Pillar 3: Quality Workforce

Employee-led electric vehicle replacement

One of our maintenance managers, Craig Tylenda, saw an opportunity to reduce his plant’s greenhouse gas footprint, while showing his employees what it’s like to walk the talk of “going electric.”

In the past, the plant’s work vehicles were primarily gas- and diesel-powered pickup trucks. Tylenda took it upon himself to research viable alternatives and determined that the same day-to-day functions could be achieved using a smaller fleet of electric vehicles (EVs).

When the time came to retire those vehicles, the plant replaced six full-sized pickup trucks with four fully electric Polaris GEM vehicles, three fully equipped industrial tricycles and a pair of bicycles. The plant’s maintenance team has retrofitted the vehicle beds with racks and storage cabinets as needed for the site work. And, while a few full-sized trucks will be kept for specialized applications, like providing a portable welding platform, EVs will continue to be integrated into the fleet.

In addition to providing equal performance to their less sustainable counterparts, they are also quieter, more fuel efficient and idle more cleanly.

While we’re starting to make more EV options available across the company, we’re also going to downsize equipment that doesn’t have an EV alternative. That means large V8 engines will be replaced by more fuel-efficient V6s, smaller trucks will replace bulky half-ton pickups, and smaller SUVs will supplant full-size SUVs.

In total, we purchased 15 new plug-in vehicles for our fleet in 2017.

This initiative was a great example of the sustainability culture we’re working to create at PGE, where sustainable thinking is embedded in how we approach everything we do.