The real reason to look at battery-electric buses is pure dollars and sense. Battery-electric buses can have lower lifecycle O&M costs. The current generation might not have lower O&M costs, but there is definitely a path to lower O&M costs with electric versus bus with internal combustion engines.
There's also an extremely valuable noise externality. If you live in a city (I do), you hear lots of buses roar like dragons, which is unpleasant, to say the least, for people outside the bus, and not that pleasant for people inside the bus. The other day I had one of those uncanny experiences when I was walking along, and there was a bus coming down the street, but I could tell something was "wrong." It took me a moment to realize that it wasn't making hideous engine noises because it was electric!
Little things may also improve bus uptake, like the lack of noise pollution.
I think we very much ignore the massive negative impact noise makes on our society. ICE vehicles create lots of noise that is massively disrupting our sleep in cities. Quieter cities should have a good increase in health as our citizens sleep more soundly.
I agree very much, and not only for the sleeping part.
My girlfriend suffer from hyperacusis. Loud ICE vehicles, especially two-wheeled one (there are a lot where we live) cause her physical pain. It's a relief when a vehicle starts and there is almost no noise.
We really wish the emissions and noise would go inside the rider lungs and ears. People would be much faster to make the switch to cleaner, less noisy vehicles.
I have a problem sometimes with late night "drag races" where two or more ICE vehicles decide that the relatively straight streets of a downtown grid are perfect for aggressively and loudly over-revving some engines then blasting down the street as loudly and presumably violently as possible.
Admittedly, my building is at the first traffic light of the straight part of the (one-way) Main St. Potential plans to restore two-way flow to such a street might lessen that somewhat, but I assume random idiots with what look like clear streets will continue to love showing off how loud their ICE engines get doing stupid stunts.
A least where I live, there is a ton of honking, too, usually for pretty trivial reasons, which is a bigger contribution of cars to noise pollution than their actual engines. I wish it cost $0.50 or something to honk a car horn.
For me it's the constant construction around here. Workers seem to start at dawn. Some days it will be a jackhammer, on more benevolent days you only hear general noise and the reverse beeps from some massive construction vehicle.
In today's world, a diesel bus is able to run for an entire day, doing route(s) back and forth without going back to the depot for refueling and charging. This can be true for an electric bus, but in general the range is not longer, and depends on stuff like
- elevation changes in the route
- climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.
> Similarly, the Minnesota source claimed that over the three-week trial, electricity consumption was 70 percent heating and only 30 percent motion.
> Wright said (as of early fall) that Moscow’s trial routes for BEBs—trolleybus Routes 73, 76, 80, and 83—have had to use more buses just to run the same service, pointing to before and after slides. The four routes appear to have gone from 46 trolleybuses to 82 BEBs without any increase in service frequency, presumably because BEBs have considerable down time for midday charging.
That incurs a lot of additional costs:
- buses not in service while driving to and from charging points are personnel and vehicle hours that cost money, especially if after charging you need to be able to place the driver in a bus actually going into service
- you are maintaining and storing a much larger fleet of buses now
Until an electric bus can be made that can run a full day without charging, costs will rise for electric bus adopters.
You can charge the busses at the endstation with a inverted "train roof thing" for 5 min/45 min drive.
Heating should not really be a problem. You should use some open flame heater with e.g. gas, wood spill etc for that not high quality electricity or gasoline.
Ye, maybe I should have written enclosed open flame. I meant some sort of protected open flame heating a tube of water. Is burner the correct term?
Having a auxiliary diesel burner with water as medium is standard practice in the area. The buses have so large windows that the heating power is quite ridiculous. Maybe EV-buses need smaller windows? I tried to figure out how the buses and the article are heated and another article states electricity and oil burner when it's quite cold. (https://www.jamtkraft.se/om-jamtkraft/nyhetsrum/stadsbussar-...)
I don't think it's reasonable to heat them only with electricity in that climate. Maybe a wood pellet burner could be used if one is made for automotive use? I wonder if the pellets would bounce around too much ... probably only good enough in rural areas where there would be no smog problems.
