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The journey to decarbonising emergency service fleets requires leadership and an approach that involves not only different parts of individual organisations to pull together but joined up thinking at a national level to prevent continually reinventing the wheel and wasting valuable time and resources.
Carl Christie leads the Fleet Strategy Team at Cenex, an independent not for profit research technology organisation whose mission is to accelerate the transition to net zero transport. He spoke to me about how Cenex has worked extensively with local authorities and more recently with emergency services.
He agrees that the road to net zero shouldn’t involve every police force, fire and rescue service and ambulance service doing the same thing over and over. He has found that when Cenex works with individual services, they all need to ask the same questions of their capability both in terms of fleet and estate. The methodology remains the same even if the specifics change based on geography and local circumstances.
“We need to have a nationally consistent approach. Services have their own unique challenges but the overarching set of questions that they all need to answer are the same.”
One of the perennial problems that inhibits the emergency services ability to benefit from a joined up national approach is central government fragmentation. Police and fire come under the Home Office with scrutiny and inspection provided by HMICFRS; the ambulance service comes under NHS England and is regulated by the Care Quality Commission. And each one has its own national body – NFCC, NPCC and AACE.
The policy comes from an entirely different place with the drive to net zero sitting in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero with its own Secretary of State, Ed Miliband driving the agenda forward.
Carl agrees that this is the crux of the challenge but says that there is much to be learned from the NHS England set up, with the strategic direction clearly laid out and running through to individual trusts. It is less clear-cut in police and fire where the NFCC and NPCC have their own sustainability leads at chief level as well as groups operating at a more tactical level including the National Police Estates Group and the Emergency Services Environment and Sustainability Working Group.
In March, I attended a Greenfleet event and came away with five steps to rethinking green emergency fleets, one of which was about leadership. Carl talks about the fleet and infrastructure strategy that Cenex developed with Essex County Fire and Rescue Service and Essex Police, which led to a chief officer led zero emissions vehicle board being set up to ensure it is implemented.
“I think there is an incredible appetite to act and an increasing acknowledgement that this isn’t just about environmental benefits, it’s about operational continuity as well.”
Getting leaders on board and thinking about fleet decarbonisation can be helped by good data. In a separate piece of work for Norfolk and Suffolk Constabularies, Carl says that as part of the development of the EV charging infrastructure strategy, they did a full assessment of telematics data for 900 vehicles and 500k journeys to set out real world requirements and the best charging infrastructure to support them.
“You can have perceptions about how those vehicles operate but it won’t always match reality. The charging needs across the fleet are not consistent, they depend on the vehicle and the operational needs. You need to do the work and get into the detail to work out the actual power needs, the costs and the overall demand on the power grid.”
Telematics can provide information about fuel consumption as well as journey data which helps to understand carbon emissions, but Carl says that this can be done at a macro level without delving into individual vehicle level data and is a great starting point for any infrastructure charging strategy.
“Frequent small charging is good to de-risk operations because it means a vehicle has enough energy for a shift and it helps estates because the vehicles then don’t need ultra rapid charging at the end of each shift.”
In terms of emergency services working out what vehicles to buy, Cenex has developed a tool to help fleet managers make informed decisions about procurement by forecasting their potential whole-life cost and emission impacts compared to a conventional diesel or petrol vehicle. The zero emission fleet transition tool or ZEFT is free to use and while it was designed for NHS fleets and commissioned by the NHS, the tool is in the public domain and its advice is relevant and available for the wider emergency services to use.
Carl advises emergency services who want to decarbonise their fleets to look at the ZEFT tool and sort out their data. “Get a good understanding of your current fleet operations and make sure your data is up to scratch and you’re using the data in an insightful way and not just collecting it.” He also offers a second piece of advice. “Go and speak to someone else who has already done it.”
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