Clean Fuels Ohio continues to lead and make progress on the NGV U.P.-T.I.M.E. Analysis project which aims to collect up-to-date fleet vehicle maintenance data and costs to compare the relative maintenance costs of natural gas (NGV) and diesel trucks used in freight and goods movement applications and document maintenance cost differences between current generation natural gas trucks, previous generation natural gas trucks, and current generation diesel trucks. The project relies on gathering maintenance cost data from national fleet partners using both natural gas and diesel trucks to create a cleaned, summarized, and anonymized database that will also be shared with the U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office (US DOE VTO).
Clean Fuels Ohio convened with the NGV UP-TIME Project Advisory Committee (PAC) on Tuesday, June 28th to provide project updates, share preliminary data analysis results conducted by Energetics, the project’s technical data partner lead, and receive feedback and input from PAC members on the analysis results completed to-date. Energetics data analyst, Yash Pavuluri, presented on the preliminary data analysis results which first highlighted the data cleaning process, data imputations and corrections, and database structure and terminology. Secondly, Energetics highlighted over 30 different analysis visualizations entailing fleet profile visuals, overall repair frequency visuals, component level repair frequency visuals, and significant VMRS system codes of the 1,500+ vehicle dataset. Over the next 1-2 months, Energetics will pursue next steps in the data analysis process by continuing component level analysis for repair frequency, beginning overall and component level cost analysis, and continue collaborating with project stakeholders to identify potential sources of errors and refine analysis methods. The project team will send summaries of the preliminary data analysis results and ask for targeted feedback from project advisors on a bi-weekly basis.
The project continues to receive technical assistance from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) specifically on the data analysis of the study. Project staff members from both NREL and Energetics meets weekly to refine the analysis approach, discuss best practices on how to clearly share results for easy/clear understanding by stakeholders, review preliminary data analysis results to provide input into interpretation and suggested improvements, determine if there are unique NREL approaches are used, and identify other related support during the process.
If you are a fleet that operates both natural gas and diesel trucks in the freight & goods movement sector and are interested in contributing data to this project or learning more, please reach out to Timothy Cho (tim@cleanfuelsohio.org).