Biomass or biofuel being renewable or good for the environment is debatable at best, especially when considering unintended consequences (like Brazilian rainforests getting slashed for biofuel crops).
Obvoiusly the best is to not use the energy in the first place, but what renewable ("regrowable") would be better than biomass if heat is what you want?
It's the end stops that have the roof charger. Traffic lights would probably be too short of a stop? Unless you have plenty of them on the route so you could afford some green lights without running out of battery.
> climate; not only do batteries perform worse in cold weather, but heating and cooling makes up a significant amount of energy draw. In an ICE bus usually the ICE itself generates waste heat.
New Flyer, a major bus maker, is based out of Winnipeg, Canada, and is developing e-buses:
Pure second-hand anecdote, but my father is in management at our local regional transportation company (covers buses, lightrail, and more). We're not a small city.
They're experimenting with an electric bus right now - but so far it's been a nightmare. Range is the primary problem, lasting less than a full route, sometimes not even lasting over an hour after a full charge. This has resulted in having to tow the bus back to the shop several times.
Even with removable batteries, you'd have to have a lot of these lying around, and a lot more buses running shorter routes, to compensate. Their CNG buses just don't have this problem, and produce largely water vapor as their combustion bi-product.
Which vendor is supplying those buses? Sounds like your unit may be malfunctioning if that's nowhere near spec, or you have extreme weather conditions.
The vendor is GreenPower Motor Co. Inc.'s EV Star mini-buses. They bought 6 of them for testing.
I think the problem is the terrain, distance in the routes, and expected load.
"Out of the box" it looks like they're capable of 100-150 miles, but from what he said, they weren't getting those numbers even on a good day.
From that experience, and from his attitude towards them. I doubt they'll be eager to try out the full sized versions.
The CNG buses they currently run are pretty darn clean, and cheap to operate as it is. So electric will have to be quite a bit better in order to convince them to switch.
I don't have insight to the testing process, but ya, I assume they drove one around before buying 6 of them...
It's like the difference between using the trial period for some new SaaS product, vs. actually buying it and putting it into limited production - you'll find all sorts of things you didn't run into before.
You must also consider the scale they operate at - buying 6 for testing probably isn't too big of a deal if they don't work out long term.
Almost all EV and electric mobility range numbers are pure bulls*it. Scooters with 40 miles range? You'll get 15 miles at best. They measure those doing laps on tracks. I can't imagine how absurdly mindbogglingly braindead they must be to think doing laps around a track is anything representative of the real world. Do the company execs spend all their day in the office, and have never in their life ever seen a hill or traffic light before?
The thing is you want ranges to be reproducible for comparisons, and for that you need a standardized environment - temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed, driving profile. The easiest way to do this is on a track or on a rig.
Routes and service varies a lot from one fleet to another and route to another. That effects the type of bus you want. Maybe you have a school bus in San Diego. Drives flat and a couple of hours day. Or maybe it's bus in the Sierras and has to climb 2500 feet up a steep grade in 100 degree weather at 7000 feet.
The other thing I think is routes are currently designed around diesel buses. Natively replacing them with electric is likely to be sub optimal.
Yeah but when you then go and sell it to the customer as a "scooter with 40 mile range" this is extremely deceptive and disingenuous as you KNOW the customer isn't going to be running their scooter around a track, they probably are going to be using it to commute around town with stoplights and hills.
Yes, it depends on a lot of factors, but stoplights exist almost everywhere and should be considered standard; if that halves your range to 20 miles, you should probably advertise it as "10-20 miles range depending on terrain" instead of "40 miles".
A standardized environment for testing is fine but it should emulate some set of realistic conditions if you intend to use numbers from it for advertising, e.g. stop-and-go every 100 meters, uphill 2% for 1/3, 0% for 1/3, downhill -2% for 1/3, or something like that would at least be slightly more representative of the commutes of most people.
