Cardiff Capital Region are looking for innovative technology for zero emission Council owned fleets

Find out more about each challenge below:

1. On-site renewable energy for EV fleet charging at council depots

CCR are looking for technology providers who can offer solutions to optimise on-site renewable energy for EV fleet charging at council depots for deployment at TRL5 and above. Any solutions should be scalable and be applicable to other Local Authorities in the region.

One such example is Merthyr Tydfil County Borough who have a fleet of approximately 140 vehicles with a mix of cars, vans, and HGVs. With a drive to reduce operational costs, they have a requirement for all their cars and vans to be zero emission by 2025 and 2030 for HGVs.

Merthyr are looking at how they can increase their self-consumption of on-site solar energy at a depot level through either physical or digital solutions that relate to the management of renewable energy for EV charging.

Example solutions could include:

• Energy storage that stores solar during the day to allow charging during evening hours
• Smart management and scheduling of vehicles so that they can charge off solar during daylight hours
• Increasing renewable energy at the site with relevant storage and digital technologies
• Smart management of the renewable energy system
• Ideas around microgrids

You can find out more about this opportunity and apply here.  Closing date is 6th December 2021.

2. Digital twins for management of large-scale renewable energy

CCR are looking for data driven approaches to deployment of future vehicles and infrastructure for zero emission vehicles.

As an example, Monmouthshire County Council has several depots that operate different vehicles and services. These depots are often grid and space constrained and it will be hard to convert them for 100% zero emission vehicle use in the future.

Monmouthshire CC have a 5 MW solar farm already built and wish to relocate all fleet services to a large, centralised depot next door to the solar farm. They have a full range of vehicles from Cars, Vans, Passenger Transport and Refuse collection Vehicles. The site would also be an HGV MOT testing centre.

With 5MW of energy to play with and many different technology choices on the table, such as EV and Hydrogen they are looking for digital twin solutions that will help them utilise the renewable power generated in the most efficient way and avoid grid upgrades where possible. Some of the required functionality of the digital twin is below.

• Run scenarios on vehicle deployment and optimisation
• Evaluate charge points and H2 infrastructure needed to make all vehicles zero emission
• Power depot of renewable energy – how much is needed?
• What microgrids would help the depot
• How could the model be expanded and adapted for other local authorities in CCR

A flexible approach will be needed to allow extrapolation to make data driven decisions about future procurement in a timely manner.

You can find out more about this opportunity and apply here.  Closing date is 8th December 2021.

3. Zero emission auxiliary energy supplies for utility and community vehicles

CCR are looking for integrated energy solutions to enhance the energy capacity of zero emission vehicles to allow auxiliary energy usage.

For example, Monmouthshire council wants to switch their own fleet to electric but have some challenging operations for vehicles that require significant on-board energy use.

The council offers a meals-on-wheels service and wants to utilise a system to allow meals to be heated at the point of service, but this requires several on-board microwaves to heat on demand. This requires an increase of energy of around 5-10 kWh. Other utility vehicles such as parks and recreation have similar needs as the auxiliary equipment moves to electric rather than petrol.

The auxiliary energy supply must be easy to charge/refill once back at the depot and ideally via the vehicle system. It must be capable of providing a pure sine wave AC output and should be as light as possible to avoid creating any gross vehicle weight issues and have a relatively small volume It must be zero emission at the point of use.

Solutions should:

• Work across multiple vehicle types
• Be cost competitive and have a long cycle life
• Could be battery or hydrogen powered but must be zero emission
• Have a useable energy output of 7-10kWh
• Be easy to use
• Retrofittable onto existing fleet
• Able to charge/refill at depots without the need for extensive infrastructure upgrades

You can find out more about this opportunity and apply here.  Closing date is 8th December 2021.

4. Optimising vehicles and charging infrastructure for council fleet to transition to EVs.

Through this IX challenge, CCR are looking for digital solutions to enable the right procurement decisions to be made for the optimisation of vehicles and charging infrastructure to transition to electric vehicles.

The council has data on the vehicle types, the mileage that each undertakes per day, the type of work they undertake and where they are based. One of the council’s services has a predominantly return to home operation with 90 out of the 95 vehicles being taken home at night.  70% of these homes do not have off street parking suitable for home charging.  Information is also available on all the buildings and land such as offices, schools, libraries, depots and leisure centres where charging points could potentially be located.

The challenge is to develop digital solutions to be able to plan the optimal solution in terms of number and size of vehicles, the exact location and size of each charge point and to model their usage pattern based on shift and route information of each vehicle, this is to avoid the need for unnecessary chargers.

Solution providers using digital twin technology that would allow expansion to other areas would be welcomed along with other innovative solutions.

Any solution should be flexible to allow different scenarios to be run with the ability to identify comparable cost and CO₂ emissions.

Proposals are welcome for:

• Existing market-ready technologies
• Established solutions from other sectors of industry which can be adapted for this application.
• Development proposals based on existing competences.
• Universities and catapults with solutions above TRL 5 +

across industries including automotive, rail, construction and infrastructure, heavy engineering, energy, data and analytics, software providers or from organisations with relevant expertise operating in any industry sector.

You can find out more and apply for this challenge here.  Closing date is 15 December 2021. 

Proposals for each of these challenges are welcome from:

• Existing market-ready technologies
• Established solutions from other sectors of industry which can be adapted for this application.
• Development proposals based on existing competences.
• Universities and catapults with solutions above TRL 5 +

across industries such as Automotive, Rail, Construction and infrastructure, Heavy engineering or Energy.