Public transport is a backbone of sustainable mobility strategies and plays a major role for further increasing accessibility, tackling climate change as well as reducing local noise and air pollutant emissions. Cities in Europe are increasingly concerned in reducing emissions from transportation, and are focusing their incentives away from fossil fuels (with diesel in the crosshair) and towards electric solutions free of (local) emissions. While the wider take-up if electric mobility solutions seems within reach, however, key issues must be sorted out to ensure its viability, from which energy infrastructure, power availability, energy storage solutions, and economic incentives are just a few. Furthermore, there is a need to reduce energy consumption, emissions and congestion and to solve space problems at the local level while at the same time tackling increasing transport volumes.
Against this background, ELIPTIC evaluated various approaches and technologies for electrifying public transport and demonstrated that the further take-up of electric vehicles can be done in a cost-efficient way by integrating multi-purpose charging into existing public transport infrastructures. ELIPTIC - Electrification of public transport in cities was a research and innovation Horizon 2020 project and a member of the CIVITAS initiative for clean urban transport running between 2015 and 2018. The consortium consisted of 33 partners from 8 different EU countries representing different sectors such as cities, manufacturers, research institutes, associations and public transport companies. ELIPTIC received funding of 5.9 million € through which it was able to realize 20 different use cases in the form of both practical operation and feasibility studies.
ELIPTIC worked across the three thematic technical pillars to foster the further electrification of urban public transport by optimising the use of existing electric infrastructure:
A) Safe integration of electric buses using existing electric PT infrastructure
B) Innovative energy storage systems to increase operational efficiency
C) Multi –purpose use of electric PT infrastructure
