Brecon Beacons National Park reveals electric transition plan

The clue is in the name: Brecon Beacons National Park Authority.

As a European and global Geopark containing a Unesco world heritage site, the Brecon Beacons authority has every reason to be an environmental leader.

But in its fleet manager Kevin Booker, it also has a three-time electric vehicle Guinness World Record holder.

Booker, fleet manager and IT manager for the past 19 years, is also responsible for renewable energy, green technology and charging infrastructure within the boundaries of the park’s 520sq miles. Never mind blue blood, Booker is green blood royalty.

Although managing the fleet accounts for just 20% of his time, Booker has been pioneering the authority’s electric transition plan since 2016, initially proving the case with two BMW i3s.

Three years later, the organisation secured funding from the Welsh Government which it used to switch its entire pool fleet to electric Hyundai Konas (pictured below) and Renault Zoes.

Booker’s key fleet priorities for 2022 are to expand and enhance charging infrastructure at all sites, introduce further eco driver training on electric vehicles (EVs) to help staff get the most out of their vehicles and investigate the implementation of an EV-only salary sacrifice (sal/sac) scheme for all employees.

The clue is in the name: Brecon Beacons National Park Authority.

As a European and global Geopark containing a Unesco world heritage site, the Brecon Beacons authority has every reason to be an environmental leader.

But in its fleet manager Kevin Booker, it also has a three-time electric vehicle Guinness World Record holder.

Although managing the fleet accounts for just 20% of his time, Booker has been pioneering the authority’s electric transition plan since 2016, initially proving the case with two BMW i3s.

Three years later, the organisation secured funding from the Welsh Government which it used to switch its entire pool fleet to electric Hyundai Konas (pictured below) and Renault Zoes.

Electric transition plan

The authority operates 24 vehicles – 17 vans and seven cars. The latter are all pool cars and include one Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) as well as four electric Konas, one Kangoo ZE and one electric Zoe. It also has three Outlander PHEV Commercials within its van fleet, used by wardens and planners who conduct off-road site visits. Its fleet was voted Fleet of the Year – up to 250 Vehicles in this year's Fleet News Awards (Booker is pictured holding the trophy). Booker says:

“We’ve looked at the fuel economy on the Outlander and it’s well above 50 miles per gallon, so it’s doing quite a of lot of trips purely on electric.”

The biggest cost-saving initiative he has introduced is electrifying the pool car fleet which has reduced total cost of ownership by more than 30% and has cut downtime due to less maintenance and increased reliability.

Brecon Beacons was previously spending £1,000 per month on fuel, now it spends about £250 – 75% less. However, Booker expects this saving to narrow to closer to 50% with the recent energy price hikes.

Reduced emissions

By switching as many vehicles as possible to electric or plug-in hybrid, Booker has reduced average CO2 emissions to 86.6g/km overall and 9.2g/km on its pool fleet alone.

Annually, the fleet covers between 250,000-270,000 miles – however, this can vary dependent on the projects the authority is involved with.

Booker’s ambition is to transition the fleet to 100% electric by 2025 – every replacement will be EV-only – but this will only be possible if a manufacturer launches an electric pick-up truck. He currently operates 10 Euro 6 diesel Toyota Hilux pick-ups. He says:

“The one thing we have left to do is the pick-up trucks and the only sticking point with that is that no one has brought out a pick-up truck that is electric – we would be the first to buy one when they do.”

“There are some in the pipeline – Rivians and Cybertrucks – but it’s not going to be practical to put one of our wardens in a £100,000 pick-up truck.”

Expanding charging infrastructure

The authority has 17 EV chargers across its portfolio ranging from 3kW (on grid-constrained sites) to 22kW and Booker has plans to further expand the infrastructure.

“All the public and corporate charging infrastructure we implement is my responsibility, and we’ve got more chargers coming,” says Booker.

“We were early adopters and most of our charging infrastructure is not smart to the extent that you can get now.

