Grand Teton National Park

Grand Teton National Park is expanding the use of electric and alternative fuel vehicles across its fleet. This success story highlights the park's approach, results, lessons learned, and future plans for fleet electrification.

The Opportunity

Grand Teton National Park currently has 168 light duty vehicles, 19 of them leased. The park has also had a Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) refuse truck since 2021. Currently, the national park is required to have a minimum blend of 5% bio-diesel in their diesel.

The Solution

The park has 3 charging stations in the park HQ in Moose, and 1 in Colter Bay. In addition to the charging stations in Moose and Colter, the new employee houses and renovations of existing houses have 240V circuits running to the garage.

GTNP has motorpool utilization policies, they assign hybrids to workgroups with the highest mileage. Their ‘pool’ vehicles support general transportation demand, and they maximize use of EVs for this, as the usual demand is for Sedans.

The Impact

• Most of the EVs don’t require much maintenance, as they are new

• Rusty Mizelle, GTNP’s fleet manager, asserts that the CNG refuse truck has been performing well, with more MPG and twice the range of a diesel truck at 20,000 miles

• The EVs have been perfect so far, with the only issue in the winter being maintaining access to charging stations, and ensuring that people don’t leave power cords in parking spots as that is a safety hazard

• 14.3% of GTNP’s fleet are alternative fuel vehicles

What’s Next?

Given the success of these alternative fuel vehicles, the park is looking to replace their other refuse truck with another CNG truck. They are also looking to expand their work fleet charging array. While it is not required for concessionaires in the park to use alternative fuel vehicles, the park highly recommends it, and several concessionaires are transitioning to EVs. GTNP plans on the continued life-cycle replacement of gasoline/diesel fleet vehicles with alternative fuel vehicles.