Fresh from success at this year’s Great British Fleet Awards, Dundee City Council corporate fleet manager Fraser Crichton talks to Simon Harris about 16 years of building a
Fresh from success at this year’s Great British Fleet Awards, Dundee City Council corporate fleet manager Fraser Crichton talks to Simon Harris about 16 years of building a genuinely closed-loop, renewable-powered fleet.
Fraser Crichton has been thinking about electric vehicles and mobility for Dundee City Council for 16 years – long enough, he admits, that the number itself gives him pause. What started as a bid to prove that a large public sector fleet could go electric has evolved into something considerably more ambitious: a self-sufficient, closed-loop energy system in which solar generation, second-life battery storage and vehicle charging are all designed to work together, on a site that also happens to service and maintain a 750-strong council fleet.
The starting point, Crichton says, was air quality rather than vehicles as such. Transport accounted for a striking 78% of Dundee’s pollution, and the council wanted to demonstrate that decarbonising a fleet at city scale was achievable, not just as a pilot but as a genuine, city-wide proof of concept. What followed was 16 years of incremental additions – “adding bits to the jigsaw” as Crichton puts it – shaped as much by outside scrutiny as by strategy.
The most striking recent addition – solar panels on the roof of the council’s workshop, feeding second-life battery storage, which in turn powers overnight EV charging – emerged directly from a recurring criticism that Crichton faced on the presentation circuit. Fleets could point to renewable-powered charging for their electric vans, cars and bin lorries, critics argued, but the moment those vehicles went in for maintenance, the workshop itself was drawing straight from the grid. “Your fleet’s nearly 40% EV, but you’re still only partially using renewable energy,” was the recurring theme, as Crichton recalls it. “Your cycle isn’t a circle.”
Dundee already had relevant experience to draw on. The council had been running renewable energy hubs with rapid charging and second-life battery storage since 2018, and applied the lessons learned from that earlier work to the workshop project. With the cost of solar continuing to fall, putting panels on a large workshop roof to power the building and its tools was, in Crichton’s words, “relatively easy”. The more interesting problem was what to do with the surplus: in summer, with staff on leave and demand for workshop power lower, excess solar generation risked going to waste – unless it could be redirected to the row of chargers Crichton already had installed across the yard, ready to top up vehicles that often arrive back at the depot around 10% charged. The result, in effect, is a small-scale bi-directional system: battery storage capturing surplus solar energy and releasing it to vehicles when it’s needed.
The batteries themselves are second-life Renault Zoe units, still holding 90-93% of their original capacity, sourced through the specialist storage company Connected Energy. Dundee has had them in operation across seven or eight sites for a decade, with only a single failure – one faulty cell, replaced for around £700. “Given 10 years, that’s not bad,” Crichton says.
Beyond the hardware, he points to an unexpected cultural benefit: engineers who had spent careers working with oil and combustion engines have become invested in understanding an entirely different kind of ecosystem. By his estimate, around 70% of the council’s engineers now drive electric vehicles themselves – a level of buy-in that, once established, tends to spread by word of mouth.
The wider payoff is now feeding back into public pricing. As more of the council’s charging is now genuinely powered by renewables generated on-site, the local authority has been able – in partnership with eVolt – to reduce its rapid charging tariff from 57p to 55p per kWh, and trim two pence off its AC charging rate too.
As a local authority, Crichton notes, Dundee isn’t looking to turn a profit on charging – but for the first time, the economics of the renewable investment are visibly working in the public’s favour.
Two other results from Dundee’s award submission for the Great British Fleet Awards stand out: zero positive alcohol readings since the rollout of in-cab breathalyser interlocks, and a 21.25% reduction in accidents attributed to a genuine cultural shift in driver behaviour.
