Task Force Says There Are Still Frontiers to Explore in Energy Conservation
NASHVILLE, Tenn.— Let's say you're a fleet owner who has managed the switch to ultra-low-sulfur diesel.
Maybe you've already governed truck engines and explored aerodynamic devices such as trailer skirts and cab design.
Maybe you think there's not much else you can do to clean up the environment or reduce fuel consumption. If so, the task force on Future Energy Conservation has some news for you.
Task force members who were meeting and holding public sessions at the Technology & Maintenance Council meeting here this week said there are still plenty of frontiers to explore in energy conservation.
“I think there’s a lot of uncharted territory out there,” said task force member Duane Lippincott, senior project manager, corporate automotive engineering, at UPS Inc. “It’s all getting it within a cost range that you can afford."
The task force session on Feb. 16 was one of several held that day on various aspects of sustainability and environmental technologies and attended by carriers, truck makers and industry providers, who talked about everything from new aerodynamic devices and self-evaluation of fuel consumption to the possibility of yet untested products such as trailers made of light carbon fiber material that might produce new fuel savings.
The task force on energy conservation, though, is taking the longest look at fuel savings, trying to project decades out.
“If we want to have influence over transportation, cost of ownership, the effectiveness, the safety of it, the energy efficiency of it either human or material, we need to be theorizing what do we need in 2030 . . . to have any amount of influence over the very, very bright people in the manufacturing community that are already looking out there and trying to understand how to position their business,” said the chairman of the energy conservation task force, Marc Clark, manager of vehicle engineering for FedEx Express.
“Making meaningful changes in this industry is a long process because of the durability of the assets that we operate, the turnover rates, it takes us a long time,” Clark said. “But it’s got to start someplace, and it’s not wrong if it starts here.”
Kirk Rutherford, vice president of equipment at Bridgestone Americas fleet operations, said the task force is actively seeking “technologies to help conserve energy or recover or recapture energies to make sure that we’re not wasting anything that we could be reusing and then figuring out how to consume less of whatever we’re going to use.”
During the sessions, most carriers told the speakers they governed their trucks at 68 miles per hour to save fuel, with fewer of them saying they preferred 63, although some participants said fuel savings also depend on such variables as loads and the routes traveled. Participants also explored methods for evaluating the effectiveness of aerodynamic devices on tractors and trailers.
“The amount of money that is being saved using these aerodynamic devices, these skirts, is phenomenal,” said the leader of one session, Fritz Marinko of Stemco, a provider of truck parts.
Another session leader, Robert Wessels, a trucking industry consultant and former engine salesman for Caterpillar, told Transport Topics after the session that he thinks the next frontier in fuel savings does not lie in equipment.
“It’s in the operations department, getting the drivers to run where you want them to run, how to route miles,” Wessels said. More drivers than one would think make routing mistakes and add miles to trips, he said, adding that driver performance may eventually be measured against Global Positioning Systems.