“We are hoping to get some rapid chargers on-site, but we are waiting for the power distributor to upgrade the supply here, so we have got enough electricity coming into the building for them.

“Our depot is due to have six Easee 22kW chargers on an array so they can vary based on the load on the building – the chargers are all three-phase, but they look at the supply in the building and adjust around our existing charging infrastructure, as well.

“For our HQ, we have hit the maximum of our supplies, so now we are looking at paying the distribution network operators to upgrade the supply to the site.

“We’re waiting for a 500 kVA transformer which will allow us to make use of rapid charging and it could let us have 40 chargers in the car park going at full load when you employ array charging (this enables a higher number of active charge points on the same power supply).”

Keeping pace with developments

Booker says the objective is to put any income generated from public charging into more renewable and charging technology to ensure Brecon Beacons keeps pace with the latest developments.

The authority is also making savings from generating its own energy and reducing its environmental impact by switching its energy supplies to 100% renewable sources – EV chargers are powered by solar panels and renewable energy, including hydro generation.

To-date, the solar panels on-site have generated 77 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy, which is enough to offset the mileage of the fleet. Booker says:

“The aim with regeneration was to offset the carbon from our vehicles, not necessarily to charge our vehicles. We have offset 9.1 tonnes of carbon from one of our sites, which weighs more than our pool fleet

“All our sites that have chargers, bar our HQ site, are powered by renewable energy. We have solar panels, but all the authority’s energy contracts are for green energy, so our chargers are powered by green energy.

“As a national park, we made a conscious decision that we should be buying from green energy suppliers.”

The authority’s sites include public visitor centres, country park, depot for kit and its HQ – which it shares with the police.

“We would like to go out on our own at some point, but it’s a lengthy process to get funding from the Welsh Government,” Booker says.

“The aim would be for every space to have a car charger and renewable energy battery storage. We tend to look at it as a whole – it’s not fleet and technology in isolation, it’s fleet, battery storage and solar as a complete energy solution.”

Booker is looking into technology to allow drivers to charge their EVs at home and aims to make the process as seamless as possible for staff and the authority’s finance team.

His project is trialling MyEnergi’s Zappi home chargers, which provide data on how much energy is used to allow drivers to reclaim the exact figure.

EV-only salary sacrifice scheme

The organisation is in the process of implementing an EV-only salary sacrifice scheme this year.

“We are looking to start a sal/sac scheme, which is with our legal team at the moment,” Booker says.

“Sal/sac is going to be EV-specific; we are not going to allow any other vehicles on it, including plug-in hybrids. As a national park, we are being quite strict on that.

“We’re hoping to launch it with an electric bike scheme at the same time, to allow staff to cycle to work and have sal/sac on a bike and an EV, potentially.”

The scheme will be available to all staff who meet the relevant living wage criteria as set out by financial regulations.

Cost savings from bulk buying fuel

Electrification aside, Booker has also generated savings – on average 10% of pump price – through buying fuel via the local authority which provides savings on bulk purchases.

“In the past, we’ve had to buy fuel at the pumps, but we’ve entered a partnership with the local authority to get the savings by bulk buying fuel for our pick-up trucks and it’s the same with AdBlue – we get savings from the bulk buy of that,” says Booker.

Ending grey fleet

Booker introduced a policy of using pool fleet vehicles to put an end to grey fleet and to reduce emissions and improve driver safety. Now, staff can only use their own car “in extreme situations”.

“We are not a big local authority; therefore, we do not have the ability to check staff’s own vehicles,” he says.

“The idea was that if we can control that, we can control the emissions of our organisation for business travel, whereas if we let people use their own car, we can’t determine what their own car is.”

He also targets a five-star Euro NCAP rating and even pays for add-on packs to ensure the pick-up trucks meet the maximum rating, which includes safety features such as collision avoidance.

