Lisburn, Northern Ireland: McCulla Ireland has trialled Hultsteins’ Ecogen2 refrigeration systems over the past year. The Ecogen generator, fitted to the tractor, allows the existing diesel-powered fridges to run on electricity during transit.
McCulla operates a mixed fleet of 130 diesel and CNG trucks with 220 trailers and produces in-house biomethane for use in its vehicles. Brian Beattie, operations director, McCulla, said: “We’re doing all this fantastic work on the front end of the CNG trucks, which have 93% lower emissions than a diesel equivalent, but we’re hauling this 45-foot truck about with a fridge powered by a diesel internal combustion engine.”
“We’re now able to provide our customer with an extremely low-carbon CNG vehicle and fridge trailer with zero emissions, because it’s powered by the compressor on the truck,” Beattie said.
“The best application for us is on our gas-powered trucks, because what we’re offering customers is a very low-carbon solution. It’s appealing to early adopters – those keen on environmental, social and governance policies – and you’re talking to a welcome audience that wants to reduce carbon. We find this is often driven by the larger corporates and multinationals,” Beattie said.
“A lot of fleets out there just buy the one electric vehicle to tick a box. We’re more about rolling out low-CO2 solutions across our whole operation. We’ve run significant tests and we’re getting really good results, so we’re now considering rolling them out across the fleet.”