The interlock programme began life as a response to EU legislation on driver alcohol-testing for professional vehicles – something the UK, outside the EU, was in no hurry to adopt, but which Crichton judged inevitable given the reliance of manufacturers such as Dennis Eagle, which supplies Dundee’s refuse fleet, on the wider European market. Implementation took roughly a year, deliberately involving a small working group of around seven people, spanning legal, health and safety, and union representation, rather than a large, unwieldy committee. The council was careful to frame the initiative around driver welfare rather than punishment: a driver who had been drinking the night before a shift might be over the limit without realising it, putting themselves and colleagues in the vehicle at risk. Crucially, Crichton says the council’s first response to a positive test was never “you’re in trouble”, but “how can we help you?”. The technology is now on 14 vehicles, planned to rise to 25 by the first quarter of 2027, and Crichton expects drug-testing to be the logical next step – though he acknowledges that, unlike alcohol, drug traces can remain detectable in the body for far longer, adding legal and practical complexity the council hasn’t yet fully communicated to its workforce.
The accident reduction followed a similarly data-led approach. By combining 12 years of tracking and insurance data, the council identified accident hotspots and specific driving patterns – such as vehicles consistently running 5mph over the limit on Dundee’s Kingsway ring road – and took the findings directly to drivers, framed around protecting their own licences and reputations rather than as criticism of individual competence. The more significant discovery, however, was about where the council’s attention had been misdirected. Historically, driver training had focused heavily on the roughly 100-200 staff qualified to drive heavy vehicles. But the data showed that smaller vans and cars – driven by a much larger pool of council drivers – were actually generating more incidents. “It was a shift to understand that it was all the drivers,” Crichton says, not just those already receiving formal CPC training.
Dundee’s experience running parallel smart-charging trials at two very different depots reinforced a lesson that Crichton returns to repeatedly: assumptions don’t transfer between sites, even within the same fleet. One trial site, covering construction services, ran 80 short-journey EVs on relatively predictable, planned routes; a second, much smaller site of five vehicles supported pest control work, with irregular hours and unpredictable job locations.
Intuitively, Crichton expected the construction site to be easier to optimise and the pest control site to be genuinely erratic. In practice, pest control drivers turned out to have surprisingly consistent charging habits, just built around a different rhythm to the working day. The real lesson, he says, wasn’t about vehicles or routes at all, but about people: successful rollout depends on understanding how each team actually operates, and bringing staff into the process rather than dictating charging schedules to them. Now expanded well beyond its original 70-vehicle trial toward 250-300 vehicles, the programme’s underlying principle remains communication and buy-in.
Dundee’s approach to procurement has shifted markedly over 16 years. Rather than leasing, the council is increasingly moving to buy vehicles outright, borrowing at low public-sector rates to fund its 750-vehicle fleet directly. For Crichton, the driving principle is control – over the assets, over charging behaviour and costs, and over long-term planning – at a time when leasing and hire costs are rising. It has also reframed how the council deals with manufacturers: rather than simply buying vehicles, the council now expects OEMs to commit to longer-term partnership, including data-sharing on vehicle-to-grid capability and battery performance, as part of major framework agreements covering hundreds of vehicles over several years.
Dundee has a target of full electrification by 2035, and Crichton is candid about where the real risk lies: not budget, grid capacity or supply chain in the abstract, but the stark cost gap for larger vehicles. An electric refuse collection vehicle currently costs in the region of £450,000, against roughly £250,000 for a diesel equivalent – a gap he hopes will narrow as Chinese manufacturers continue to drive down costs. In the meantime, Dundee is focusing on getting its charging infrastructure ready in advance and considering operational changes – such as moving some refuse rounds from double shifts to single shifts – to make the most of lower-cost overnight, renewably generated power.
Underpinning all of it is a mindset Crichton says has changed more than any specific technology choice: an early focus on which vehicles to buy has given way to a focus on energy first – where it comes from, how much capacity is needed, and what infrastructure will still make sense years down the line. It’s a lesson he offers freely to smaller fleets asking how to replicate Dundee’s approach: start small, expect to make mistakes, put charging infrastructure where staff will actually use it, and resist writing a rigid long-term strategy in a sector moving as fast as this one. “By the time you’ve written the strategy,” he says, “six months later, maybe 10% of it still makes sense!”
