As part of their commitment to a hydrogen-based strategy, Aberdeen City Council has recently awarded a significant contract for the conversion of an initial 35 vehicles to ULEMCo. The award has been made following a process conducted via the TPPL and NEPO HGV procurement Framework Agreement, for conversion to a mixture of refuse and commercial vehicles operated by the Council. This is part of a £10m plan to renew the fleet, bringing greener and more efficient vehicles to the council’s operational services department. Their use will cut 1,450kg of CO2 per vehicle per year or 21.75 tonnes per year once all the vehicles are in service..
Amanda Lyne, Managing Director at ULEMCo, said: “A lot of attention and public funding support is focussed on looking for zero-emission solutions, but we cannot afford to wait for these to be commercially available, we must start transitioning to carbon-free energy using the full toolkit to achieve CO2 reduction immediately.”
Councillor Jenny Laing, Leader of Aberdeen City Council, said: “I would say to local authorities that are thinking about moving to hydrogen technology, that it not only helps you with the economic targets that you may have, but it will certainly help with the environmental targets that each and every local authority in Scotland has set themselves.”
The converted vehicles will create significant demand for the growing Hydrogen Hub in the region, supporting the Council’s commitment to deliver a thriving hydrogen economy in the area, and creating the demand for more highly skilled jobs. Part of the contract allows for vehicles to be converted locally, which both contributes to employment in Aberdeen and improves the logistics of moving the vehicles to Liverpool for the upgrade. Hydrogen Hubs make sense in consolidating demand, creating scale and making hydrogen a cost-competitive solution for the decarbonisation of back-to-base fleet operations.
