The Company

ČEZ Group is one of the most important economic entities in the Czech Republic which operates in Western, Central and Southeastern Europe. Their main business is production, distribution, trade and sales in the field of electricity and heat; trade and sale in the field of natural gas; providing comprehensive energy services from the new energy sector. ČEZ Group is one of the ten largest energy companies in Europe, with more than 8 million customers and over 32,000 employees.

The Dukovany nuclear power plant is the first nuclear power plant built in the Czech Republic and is the largest employer in the region. 3,000 employees of the ČEZ Group and other suppliers work directly at the power plant. A further study by Charles University showed that the operation of the power plant is related to up to thirty thousand jobs.

The Problem

As a result of the widespread increase in the number of cars people take to work, with little public transport uptake, the nuclear power plant has faced a lack of parking spaces and thus the dissatisfaction of employees who had nowhere to park. This is one of the reasons why some drivers have started parking their cars along an undesignated space on the adjacent district road, which reduced the safety of traffic on this road. Despite the construction of a new car park with a capacity of 322 parking spaces, ČEZ set out on a long-term sustainable trend of motivating its employees and suppliers to optimise and reduce the number of cars that come to the power plant every day and thus to reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions.

The Solution

With the ČEZ management team, we launched an awareness campaign to acquire the first users for Yedem’s carpooling solution. In a few days we deployed our service enabling all employees and suppliers to share their rides. People from all over the region and more distant places come to the power plant. Users who offered their ride to other colleagues and subsequently shared their ride with them received a guaranteed parking space for the day.

The Results

During the first few months, hundreds of power plant employees and suppliers signed up for the Yedem application. The start of carpooling began to pick up speed, and we soon arranged dozens of shared rides a day. The power plant thus recorded a year-on-year decrease of several dozen cars a day. During an maintenance outage, when up to twice as many employees are at the power plant compared to normal operation, there is a saving of parking spaces for up to 200 cars per day. In just half a year of carpooling, the employees of Dukovany managed to save around 18,000 kilograms of CO2, which would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere. Over the whole year of 2021, Dukovany workers managed to save around 100,000 kilograms of CO2. Another positive fact is that employees in the power plant are more flexible thanks to carpooling and are transported at lower costs. The number of passengers is growing every month, while the number of cars is declining – jointly bringing positive benefits all around.

Cooperation with the service provider has been very effective and reliable from the very beginning. From their approach, there was a real interest in the functioning of the system and an effort to solve the problem of parking. In a very short time, they conducted a user questionnaire survey, based on which they improved some functionalities and the application environment to meet the needs of users even more. Thanks to this, the interest in reserved parking is above expectations and the number of cars arriving at the power plant with two or more passengers is still growing.Ing. Jiří Bezděk - spokesman ČEZ group