Mer installs NHS charge points

Electric vehicle (EV) charging firm Mer has installed charge points at 13 sites for the Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust.

Mer worked with NTW Solutions, the support service for the NHS Trust, and who provides estates and facilities management, car leasing, finance, workforce and procurement services, and runs a fleet of 1,400 lease cars for Trust employees, as well as around 90 service vehicles ranging from pool cars to vans and trucks.

Mer won a competitive tender to deliver the charge points after meeting key criteria. One of the main priorities for the Trust was the ability to set different tariffs – free charging for fleet vehicles, a preferential rate for staff, and a higher rate for visitors.

Lee Cant, Commercial Director of NTW Solutions, said: “Working with Mer to procure these chargers has been an enabler for us to move forward with our decarbonisation strategy. We benchmark ourselves against other trusts in the region and we know that we are out in front in terms of fleet electrification thanks in part to this project.”

“In total 40 percent of the lease cars are now fully electric or plug-in hybrids, while about a quarter of the service fleet is the same. Some of the service vehicles are larger and they need full payloads for operations like laundry, so they won’t be electrified yet, we’ll concentrate for now on the lighter vans.”

“We were keen on having a viable management system that we could extract data from, in order to ascertain which chargers were the most popular and identify where we might need additional infrastructure to meet demand.

“We had a lot of wards that were not prepared to go electric until there were chargers on site. It has enabled us to change our policy so that all new vehicles added to the fleet have to be electric unless there is a very good operational reason why they can’t be EVs.”

Scott Duncan, associate consultant at Mer, said: “This was a complex but rewarding project to install chargers across multiple locations. The Trust is making full use of the smart charger technology to set different tariffs for various use cases and utilise Mer’s proprietary back-office software for data analytics.”

Image courtesy of Mer

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