The Pittsburgh Region Clean Cities held their annual Stakeholder meeting on February 24th at the Community College of Allegheny County – West Hills Center. Executive Director Rick Price welcomed everyone and started the meeting by going over how the coalition is structured and its’ association with the DOE Clean Cities Program.
Each of the chairs of the program committees spoke about what was going on in each committee. Rick spoke about the EV/PHEV Committee. He stated that PRCC had installed over 70 EV charging station in the area with 18 more being installed before the end of June. Rick also mentioned that the City of Pittsburgh has started to move forward with some electric vehicle purchases and plan to install more charging stations.
Mac Godfrey the chair of the Gaseous Fuels Committee talked about all of the companies that are using natural gas and that 5 new natural gas stations have opened in the last year in Western PA with 2ore under construction. Companies like Giant Eagle and Pitt Ohio continue to increase the number of NG trucks they are purchasing. Mac also talked about how many schools and school bus companies are now purchasing and using propane autogas. In fact it was mentioned that Pennsylvania is fourth soon to become third in the nation for the number of propane school buses.
Ian Winner stood in for our Bi-Fuels committee chair and talked about what their organization Optimus Technologies has done in the bio-diesel area with 20 trucking converted for the City of Pittsburgh and installed another bio-diesel station in the strip district. Rick Price also mentioned that the area has 8 or9 new E-85 stations that have been installed at many of the Speedway stations in Western, PA.
Price also stated that even with the petroleum based fuel prices that the use of alternative fuel hasn’t really been affected especially in the heavy duty truck industry.
Then the next speaker was Geoff Bristow from the PA DEP to talk about the recently announced Alternative Fuel Incentive Grant Program and some of the changes coming to this year AFIG Program. The main thing is that the program is open all throughout the year so folks do not have to rush to get their applications in the normally short period of 5 or 6 weeks. Geoff also explained some of the other changes from some the previous years’ of AFIG. To learn more go to
The last speaker was Steve Yborra from Yborra and Associates to talk about a new conversion company called Green Bridge Technologies who has some new vehicles EPA approved conversion kits. Steve mentioned that they are really clean vehicles and are actually as clean or cleaner than the old CNG Honda Civic. Steve and Green Bridge Technologies brought a Chevy Trax with them that they were using doing a road show across New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
