ULEMCo, the hydrogen fuelled vehicle pioneer, has been awarded a major fleet-wide contract by Aberdeen City Council (ACC) for its hydrogen dual-fuel utility vehicle conversions. The contract, initially for 35 vehicles, is a strong signal of commitment to a hydrogen-based strategy, and will see the Council operating the largest fleet of hydrogen vehicles in the UK.
ULEMCo has supplied heavy duty vehicles to ACC previously, and these have been running successfully on the roads for over a year. This new order, part of a Fleetwide Conversion commitment includes further refuse collection vehicles and road sweepers, but also a wide variety of other utility trucks including tippers and tractors. It clearly demonstrates the flexibility of ULEMCo’s H2ICED® hydrogen dual-fuel technology in offering a practical route to saving up to 40% of CO2 emissions across whole fleets today.
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.
Having benefited from investment by Edinburgh-based angel investment syndicate Equity Gap, and with Scotland’s national economic development agency Scottish Enterprise as a shareholder, ULEMCo sees Aberdeen and the rest of Scotland as key areas for investment for their conversion centre roll-out programme, and therefore extremely important to facilitating the rapid growth of hydrogen deployment, and delivering cleaner mobility in Scottish cities.
ACC is targeting the assets that are hard to decarbonise such as tractors and tippers, as well as converting further refuse vehicles and sweepers in lieu of any commercially available ‘zero-emission’ alternatives, which are not expected for some time yet.
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