Minister P. Dardziński: We have the ambition and resources to develop the whole bloodstream of zero-emission transport for cities
Piotr Dardziński
By the end of the year, the National Centre for Research and Development will announce a tender for a prototype zero-emission bus in the program "Zero emission public transport". "We have the ambition and resources to develop the whole bloodstream of zero-emission transport for Polish cities" - said Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education Piotr Dardziński.
23 Polish cities joined the program "Zero emission public transport", as did the organizer of public transport in the central part of the Silesian voivodeship (KZK GOP), which unites another 29 municipalities. They all declared that in the event of successful production of the vehicles commissioned by the National Centre for Research and Development, they would buy a total of approx. 600 such buses.
By the end of the year, the National Centre for Research and Development will announce a tender for a prototype zero-emission bus.
"The competition will concern two components. The first component will be the zero emission public transport, the zero emission bus itself, and the second component will be the charging infrastructure, because these two components are intrinsically linked" - explained Prof. Aleksander Nawrat, deputy director of the National Centre for Research and Development. According to Navrat, both components are expected to be introduced in the cities participating in the program by 2020.
"The program is very beneficial for the cities because they receive an innovative product that they are not able to buy today. The product - we hope - will be a purely Polish product, built with Polish components" - he said.
Deputy Minister of Science Piotr Dardziński spoke about the benefits for the state of the program including the zero-emission bus. "Thanks to the role of an innovative contractor, because the government commissions and pays for these first buses, we create a whole new market, a new industry for Polish manufacturers. Local governments have declared that they will buy 600 such buses. A new business can be built on this first purchase, and then scaled up to cover the whole Poland, all cities, not just those that are now in partnership, and even further, globally" - he said.
He also said that initially the participants would be consortium "established probably by existing bus manufacturers who will have to work with scientists".
The Deputy Minister also emphasized the revolutionary form of financing: the amount of PLN 100 million allocated for the bus design stage is distributed in the innovative partnership procedure. This is the first use of this option in Poland - provided for in the Public Procurement Law.
"If we were to leave this mechanism only for the free market, such a bus would most likely not be built in Poland, because traditional manufacturers prefer to wait for their existing technologies to depreciate before introducing new ones. Secondly, we do not have sufficiently strong bus manufacturers who would be able to engage so much money in this most risky part, R&D work on the bus" - he said. (PAP)
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