Project partners of the ZCI – Zero Carbon Infrastructure consortium have upgraded the ZCI Register of Good Practices and identified practices of interest to them. The project partners started planning study visits and exchanging good practices and knowledge. The first exchange of good practices of the project took place online between the city of Burgas, Bulgaria and BSC, Business Support Centre, Ltd, Kranj – Regional Development Agency of Gorenjska, Slovenia. The aim of the meeting was to share the experience of Burgas regarding the electrification of public transport, which is also the goal of the Gorenjska region. About 10 years ago, Burgas managed to completely transform its public transport by replacing buses with new EURO 6 standard buses, developing bus rapid transit (BRT) corridors throughout the city, introducing a traffic management system and establishing several multimodal transport hubs. In the last few years, the local administration and the public transport company BurgasBus Ltd managed to secure funding from EU structural funds and procure 56 electric buses and 56 charging stations. In this way, the entire public transport in the city was electrified. With the ambition to be sustainable in 2023, a 1 MW photovoltaic plant was built and the energy produced is used directly to charge the buses. The Municipality of Kranj is also planning investments for the gradual modernization of the transport scheme, including the purchase of additional electric buses. From the discussion, it became clear that electricity is currently the cheapest “fuel” and that it is worth investing in electric buses from an economic point of view. According to the Burgas experience, there are some doubts related to how the batteries will perform long term. Electric buses have been running in Burgas for 3 years and so far there have been no problems, but it is not known what the situation will be in 10 years or more, the municipality cautiously added. The diesel buses that were once in use in Burgas have more than 1 million kilometers and are still working well. The partners agreed that the study visit to Burgas will be organized in the second half of September 2024.
