thing again over the last few years of using different suppliers, manufacturers, OEMs, just a test of order. So I’ve not bought a fleet of vehicles just yet because I want to test all of the suppliers and actually the winner of who provides the best vehicle after sales will get the rest of our business. And touch wood a lot of them have been really good. But we’ve had some horror stories and it wouldn’t be fair for me to mention the OEMs or suppliers who maybe let us down, but for me there are some at the moment we just wouldn’t go back with really. But yeah, we’ve got a good relationship with most of them. I think Islington as a brand we’re quite high profile in everything that we do. We’re quite innovative. So it is really testing the water at the moment and in terms of who can really perform the best, who’s got the best vehicles, who’s got the best after sales and we’ll probably go forward with our preferred supplier. We’ll probably make that choice in the next couple of years really, like right, these are the vehicles now we want to move forward with. My technicians get a little bit frustrated with me at some point because we’re using, you know, we’re using different suppliers, different vehicles and it’s trying to get them established and get them used to all these different suppliers and different bits of kit and different bits of vehicles and yeah, it’s not massively helpful where we’ve had, three or four or five particular brands over the years. Now we’ve got a lot more. Like I said, because we’re trying to test for one and it’s a bit frustrating for them, but, they understand why we’re doing that. And at the same time they’re learning different problems as well. So in a odd sort of way you know I’m helping them with their learning by using different bits of kits, different bits of vehicles and different suppliers. 

Benoit Laflamme: What kind of software helps you better manage your fleet as you transition to zero emissions? 

Chris Demetriou: I would like the big OEMs to start thinking about vehicle-to-grid. I can’t go to Renault or Mercedes or Ford and say, “Actually, I want to buy, you know, 20, 30 of your vehicles, but I want them to be vehicle grid enabled.” I’ve tried and they just won’t they don’t have the confidence to do that yet. And, you know, you hear stories about what’s that? What’s the reason why? Because are they worried about, you know, warranties and battery degradation? And I don’t know. That’s for them to really understand and find out. So because of that, I’m using SMEs to do or provide the vehicles that I want. Like I said, I’ve got two refuge collection vehicles which are V2G enabled. I’m going to upcycle or repower our buses and we’ve got 45 of them and they all are going to be V2G enabled. We’re spending a lot of money on these big vehicles, and it’s how we use these vehicles as a commodity. The big HGVs are still double the cost of a diesel or a petrol equivalent and actually if we’re paying you know £350-£400,000 for refuge collection which are electric, we need to get more out of them, and if we can get more out of them because you know because they are energy on wheels and we can use tap into that energy, we need to do that. Also on top of that we’d like to see smaller more powerful batteries especially with our vans. So, you know, we’ve got this problem like I said earlier with vans going home, you know, each night and still, you know, vans might be able to do especially your midsize vans 120, 150, 160 mi, you know, if we can get if we can get these vans to 200, 250, 300, it just makes that that that need to charge just, it just alleviates some of that pain. 

Benoit Laflamme: Thank you for watching this episode of the BetterFleet Academy, where we hear valuable insights to help mission critical fleets transition to zero emission vehicles. Please share it with your network and let us know if there’s anything in particular you’d like us to cover in future episodes. Stay tuned for more.