Somos FCC - Nº5

I N N O V A T I O N 50 I N N O V A T I O N José María López Director INSIA-UPM 100% electric sewer system suction equipment in Barcelona. The concept of sustainable mobility seeks to establish the avenues of re- search and innovation that currently point towards the development of a more advanced, efficient, ecological, safe and competitive urban transport system. The air pollution that currently exists in cities comes largely from the ve- hicle fleet. In particular, exhaust gas emissions, which have a double effect, on the one hand a greenhou- se effect with environmental conse- quences on a global scale and, on the other hand, contribute to the lo- cal concentration of gases and pollu- tants, which is known as air quality, whose limits for certain pollutants such as NO2 are usually exceeded in many large national and European cities. It is also the first sector in energy consumption, mainly of fos- sil origin, which, added to the annual increase in car sales, leads to an un- sustainable growth that must lead to a reflection to adopt additional mea- sures. In this situation, vehicles dedicated to urban services seem to be the first that will be affected by the new so-called clean technologies, since their activity is basically focused on the urban environment, where air quality is going to be an indispensa- ble requirement for the habitability of cities. All this, combined with growing concerns about the cost and securi- ty of the supply of energy resources Electric mobility in urban services clearly indicate that the transition to electric propulsion of road transport is inevitable. As I have already said, in the field of urban mobility, electric propulsion will be the first approach to environ- mental sustainability. However, a number of technical and commercial challenges are still associated with the charging, storage and use of electrical energy to power vehicles. Furthermore, there is not yet an ac- ceptable supply of electric vehicles for urban services (public transport, freight transport, urban cleaning ser- vices, etc.), both in terms of price and performance, which obliges these urban service companies, on the one hand, to purchase electric or hybrid vehicles at an excessive cost and, on the other hand, to have third parties develop their vehicles. As a practical example of eco-effi- cient engines, the cleaning and maintenance service for the sewera- ge system in Barcelona, provided by the FCC Medio Ambiente, is worth mentioning. Since July 2016, the first complete fleet of 100% electric vehi- cles has been in daily use, with 13 specialized machinery units on hea- vy trucks, 28 specialized machinery units on vans and 15 vans or light vehicles. The innovative infrastructure that manages the recharging of the fleet of these 56 electric vehicles is based on a “smart” system that optimises the recharging of each vehicle accor- ding to the work shift, the power avai-