DUMFRIES and Galloway Council has moved up a gear in its drive towards introducing electric vehicles and promoting greener travel in the region.
A freedom of information request revealed that the local authority now has 73 electric vehicles in its fleet, forking out nearly £1.8m for outright purchases, and paying an additional annual cost of £171,000 to lease more.
With a total of 807 vehicles within the council fleet, this equates to a nine per cent conversion to electric.
This region is leading the way in Scotland when it comes to installing electrical vehicle charging points in its towns and villages.
A council spokesperson said: “There are now 208 charging points, 187 of which have been installed in the last five years.”
Dumfries and Stranraer have 100 electrical vehicle charging points between them.
Millions has been spent on introducing this new electric charging point network across the region in recent years.
This funding comes from various sources, including Transport Scotland, and the UK Government’s on-street residential chargepoint scheme (ORCS).
Dumfries and Galloway Council confirmed that it has received £641,387 to date from OCRS funding.
It was revealed last year that Dumfries and Galloway was one of only a handful of councils in Scotland which had made use of OCRS funding to install on-street electric car chargers.
The Daily Mail reported that just 115 councils out of 320 or so across the UK had accessed the flagship ORCS scheme since it was launched in 2017.
The newspaper reported last summer that five Scottish councils had used ORCS cash to build a total of 172 chargers since 2018. Dumfries and Galloway Council has built the most with the cash – 97.
Dundee, East Lothian, Renfrewshire and Stirling between them had used the fund to create 75 publicly available chargers.
Meanwhile, a report produced two months ago showed how council emissions are down for the fifth consecutive year – and that the local authority’s carbon footprint is now less than half of what it was just four years ago.
The figures also show that the council has reduced its carbon footprint (tCO2e) from 24,859 in 2021/22 to 22,445 in 2022/23.
This equates to an improvement of nearly ten per cent compared to a shift of just two percent the previous year.
The region’s charging stations
Annan – 17
Dumfries – 78
Castle Douglas – 19
Creetown – 2
Dalbeattie – 8
Dalry – 2
Gatehouse – 5
Gretna – 4
Kirkcudbright – 5
Langholm – 5
Lockerbie – 3
Moffat – 6
Moniaive – 1
New Galloway – 4
Newton Stewart – 7
Sanquhar – 1
Stranraer – 22
Thornhill – 1
Wigtown – 9
