City of Charlotte – Abigail Roller – 2025
Summary
Abby Roller developed strategies to decarbonize the City of Charlotte’s medium-duty fleet, including electrification, right-sizing, and exploring alternative fuels.
Goals
The City of Charlotte is committed to being a global leader in sustainability. Updates to its Strategic Energy Action Plan (SEAP+) set goals to reach net-zero emissions from light-duty vehicles by 2035 and the full fleet by 2050. While progress has been made electrifying light-duty vehicles and piloting heavy-duty trucks, the Office of Sustainability and Resilience brought Abby Roller on board to explore decarbonization strategies for medium-duty vehicles, where electrification has been slower to advance.
Solutions
To address this challenge, Abby worked with the city’s fleet managers and analyzed vehicle data to assess current medium-duty fleet needs. She researched the market for available and emerging electric medium-duty vehicles and recommended actionable strategies, including adopting electric cargo vans, right-sizing vehicles to electric pickup trucks, and building relationships with electric truck dealers. She also explored the feasibility of using alternative fuels to reduce emissions from vehicles that are not yet ready for electrification. She compared lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions and implementation costs across different technologies to inform a balanced strategy. These recommendations enable Charlotte to move forward with electrification while preparing pilot programs to test renewable diesel and renewable propane for harder-to-electrify vehicle classes.
Potential Impact
Implementing near-term electrification strategies’such as deploying electric cargo vans and right-sizing vehicle use’has the potential to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 900 metric tons and generate approximately $200,000 in yearly savings. In addition, establishing a Fleet Decarbonization Task Force will help formalize a citywide right-sizing strategy and develop metrics to evaluate pilot programs, enabling Charlotte to make informed, data-driven decisions in a rapidly evolving transportation landscape.
