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With studies suggesting that fleet community members are facing a real financial
budget problem with rising gasoline prices, many are considering using alternative
fuel vehicles which could reduce fuel costs by up to 600%.
Don Beams is a member of the Silicon Valley Clean City's Coalition. He was the former fleet manager
of the city of San Jose, the 10th largest city in America. The information that's out there,
making the fleet manager aware of those options and perhaps incorporating them into
an existing fleet. You have a tendency, if you're objective, you might want to try
a small portion of your fleet. Make that a pilot program. See how efficient it is.
What you don't want to do is throw everything away. But try this new technology.
I think that's where we've been, San Jose has been very successful because they've had that opportunity
and that freedom to exercise and put into service different options and see how well they perform.
The city of San Jose is also a leader in switching its diesel trucks to green transportation.
Our city is doing this, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District has 9 counties and 150 cities.
You are probably more familiar with South Bay but our city is doing the kind of switch over
that San Jose's been a leader.
We've been, as far as the exhaust technology, the diesel particulate filters,
we've been proactive in the fleet identifying those vehicles that need to be retrofitted,
retrofitting those vehicles. But then we're also looking at perhaps earlier replacement
of those vehicles to get the cleaner more fuel efficient vehicles into the fleet environment.
Currently the green team led by Bob Garzee is promoting the electric vehicles and natural gas technology
training program that develops a trained workforce for the merging job sector of green transportation.
It educates potential alternative vehicle buyers and users.
So talking more about the June 1st second conference. Is there anything that we haven't hit that we ought to talk about?
What we've put together with the workforce group is a comprehensive training program which covers all aspects
of all alternative fuel vehicles. We have a group, one of them has the lead instructor
Randy Bryant with De Anza College who has well over 15 years of technical training and expertise.
In that 50 hour class, 20 hours of it is actually practical hands on. I think, a lot of times it's just a theory
but this is very comprehensive with respect to the fact that you are actually learning about it
in the classroom and physically going out and associating with you've learned with that component.
My name is Randy Bryant, I'm the department head at De Anza College Automotive Technology.
We are in partnership with Green Transportation Workforce Development
in developing an alternative fuels technology program.
This facility is approximately 10,000 to 15,000 square feet depending on which building
you're in and we train electric vehicle, hybrid, propane, CNG, infrastructure classes.
Right here we have the Chevy Volt that we're using in the class in our EV class.
In our normal automotive program we train between 350 to 550 students a quarter. The type of training
that we provide at De Anza College is authentic hands on training not like seminar style training
where you listen to someone talk for an hour or two or a day or two. This is where you would
actually get hands on training. We'll be actually removing components from the cars,
looking at them, testing them, putting them back in service and training fleet technicians
and after market technicians how to service and put vehicles back into service as quickly as possible
limiting down time in the EV hybrid area.
We are in our start-of-the-art. This classroom really shows where we've gone with authentic training.
We have a classroom that's got all the latest state-of-the-art electronics. It's a smart classroom.
But in the back of the classroom we have two automotive lifts that we can put cars up in the air
and actually work on the cars in the classroom so the students can get the hands on part of the training.
This classroom is also the classroom we're going to use for the solar powered fueling infrastructure
part of the electrical vehicle training. We're going to have the solar panels outside the door
and a charging station in the parking lot with all of the energy flowing through a monitoring device
so we can see the energy we're producing and the energy that we're using to charge the vehicles.
We also are the only approved training facility in the South Bay Silicon Valley. We're training union
technicians. Fleet managers send their union mechanics here for training.
San Jose to date has approximately 41% of its fleet on some form of alternative fuel.
Whether it be biodiesel, compressed natural gas, propane, and electric. It does have an impact on our goal
of cleaning up the environment and reducing fossil fuel use.
For more information on this project and other Silicon Valley Clean Cities effort go to www.svcleancities.org
or contact Silicon Valley Clean City Coalition at the contact information shown.