Good practice:

3 urban electric buses for Gabrovo

The tender aim is to achieve sustainable and ecological urban transport through purchase of new busses. Currently, electrical vehicles are considered to be “the greenest” one on the market. They are extremely contributive to the improvement of air quality in urban areas, since their direct harmful emissions are zero. But the their widespread use raises other issues to solve - harmful raw materials used in batteries and negative environmental impact during their extracting and disposal. Some of these issues are solved in electrical vehicles that use supercapacitors instead of standard batteries. Supercapacitors perform better on both indicators - environmental and sustainability of the investment. They don’t contain such harmful materials, chemicals or toxic metals. Another advantage of supercapacitors, compared to batteries, is that the charge is practically not reduced at low temperature, they live longer and the work temperature also has a better performance. This technology is not yet well-known in Bulgaria. It is used in Belgrade, Vienna. Gabrovo team decided that it is too risky to try only the new capacitors technology. During the market research and market consultations, the potential suppliers convinced the experts from Gabrovo municipality that it’s impossible to combine both technologies in one tender. This was the real challenge - HOW to allow both technologies to participated without favouring any of the potential participants because of their battery technology

5 people actively working on the documentation and 5/7 experts and stakeholders providing additional support. The expertise and knowledge of the SPP-regions project partners was a significant factor in preparing the documentation. The value of the public contract is about 1,396,000 EUR (excl. VAT)

Increased competition and encouraged innovation in battery technologies with lower environmental impact.
Achieved better tender price because of the better competition.
Encouraged public Buyers (Bulgarian and foreign) to use functional specification.
Reduction of the harmful effect of raw material extraction for the standard batteries.
The existence of contract performance guarantee that during the whole warranty period the battery will have an efficiency of at least 80%

The expert team set the specification besed on the transport scheme (daily distances per bus, distance between the final stops and waitening time at end stop. Energy storage: min 250 km with one charge, and full charge for less than 5h or min 20 km with one charge and fully charge for less than 10 m

The important thing for public authorities is not simply tobuy goods and services, but to seek for achieving adequate results.
A constant process of monitoring and analysing of the the long-term effect of our already green tenders, as well as trying to find solutions to potential future problems.