Interview with Philip Mortensen, Guro Wensaas and  Romeo Apetrei-Thomassen, City of Oslo - November 2020

Public works can often be a source of noise and air pollution. But thanks to forward-thinking procurement, Oslo has created the world’s first construction site with 100% electric machines.

Oslo is a city undergoing a facelift. The Norwegian capital’s mid-century boulevards and squares are being brought into the modern world in a more people-friendly way. One of the many procedures in this makeover is Olav V street, just a few paces from the city hall.

Passers-by might huff and tut at the inconvenience of yet another construction site, but this one is special – It’s zero emissions. A first of its kind in the world, all the machinery – diggers, excavators and loaders - is electric. And according to Philip Mortensen, the Senior Adviser at Oslo’s Climate Agency, bystanders notice the reduction in ambient noise.

“It’s obvious that it’s quieter and it’s less polluted,” he says. His colleague from the Central Procurement Department, Guro Wensaas, notes that some coffee shops on Olav V Street even left their doors open.
The pair are part of the team that brought this unique zero-emission construction site, or Zemcons, into being. Mortensen developed the policy framework for the construction site and Wensaas led the development of standard requirements for construction work on Oslo’s Zemcons.

The Olav V Street project serves as the demonstration project in the Zemcons group of the EU-funded Big Buyers Initiative (BBI) and has provided much valuable information about the practicalities of plug-in public works. The group also hosts Amsterdam, Brussels Mobility, Budapest, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Trondheim and Lisbon.
For Mortensen, it’s clear that businesses in the surrounding area aren’t best pleased with a construction site on their doorstep, even a quiet one. But the workers and machinery operators on the site gave priceless feedback. “They report that the construction site is a quieter - It makes it a safer place to work. It’s easier to communicate between the workers,” says Mortensen. What’s more, the workers are happy to be on such a historic site.

“The fact that the project is a Zemcons project is something that motivates the workers,” Mortensen says. “The people operating the machines think it’s a fun and interesting experience to have this kind of equipment. They feel like they’re taking part in a transition.”

The project, which is turning the street in this office-dense part of the city into car-free, people-friendly plaza, is due to wrap up early next year. The team however hope this won’t be the last Zemcons site in the world and hope their experience will come in handy for other cities in Europe.
Notably, says Mortensen, the project revealed that there are pre-requisites cities should put in place before embarking on such an ambitious project. “You need to do a lot of work on the ground if you want to do a demonstration project in this early stage,” he says. Looking at the electricity grid to see if there is potential supply for the site’s machines is crucial, as is identifying a supplier for the machines themselves.

Each machine comes with its quirks, too – Mortensen describes machines that burned out charging modules due to an inconsistent electricity supply, diggers and have limited mobility due to the position of the cable, much like household items that have to be plugged in. “But”, he adds, “you vacuum in your home with a cable attached to the vacuum cleaner, so there’s no reason why you can’t do the digging with a cable, too.” 

These issues can be shared with the six other cities in the BBI group, but for Wensaas, the real benefit of the group comes in sending a signal to the market. “We might go forward and do this pilot and try new requirements and develop a small market for zero-emissions machinery, but alone we are not enough to signal to the industry to start serial production,” she says. “And through that, lower the price for us and others.”

And others intend to follow. In the BBI group alone, most plan to turn their construction sites into Zemcons within the next 10 years.  This is not to say there aren’t potential challenges for the implementation of zero-emission construction sites. “Oslo has quite a developed electricity grid,” says Mortensen. “This might not be the case for other cities.” Detailed planning of the demonstration site is required, including forward thinking for future developments to use the large amount of electricity used on the construction site. Mortensen even suggests that partial Zemcons could be a solution on sites where a large amount of electricity afterwards would be redundant.

In Oslo, the scope for new Zemcons is growing. Romeo Apetrei-Thomassen, Quality, Environmental and Discipline Manager at the City of Oslo, explains that two sections of the municipality are set to merge, bringing their total property portfolio to over 2.5 million M2. This means that there will be no stopping the momentum of Zemcons. “We need to tell the market that this is coming. The faster you change your profile, the better it’s going to be for society,” he says.

