Electric car cities - according to today's edition of the Norwich Evening News, local business leaders within the city are being urged to sign up for a new partnership. This would aim to make Norwich one of the UK's first electric car cities.
This taps into the electric car government incentives we reported on late last year which aim to encourage the growth of the electric vehicle market. Incentives include exempting electric cars from company car tax for five years form April 2010.
In the pipeline are discussions between Norwich City Council and the Low Carbon Innovation Centre (LCIC) at the University of East Anglia. The idea is to put a partnership together within the city to access this funding and realise more wide scale use of electric vehicles.
At the moment the partnership is very much in the research and feasibility stage. Existing research by LCIC indicates that Norwich is well placed to become an electric car city. It has regular commuters and a good existing park and ride scheme. If this could be linked to the university, which has a biomass generator then Norwich could also get over some of the throny issues of charging electric cars from fossil fuel-based electricity.
The partnership is also looking into the potential to get businesses on board as the key market for a city wide electric car fleet. This would be a good step forward in UK electric car developments. Arguably smaller cities are better placed to utilise the technology and if Norwich could find a greener source of energy for their electric car charging points then that could be the old consultants favourite, a nice win - win situation!!