Decarbonising the Kimpton vehicle fleet

As a business, we have engineers working across the North West and the UK. Many are on call 24/7 in case of an emergency for our FM or PPM contracted clients.

Because we’re in the business of energy efficiency, our offices and stores were already low carbon. We use heat pumps as our primary heat source and powered by a solar PV array on the roof. This 10kw array was installed well before it was the norm, back in 2012, but It’s still going strong. The capacity of the original array is about to be extended by a further 32kW, giving us 42kW in total. This will power our Heat Pumps and provide the power we need to heat and light the building.

When we benchmarked our carbon in 2020 our carbon assessment identified that business travel was the biggest single impact we made, and as such, offered the biggest single area for improvement. So, as part of our carbon reduction plan, we have replaced six of the diesel vans from our vehicle fleet with fully electric cars. The plan is for the rest to be replaced as they reach the end of their efficient life.

To help our staff to switch to EVs and Hybrid vehicles, we’ve installed electric vehicle charging on site and promoted our popular cycle to work scheme to encourage more of our team to leave the car at home altogether.

Speaking to the engineers who are driving the new EV’s, they are popular, with the consensus being they are far quieter than the vans ever were and range is not proving to be too big an issue. Being able to pre-warm their car in the morning before they set off is a luxury that none of them were used to or envisaged and whilst it’s summer now, will be even more popular as winter draws in again. For some of the team working in Leeds, it does mean a charge on their way home, but the vast majority are seeing no issues with reliability or range at all.

Decarbonisation cannot happen overnight but we are taking some big, positive steps forward, in order to reach our net zero goals.

Decarbonisation planning and implementation is our fast becoming our most popular service that we offer to many other businesses. Much of our work is in working with businesses across Liverpool, Wirral, North Wales and the North West to help them decarbonise. We’re reducing running costs and optimising their heating, lighting, hot water and cooling in offices to reduce energy use, as well as existing BTR or PBSA residential spaces.