Soon, Olav V Street will be full of trees and people enjoying the outdoors. But unlike many other works to transform streets into places for people, the process for this site has been clean, green, quiet and has laid down the groundwork for more cities to consider their own zero-emissions construction sites.

Interview with Richard Brabers, Procurer for the City of Rotterdam - October 2020

At a time when cities’ top priority is reducing emissions, gas-guzzling garbage trucks are at the very top of the list in terms of polluting vehicles. But the city of Rotterdam has decided to tackle this issue head-on by purchasing a pair of state-of-the-art electric garbage trucks.

The 28-ton, gold-painted EMOSS ZE looks like a standard garbage truck, but glides almost silently through the streets of the Netherlands’ second city thanks to its electric motor.

The trucks join Rotterdam’s growing fleet of electric vehicles, which includes 527 electric scooters and bicycles, 213 electric and 204 hybrid passenger cars, 37 electric vans, two larger electric sweepers and three smaller sweepers. It’s safe to say that with this collection, the city is committed to its goal of being emission-free in ten years’ time.

“Every city has a huge challenge to have a zero-emission fleet by 2030,” says Richard Brabers, a category buyer for mobility at the Rotterdam city council. With this goal in mind for many other cities, the Big Buyers Initiative has come at the right time. The scheme aims to bring together cities and public purchasing bodies into groups to help align purchasing power, share knowledge and innovations and develop a joint statement of demand and lessons learned on procuring heavy duty vehicles.

“Rotterdam has maybe some more experience than other cities, but we must help each other,” says Brabers.

With the city’s electric garbage trucks now having driven many miles and emptied many bins, Brabers and his colleague Paul van Emmerik have learned a lot about the reality of powering a 28-ton behemoth with green power. “The problem is really the charging,” says van Emmerik, the city’s manager of sustainable fleetcare. “It’s all about charging, and the renewable energy you want to have, and you have to be able to stock it over the seasons.”

“The cost of the charging infrastructure is also expensive,” adds Brabers. Clearly, making sure that a service vehicle in operation on a daily basis has enough battery is a much different challenge from charging a personal vehicle – and this is before factoring in the strain from Rotterdam’s fleet of electric public transport vehicles. “They have a lot of power already, and still they cannot cope with the power they need,” adds van Emmerik.

While Rotterdam has a fairly developed electric vehicle charging network, other cities in the Big Buyers group do not. But the collaboration allows for the other municipalities to adjust their future procurement plans accordingly.

And the knowledge-sharing permitted by the Big Buyers group also revealed other challenges to overcome for cities’ fleets to become fully electric in the coming years.

Following several online dialogues organised by buyers from cities across Europe with suppliers of e-trucks, it’s clear that the e-trucks are not equally available across Europe. E-trucks are sometimes only available at dealers who have the knowledge and the support.

Van Emmerik agrees, and says that the cities themselves also need some experience with electric vehicles so they know what to ask for when putting in an order. “We have our own department with our own working places where we can service the trucks, so we have the knowledge from ourselves,” he says. “If you have to rely on a dealer, the dealer doesn’t have that knowledge. You have to learn it for yourself, first.”

The Big Buyers Initiative provided the perfect occasion for this. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 crisis limited the opportunities for study visits and collaboration, which was slightly disappointing for Brabers. He visited an Aebi Schmidt factory in south Germany just prior to the onset of the crisis in March, before the group’s work shifted online. “It is also good to see the factory location and it’s more interesting than a webinar,” he says. Despite this, he insists that the webinars still provided a good learning opportunity.

Following the group’s final meeting on October 23, the pair from Rotterdam reflect on its impact and the path ahead for electric heavy-duty vehicles. Although still in its early days and relying on technology that might require further development, Brabers and van Emmerik see the shift to full-electric on the horizon. Even private logistics companies in the Netherlands are getting in on the action, with companies adding to their fleets of electric trucks.

“As a buyer from a government, we must give the right signal. We must stimulate the market. With the Big Buyers group, we give attention, we motivate each other,” says Brabers. With a growing participation in the group, he hopes that information sharing and collaboration will bring cities towards their goals of carbon neutrality in the coming years.

“We have to make big steps, but if we do it together, it’s easier,” says Brabers.