E-charging infrastructure project in City Municipality Kranj
About this good practice
The CMK is part of 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 initiative. There was a lack of strategic planning. Transitioning public sector transportation to e-mobility is a measure, with grants available, contributing to the initiative’s goals. LP local government CMK formed a partnership, implementing the project in stages with 4 investment pillars: renewable energy provision, e-charging infrastructure, battery electric vehicles (BEV) and a digital managing system. Significant developments were done from 2020 to 2023. The main stakeholders have been CMK, the Institute for Private-Public Partnership, Electro Gorenjska, BSC, Ltd, Kranj - RDA of Gorenjska, company RIKO Ltd, energy, logistics systems, Vizije Mobilnosti Ltd. The beneficiaries are the municipal public sector and the general public.
Key milestones:
• 2020: Completion of pre-investment activities.
• 2021-2022: Purchase of equipment, land, installation, bus charging stations (ECS) operation, technical inspections, information analysis and permit acquisition
• 2022-2023:
o 4 bus ECS installation, totalling 300kW charging power across two locations, each with 2 CPs and additional BEV CPs. These locations include provisions for future expansion, with one site featuring a 300kW battery storage unit and a planned 100kW solar power plant.
o Setup of 15 ECS in the municipality for public administration car-sharing and public use.
o Installation of 43 ECS for utility cars and public institutions' car-sharing systems.
Resources needed
Investment: over 1.1 million €
Financing sources: Climate Change Fund; EU Cohesion fund / ERDF; ELENA Facility (EBRD) for technical assistance.
The number of people involved is hard to define, since multiple organisations were involved.
Evidence of success
o 4 bus ECS installation, totalling 300kW charging power across two locations, each with 2 CPs and additional BEV CPs. These locations include provisions for future expansion, with one site featuring a 300kW battery storage unit and a planned 100kW solar power plant.
o Setup of 15 ECS in the municipality for public administration car-sharing and public use.
o Installation of 43 ECS for utility cars and public institutions' car-sharing systems.
Potential for learning or transfer
Setting up charging infrastructure isn't novel, but comprehensive strategic planning remains challenging for many local governments, particularly smaller rural ones. Therefore, what can municipalities, unsure of how to tackle the transition to e-mobility, learn from this practice? First they should prepare a legal base for the intervention - policy preparation that enables eligibility for grants, sometimes this requires analitical data preparation, it's crucial to form a project consortium, develop comprehensive strategic investment project for charging infrastructure, gain the analitical data if not required in the policy preparation stage, learn from this and similar case studies. The good practices described here, or at least the procedures, can be replicated and transferred to any urban or rural area. This is a small scale project in terms of numbers of ECS, but it shows that also smaller municipality can do it. In the case of CMK, there are plans to expand the network.
Good practice owner
You can contact the good practice owner below for more detailed information.