GreenPower Motor could be major benefactor in Volkswagen emissions scandal

Some bad news for car giant Volkswagen may turn out to be good news for a small Canadian-based maker of electric buses.

This morning, GreenPower Motor Company Inc. (Greenpower Motor Company Stock Quote, Chart, News: TSXV:GPV, OTCQB:GPVF) announced that certain purchasers of GreenPower all-electric buses are eligible for funding from the $2.9 billion Volkswagen Settlement Mitigation Trust.

The scandal known as “dieselgate” or “emissionsgate” erupted in September of last year after the United States Environmental Protection Agency found that Volkwagen had cheated emissions controls on more than 11-million cars between 2009 and 2015.

The EPA levied a penalty in the form of a fund that will require Volkswagen to fund a $2.7 billion mitigation trust. The mitigation trust fund is intended to pay for defined eligible projects that reduce NOx (NOx is a generic term for the mono-nitrogen oxides NO and NO2 ). The total $2.7 billion funding for the mitigation trust fund is intended to fully mitigate the total, lifetime excess NOx emissions from the VW 2.0 liter vehicles.

“GreenPower is presently engaged with a number of organizations in analyzing their fleet for Eligible Buses so they can purchase a new all-electric school bus, shuttle bus or transit bus from GreenPower under this program. With our low floor, high floor and double decker buses, we are the only company with a complete range of all-electric buses that can take advantage of all of the Mitigation Actions that are available for all-electric buses under this program,” said GreenPower president Brendan Riley. “We believe this program will help accelerate the adoption of all-electric buses, scrap buses with older diesel engines that are notorious polluters and be part of the solution in remedying this scandal.”

Today’s news follows on the heels of some recent wins for the Vancouver-based GreenPower. In December, the company announced that its customer, the City of Porterville, had been awarded $9.5-million by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to deploy 10 GreenPower Motor Company Inc. EV350 40-foot zero-emission all-electric transit buses on all of its nine Porterville Transit routes, and to install the charging infrastructure, which will include 11 charging stations.

GreenPower says it will update the VW matter on its website.

Disclosure: GreenPower Motor is an annual sponsor of Cantech Letter.