Tesco delivers food in electric vans
AutoblogGreen has the inside-story on Tesco’s new all-electric, zero-emissions delivery vans, the Modec, which were launched earlier this year.
Running on batteries, the vans have a range of 100 miles and don’t idle, making them handy for city deliveries–and, of course, they get to miss out on Ken’s London congestion charge. The car chaps also do some back-of-the-envelope calculations on the van’s running costs:
The estimated cost of a charge is 5 GBP. So is it cost-effective? Besides the famous Congestion Charge, diesel prices in the UK are quite high (a little less than 1 GBP per liter, that is like 7.5 USD per US gallon) and there’s also Road Tax. According to their calculations: 20,000 miles with a diesel van that returns 20mpg (16 US mpg) implies using 1000 gallons of fuel a year (1200 US gallons). That makes 4,500 GBP per year (roughly 9000 USD).
Get the original Tesco press release here, which also includes details about the retailer’s concept environmenal store in Shrewsbury.
The new environmental store in Shrewsbury, which has created 100 new jobs for the local community, has been designed to reduce its energy consumption by at least 40% when compared to a store of a similar size and will feature a whole host of energy saving systems. The store frame and roof is made from renewable timber instead of steel and also boasts innovative heating and cooling systems.
Other technology in the environmental store includes a cold air retrieval system, which extracts and pumps the excess cold air generated by the refrigeration into other areas of the store and reduces the need for air conditioning by recycling the already cooled air. There are also boreholes underground so that natural heat can be used to heat water and also aid cooling in the summer.
