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Weekly Short
14 July, 2021
This week, heads of BT and BP, Philip Jansen and Bernard Looney, have formed the ‘EV Fleets Accelerator’ to fast-track the shift towards electric for business vehicles. Other big players like Tesco, Royal Mail and Severn Trent are also on board.
Jansen and Looney’s group has told Boris Johnson that existing plans by companies to green their corporate fleets as part of their Net Zero plans will create demand for 700,000 electric vehicles before 2030.
The problem they face at the moment is one of supply, which is one of the motivating forces of the initiative. We think this is a brilliant example of how sustainability can drive innovation and create new collaborations for shared needs. It’s easy to imagine a time when supply issues in the electric vehicle pipeline would not have been seen as a BT or BP problem. But the impetus of Net Zero and the desire for change has led them to do what they can to help create the solution they need, in whatever form that may take.
Next step, we hope, is for similar partnerships and initiatives to be developed to take on some of other pressing supply-and-demand challenges throughout the realm of sustainability – the demand for (and subsequent price of) rPET being a case in point.
By Cara McEvoy