I’ve long said that a key part of our transition of motor vehicles away from oil and towards much cleaner alternatives would be fleets operated by large corporate, government, and other entities. My reasoning was simple: The concentrated decision making and capital management of those organizations, plus their traditional focus on cost reductions and disaster avoidance, all make them predisposed to experiment with test fleets of new vehicles and then deploy them in large numbers. The fact that they get a PR boost from greenwashing the whole effort isn’t exactly a hindrance, either.

For a concrete example, consider the US Post Office. They operate a very large fleet of vehicles of various sizes, many of which are used locally on mail delivery routes. They would leap at a chance to employ EV trucks/vans on their local routes, assuming the vehicles could be purchased or leased for an acceptable price. The USPS is a particularly good fit for such an effort simply because they have so much flexibility in where and how they use the new vehicles; I’m guessing that they could very easily live with a per-charge range of 80 to 100 miles for local routes. If an EV with a per-charge range of, say, 500 miles, was too expensive, they simply wouldn’t buy those models until the price came down.

Along these lines, we have the article from Green Car Congress, New Study Shows Fleet Purchases of More Efficient, Lower-Carbon Vehicles Can Spur Major Decreases in Emissions and Fuel Consumption:

The “greening” of corporate vehicle fleets presents an opportunity to move a substantial number of highly efficient, clean fuel vehicles onto the road in a relatively short timeframe with results that are both environmentally and economically positive, according to a new report by the Sustainable Transportation and Communities group at the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), an Ann Arbor-based nonprofit research organization.

In the report, The Economic and Environmental Impacts of a Corporate Fleet Vehicle Purchase Program, the group examines the economic and environmental contributions of converting corporate fleets from gasoline to compressed natural gas (CNG) and hybrid vehicles.

Using AT&T’s vehicle replacement program (a 10-year program to buy or convert 15,000 of its vehicles to cleaner technology, earlier post) as a case study, CAR estimated the impact of buying or converting 15,000 vehicles to cleaner technology over a 10-year period. Replacing fleet vehicles powered by standard internal combustion engines with either hybrid vehicles or vans and trucks converted to CNG could reduce gasoline consumption by more than 49 million gallons during the next 10 years and trim carbon dioxide emissions by 211,000 metric tons total over that period. In addition, the AT&T replacement program will help support an average of 1,000 vehicle-manufacturing related jobs each year from 2009-2013.

The report is here [30 page PDF].

A couple of things to note here:

  • The report, which I’ve skimmed but not read, relied heavily on the kind of results framing shown above–doing X will avoid as much in CO2 emissions as is produced by Y vehicles. As many people have pointed out, this can be extremely misleading, as it sounds like doing X will contribute much more to solving the climate chaos mess than it really does. This report, in particular, goes the extra mile to play games with data, in that it compares the CO2 emissions savings from vans with the total emissions of cars, which further inflates the numbers. In fact, the report doesn’t make it clear exactly what base is used for the comparison, other than to say it’s what AT&T is currently using.
  • Every study I’ve seen of real-world fleet use of CNG vehicles says that their reduction of CO2 over a comparable gasoline or diesel vehicle is about 25%. Given the size of reduction needed in our CO2 emissions, plus the cost (detailed in the report) to build an infrastructure for refueling CNG vehicles, CNG doesn’t seem to make sense as a motor vehicle fuel in the US at this time. And that’s without taking into account the fact that we’d be creating yet another fossil fuel dependency and placing a gigantic bet that the current natural gas glut will last more than a few years. I’m not at all comfortable with that bet, in light of the environmental issues arising with water pollution from the technology being used in some fields, like Marcellus, and the overall uncertainty of how much gas we’ll be able to extract from such fields for the next few decades. I’d much rather see the US use natural gas for electricity generation and space heating (but only until we can move off those uses, as well), and prevent transportation from competing with those uses for the natural gas supply.[1]

[1] If you haven’t read about the water issues associated with “frakking”, the technique used to exploit some of these natural gas fields, try Googling “marcellus frakking water pollution”.


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