Dundee City Council
In 2011, an air quality meeting highlighted the severe situation around air pollution in Dundee and the need to adopt an improved, city-wide approach to air pollution management, which has evolved into a major EV focus.
This meeting tied in with the launch of the first Nissan Leafs, which were later adopted into Dundee’s fleet in the first ever phase of deploying electric vehicles in 2011. The introduction of the first four fully electric cars was also supported by the first depot chargers being installed at one of the depots. Since then, Dundee City Council has installed charging infrastructure at multiple council depots and offices to support its full-electric carpool scheme. In addition to this, charging infrastructure at construction, waste management and social work depots have been built to support individual services.
A milestone in the electrification progress within the fleet was the introduction of electric minibuses, sweepers and RCVs. It was part of the council’s strategy to deploy several different types of electric HGVs to put these new technologies to the test and examine what would work well with our operations and what charging infrastructure to expand to support wider deployment of these HGVs in the future. The electric fleet has been continuously growing for over a decade and is now close to 250 vehicles (around 35% of the whole fleet).
Recently, the focus of our projects has matured from strengthening our electric fleet and providing a strong foundation of EV infrastructure to transitioning to the sole use of renewable energy and moving away from dependence on the grid. As part of our decarbonisation strategy, we have redeveloped two of our depot sites, which now feature photovoltaics systems further supported by energy storage units. Read more here.