Home Joint energy solutions Logistics and mobility
The solutions presented in the following paragraphs tackle the energy consumption associated with the logistics and mobility topics of both persons and goods.
An industrial park should be located close to the main arterial roads and to the main public transportation lines, but is not always the case: it happens that, as they require major free buildable areas, industrial parks are located in the suburbs of cities and they are not properly linked to the residential districts.
Cooperative solutions towards to better results:
It is a common practice for companies across Europe to organise shuttle busses for their employees to reach the workplace. However, a shared service engaging several companies in the same park would allow a park fleet to operate in an efficient way.
This would guarantee the transport service to their employees, while not being a burden on the companies accounts nor operating in an inefficient way.
The term “carpooling” refers to the arrangement between people to make a regular journey in a single vehicle, typically with each person taking turns to drive the others.
Battery electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles both offer convenient personal mobility with no tailpipe emissions. Their potential to reduce CO2 emissions depends on providing them with from low-carbon source.
The economic impact is related both to a directly diminished cost for fuelling the vehicles, especially if the electricity is produced in-loco exploiting renewable energy sources, and potentially also to a smarter management of the park electric grid if they are integrated in smart grid.
The environmental benefit is directly to the fact that they are characterised by zero tailpipe emissions immediately decreasing pollution in high population density areas. Electric vehicles are not yet extremely common in many EU countries, they could be marketing tool for companies to promote their brand, especially if it can be related to environmentally friendly policies.
This practice, if applied to an industrial park, has the following benefits:
Electric and H2 vehicles are still characterised by high capital cost and in this framework their purchase could take advantage of a cooperative solution: more than one company would participate to acquire them and successively employ them in a joint way.
This could also be a way to promote among company management operatives and employees and foster their further diffusion.
Considering the current and foreseen uptake of electric and H2 based vehicles across Europe, the request for charging points is increasing. At the same time, it is one of the remaining barriers to a wider diffusion of non-fossil fuel-based transportation.
Moreover, one of the most frequent paths in everyday transfers is the home-work-home route and having the opportunity to charge the vehicle while working would represent a strong benefit for employees.
Sharing such installation would be both a way to dampen the costs and a mechanism to integrate the vehicles in a park smart grid, allowing additional flexibility to the internal grid.
Additionally, it would be an incentive for the employee to consider the possibility of purchasing an electric or H2 based vehicle, thus supporting the transition to such kind of mobility.
The possibility of incorporating in the industrial park, a block dedicated to office buildings strongly depends on the manufacturing activities related to each company and its size.
However, it is not uncommon for the manufacturing building(s) to be physically detached from the office one(s) for many different reasons (e.g. sometimes for the well-being of employees in the case of noisy/hazardous production).
In this case, the possibility to foresee a shared building for the office may be present, advantages are summarised below.
Benefits from the implementation of this solution are:
The modern logistics concept and practice is about providing cost and time effective services for commercial activities. This includes the transport of goods, warehousing, inventory, packaging and other administrative activities.
A cooperation towards logistics could take advantage of a shared warehouse to store the goods produced by different companies. At the same time, it could store the incoming raw materials while ready to be shipped externally and before a successive sorting to the various companies.
Such a shared area may take advantage of a simpler and more efficient standardised system, would reduce the effort committed to these activities by the single company and common personnel could work full time in this workplace.
The final objective could be the reduction of the number of travels via the employment of shared means of transport and the above-mentioned shared space.