In 2011, the authority added traction and electronic stability control (ESP) to its cars – three years before it became mandatory. Booker says:

“We always tick the boxes around safety, which is why we pushed people into work’s cars. We have done what we can to make vehicles as safe as possible – cars can be replaced, a member of staff cannot.”

Operating cycles

The authority recognises it has a duty of care to make the vehicles as safe as possible for drivers and this includes keeping them within a five-year lifecycle.

“Five years tends to be the lifecycle of models, so you should get improved safety on the next model, potentially,” says Booker.

The fleet replacement cycles are four years for leased diesel and electric vehicles and five years for EVs purchased outright.

However, he is facing difficultly with lead times on vehicles due to the global shortage of semiconductors and some raw materials, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, which has left fleets facing a wait of a year or more for some vans.

He says: “A Renault Kangoo van will have a year left on its contract in June, but I’ve had to tell the site manager to sort out the business case and order his new one a year in advance to make sure it arrives in time – it’s quite difficult working on those timescales now.”

As a public sector organisation, Brecon Beacons uses the Crown Commercial Services framework for both leasing and outright purchase as it has pre-agreed discount rates.

Vehicles are not brand-specific, with choices based purely on price versus value.

With its funding coming from the Welsh Government, it sometimes has capital funds which must be used to buy vehicles.

Booker says his preferred option “would always be fully-maintained lease”.

As a small special-purpose local authority, it does not have its own workshop and relies on main dealers and retail pricing for repair work.

The four Hyundai Konas are owned, but are purchased on a full service model to mirror the leasing arrangement. Booker says:

“The only thing we’re really paying for is incidentals, such as wiper blades and tyres.”

“We also put a plan in place that vehicles only stay on our fleet for the warranty period then they get replaced, so we do not end up with a situation where we have vehicles which are leased on a regular cycle, but a vehicle bought with capital funds that is something like 15 years old.

“We set earmarked reserves to either replace that vehicle with a leased vehicle at the end of its time or purchase another one. We are always putting money in the bank to replace those vehicles, so we do not get a vehicle where we have no idea what is going to happen at the end of its life span.”

The Toyota Hilux pick-ups are on year three of a four-year rolling contract which will be extended as the authority waits for those electric models to come to market.

Booker adds: “We tend to keep EVs for five years – we found with testing the reliability of EVs, we can extend them for a bit longer.”

■ And those three electric vehicle Guinness World Records? In 2021, Booker was part of a trio who drove a Mustang Mach-E from John o’ Groats to Land’s End and broke three world records in the process for the lowest energy consumption of 9,500.796 W.hrs/100km, the shortest charging time of 43 minutes and 13 seconds, and the fewest charge stops – one.

Judges’ comments:

The authority has an excellent grasp of its car parc, fleet requirements and electric transition plan, which it is executing perfectly with excellent engagement of its employees. Head of fleet Kevin Booker clearly understands the challenges and takes an impressive strategic approach to finding the solutions. He displays a great breadth of knowledge despite only spending 20% of his time on fleet.

Kevin Booker on... driver training

With a fair proportion of the national park wardens’ time spent driving vehicles off road, Kevin Booker has invested in driver training to tackle any concerns about transitioning to electric.

Kevin Booker says: “Initially, there was a lot of scepticism among our wardens about EVs. They said ‘these will never work’.

“However, through off-road training courses, they have discovered the Outlander is better off-road than some Toyota Hilux pick-ups which are more primitive four-wheel drive systems where you cannot drive them on-road in four-wheel drive mode due to transmission wind-up.”

A lot of wardens’ journeys can be made by electric, says Booker.

Reserving the charge

They have been taught techniques to use if they are on-site, such as utilising ‘hold mode’ when driving at slow speeds within the park or in forestry tracks. This enables them to reserve their charge to do those slower speed journeys on electric, saving the fuel for the main roads.

Booker also plans to provide further EV driver training on regenerative braking – using the mechanical brakes as little as possible to get the most energy back into the vehicles batteries without wasting heat on the brake disks.

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