After electrifying more than a third of Dundee City Council’s 640-strong fleet, Fraser Crichton explains why long-term charging infrastructure contracts are the critical, often overlooked foundation for making the transition work
Over a third of Dundee City Council’s fleet is now electric. That’s 232 vehicles out of 640: pool cars, vans, street sweepers and eight fully-electric refuse collection vehicles that were the first of their kind in Scotland. Since 2021 we’ve travelled 11.5 million miles on pure electric and saved an estimated 2295 tonnes of CO2 – equivalent to 13,800 trees. By 2035, we aim to have every vehicle in our fleet running on electricity.
None of that happened just because we bought the right vehicles. It happened because we built the right infrastructure to support them, and then made sure that infrastructure had a long-term future. The vehicle purchase is the easy part. The harder question, and the one that many fleet managers and local authorities are overlooking, is: what does the contract behind your charging infrastructure actually look like, and is it long enough to deliver what you need?
The problem with five-year thinking
Most local authority EV infrastructure contracts run for five-to-ten years. That might sound reasonable. But when you’re managing a fleet transition that will take a decade or more to complete, a five-year contract creates problems that aren’t immediately obvious.
First, it limits what your operator will invest. If a company knows it has five years on a contract, it will install what’s needed to fulfil the minimum specification and no more. It won’t invest in solar canopies, battery storage or depot upgrades that only pay back over a longer horizon. Why would it? The asset might belong to someone else in six years.
Second, it makes fleet planning harder. When we’re deciding which fleet vehicles to electrify over the next five years, I need to know that the charging infrastructure will be there, maintained, and upgraded for the full lifecycle of those vehicles. A refuse collection vehicle might be on our fleet for 10 to 12 years. If the infrastructure contract expires halfway through that vehicle’s life, we’re introducing uncertainty into a decision that should be straightforward.
Third, it fragments the relationship. Every time a contract comes up for renewal, you lose continuity. The engineers who know your sites, the operators who understand your fleet patterns, the people who pick up the phone when something breaks at 6am before the bin lorries go out. That knowledge walks out the door and you start again.
What a 20 year contract actually enables
Earlier this year, Dundee signed a 20-year partnership with Evolt Charging covering its entire public and fleet charging estate: 199 public chargers, six battery storage systems, and seven solar arrays across four rapid charging hubs. We also completed the migration of our entire network away from ChargePlace Scotland in two and a half weeks, with zero downtime for drivers. That speed wasn’t luck; it was the product of a relationship that has been building since 2011.
The 20-year commitment changes the calculus in ways that matter practically for fleet operations. Our operator can now justify investing in depot upgrades that support the next phase of fleet electrification, because they know they’ll be here to see the return. We’re planning a new rapid charging hub in the north of the city with eight ultra-rapid chargers, solar canopies, and battery storage. That kind of capital investment doesn’t happen on a five-year contract.
The contract also includes a bi-yearly tariff review mechanism. For fleet managers, that’s critical. It means we can forecast charging costs with reasonable confidence over the lifecycle of the vehicles I’m buying today. The tariff isn’t fixed forever, but it’s reviewed on a schedule we can plan around, with both parties at the table. That’s a fundamentally different offer to a short-term contract where pricing can shift dramatically at renewal.
And because all revenue generated through our charging network is reinvested back into the estate, the infrastructure improves over time rather than degrading. The incentives are aligned: better infrastructure means more usage, which means more revenue, which means further investment. On a short contract, that feedback loop never has time to develop.
The fleet reality that gets overlooked
Fleet electrification isn’t a single decision, it’s a rolling programme that takes years. We started with Nissan Leafs in 2011. We moved into electric taxis in 2016. We introduced electric refuse vehicles in 2021. At each stage, we needed to know that the infrastructure would keep pace, that depot charging would be expanded, and that the people maintaining our chargers understood our operations.
That last point is more important than it might sound. Our charging hubs don’t just plug vehicles in. The Clepington Road hub integrates 600 kilowatt-peak of solar generation with 720 kilowatt-hours of second-life battery storage, using repurposed EV batteries. It captures excess solar energy and uses it to reduce grid demand at peak times. That’s not something you can hand over to a new operator every five years and expect to run smoothly. It requires deep technical knowledge of the specific installation, built up over time.
We’re also starting to explore the possibility of exporting surplus renewable energy from our hubs back into the national grid. If that works, our EV infrastructure becomes not just a cost to the council but a revenue generator. But developing that capability requires long-term thinking, long-term investment, and a long-term partnership that gives both sides the confidence to innovate.
The lesson for other fleet managers
Every Scottish local authority is now facing the same transition we’ve completed. ChargePlace Scotland is winding down, and councils are having to find private partners to run their charging networks. Some are making good decisions. Others may default to the shortest, cheapest contract they can find because that’s what procurement culture encourages.
My advice is to think about the contract the same way you think about the fleet plan. You wouldn’t buy a refuse vehicle and plan to replace it in three years. So why would you sign an infrastructure contract that doesn’t last as long as the
vehicles it’s supposed to support?
We certainly didn’t get everything right the first time. Over the course of our electrification, every type of charger was trialled and tested, and we made our fair share of mistakes. But the one thing we did get right, from the beginning, was building a relationship with our infrastructure partner that was long enough to learn from those mistakes and keep improving. That’s what 20 years gives you. And I’d argue it’s the most important decision any fleet manager will make in the next five years.
