More people opt to buy clean car in Stockholm
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More and more Stockholm residents are choosing to buy environmentally clean cars, city officials say.
Eva Sunnerstedt, project manager of Clean Vehicles in Stockholm City, told Xinhua in a recent interview that "there are over 300,000 clean cars all over Sweden and about 100,000 of them are in Stockholm."
"That is about 11 percent of the total cars running around in Stockholm," Sunnerstedt said.
Sunnerstedt said that politicians in Stockholm decided to use clean cars in 1994.
"We began with electric vehicles and vehicles that run on alternative fuels, so we started to procure 300 clean cars for the city fleet in order to start the work to get the first hand experience, to get vehicles from the market and get the filling stations so the public can follow along our trials," she said.
Sunnerstedt said the overall aim of Clean Vehicles in Stockholm is to improve the environment by replacing conventional vehicles with ones that have less environmental impact.
The first phase of that target was achieved after 300 of the 1,500 conventional cars were replaced by clean vehicles running on biogas or ethanol.
"From then on we worked a lot with spreading our information, activities and test fleets," Sunnerstedt said, "You can try and test it as a present and we have a website. You can see all the different filling stations, all over Sweden. All different clean car models on the Swedish market are on display there."
Sunnerstedt said her group also cooperated with other cities such as Gothenburg and Malmo so that more bifuel infrastructure will be in place.
The second phase of the project is to continue promoting the clean car market. Incentive policies, including tax breaks, were made to encourage people to purchase clean vehicles.
"If you buy a biofuel car or clean car, you don't pay any vehicle tax for five years. Before the clean cars were also exempt from congestion charges and parking fees. But now those privileges have been taken away," Sunnerstedt said.
The measures have shown positive results, she said.
"We look at the new sales. We have over 40 percent of all the new cars that are sold in Stockholm are clean. So they are either ethanol or they are biogas or they are electrical or electrical-hybrid cars," Sunnerstedt said.
She said small petrol and diesel cars that are very energy efficient are also considered to be clean because their emissions can be smaller than 120 g per kilometer.
The biogas is locally produced from sewage water treatment plants and the ethanol is half locally produced in Sweden and distributed in the whole country. Another half is imported from Brazil.
There are 13 biogas filling stations located at ordinary petrol stations.
Sunnerstedt said Swedes are environmentally aware and interested in clean cars. They all like new inventions and technologies, she said.
"The car is more expensive to buy, but the fuel is less expensive. From time to time it has been possible to get some state funding, EU or national funding to buy a car, but today there is no such incentive in Stockholm," Sunnerstedt said.
"When we procure taxi services for ourselves or our politicians we demand that the taxi companies should have clean taxis in their fleet. And they should fill the taxi with renewable fuels," she said, "We also demand that they should recognize our phone numbers, so if the phone number is from the city, they should automatically send a clean taxi if it is in the area."
By the end of 2009, there had been a clean car premium of 1,000 euros from the government and the government now is discussing to reintroduce that for super clean cars. They are considering 4,000 euros by January 2012.
"We still have complaints on the biogas," Sunnerstedt said, "They want more refilling stations. There are around 200 filling stations in Stockholm area, and only 13 has biogas. So it is not as accessible."
There has been very high interest in biogas because it is produced locally and is 100 percent renewable.
"The interest is so large that we have a lack now," she said, "We import from our surrounding municipalities but we still don't have enough. So sometimes there is a shortage. You come to a filling station and there is no gas there and people get angry with that."
The amount of biogas sold since 2008 has quadrupled. It was predicted that there will be a 75-percent increase in 2011.
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