Sustainable Technologies for Auxiliary Truck Power and Trailer Refrigeration – a Review of the Evidence

Diesel is the main fuel choice for commercial vehicles (Freight Transport Association, 2011a, Hill et al., 2011) and its combustion produces CO2 which is considered the main contributor to global warming (Barreto et al., 2003, Lee et al., 2011). For this reason, the government has targeted road transport to reduce its carbon footprint and it has developed different policy instruments to achieve this goal, such as the Low Carbon Transport Innovation Strategy (LCTIS) which encourages innovation and technology development in lower carbon transport technologies (DfT, 2007). Lower carbon footprints can benefit road hauliers to some extent, because usually this is achieved by reducing fuel consumption, which in turn decreases operating costs and therefore improves profitability. Nevertheless current technologies are at different stages of maturity and logistics companies considering adopting ‘green’ technology need to assess each in turn bearing in mind the trade-off between fuel savings and whole life cycle costs. The aim of this paper is to determine the extent to which low-carbon technologies and fuels are being used or could be used in the context of road haulage regarding auxiliary truck power (air conditioning and appliances) and trailer refrigeration units (TRUs).