News

Clean-air demo turns off engines

Aug. 13, 2001

IdleAire Technologies has unveiled a demonstration project aimed at reducing emissions from idling diesel trucks at the Hunts Point Market in New York City’s South Bronx.. The Knoxville, TN-based company’s technology is designed to give truckers access to heat, air conditioning, AC power, cable television, Internet and local phone connections—all without idling the truck’s diesel engine. Instead,

Wendy Leavitt

Instead, IdleAire equips truck parking spaces with individual HVAC units mounted on an overhead scaffolding. Drivers access heat and a/c as well as the other services via a special console that is designed to fit into a cab’s side window. Separate plugs also allow drivers to power reefer units and/or engine block heaters.

Four IdleAire-equipped parking spaces have begun operation and another 28 are scheduled to follow over the next few months. The Hunts Point Market, considered to be the world’s largest wholesale food distribution center, draws heavy truck traffic to a crowded urban area. Thank to congestion, drivers often must wait hours to unload. That makes it an ideal site to test out such a clean-air solution.

EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman was on hand for the project’s launch along with local environmental activists, officials from Consolidated Edison, the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, the New York Power Authority and IdleAire executives.

The pilot is being financed in part through a grant from Consolidated Edison to Clean Air Communities, a non-profit organization.

About the Author

Wendy Leavitt

Wendy Leavitt joined Fleet Owner in 1998 after serving as editor-in-chief of Trucking Technology magazine for four years.

She began her career in the trucking industry at Kenworth Truck Company in Kirkland, WA where she spent 16 years—the first five years as safety and compliance manager in the engineering department and more than a decade as the company’s manager of advertising and public relations. She has also worked as a book editor, guided authors through the self-publishing process and operated her own marketing and public relations business.

Wendy has a Masters Degree in English and Art History from Western Washington University, where, as a graduate student, she also taught writing.