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California District Launches Country's First All-Electric School Bus
joe5 writes "Well, leave it the golden state. The Kings Canyon (near Squaw Valley) Unified School District recently launched the first all-electric school bus in the United States. The bus is a modified SST Trans Tech model based on a Ford E-Series van chassis — and Motiv Power Systems created the electric drive train. (The project was a collaboration between those two companies plus the California Air Resources Board.) The electric bus can carry 25 students with an estimated range of 80 to 100 miles— and while it costs more than a standard combustion engine version, is expected to save about 16 gallons of fuel per day. Thanks to a federal highway program, three more electric buses are on their way to the Kings Canyon district and similar programs are in the works in both Chicago and New York."
Many EVs let you turn on the heating remotely or on a timer, so that the vehicle is warmed up while it is still plugged in and charging. Then it only needs to maintain that temperature, which requires a lot less energy. The charge process itself also generates a fair bit of heat which can be used.
Have a read of some of the EV forums. Electric cars are pretty popular in northern European countries where it gets very cold for much of the year, not least because they have this feature and tend to work more reliably than ICE cars.
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That might be the case, but it might also not be the case.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Most districts have bus garages where they store their buses overnight, you typically heat that area anyways for the maintenance crew.
even if you don't heat the garage, just being in a structure will help cut some of the cold. My old pickup has a manual transmission that gets stiff in cold weather, to the point that i have to warm the engine for 10-20 minutes when the temp is under 10F just for the shifter to move right. In the garage the time is at the lower number, but, when i park outside, the higher number is more common.
at the very least, a school bus would probably be a ideal use for this type of tech. Predictable loop runs, twice a day, stored in the garage(and charging) while school is in session.
There are always outliers where this is going to be the case, but llikely the vast majority of school buses in urban areas could be replaced by something like this with lower running costs.
Now, you didn't say where you lived or if you had done a proper analysis of how they were collecting students.. but considering the cost of driving a bus such a distance, might it not be cheaper to collect the more distant students in a smaller vehicle?
You can paint it yellow, but it's still a really-short bus. That might make sense for very low-density areas, but I was surprised when I needed to hire a school bus for a Scout event last year that the newer full-sized buses actually get pretty amazing mileage. At 10-15 MPG, it's terrible for a car, but when you're carrying 60+ people, that's fantastic. Especially considering you can still buy a pickup truck that gets similar mileage. I was expecting the answer to come back at "7MPG highway" or something more proportional to automotive mileage.
Kudos to the anonymous mechanical engineers who design these things. I suspect it would be really hard to build a full-sized EV bus that used less total fuel, considering the transmission and charging losses, and the fuel equivalence for the additional wealth needed to purchase such a thing.
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Assuming all the energy is generated via coal, it would generate about two thirds of the carbon emissions. On one hand you have vastly improved efficiency of the power plant vs. the diesel engine. On the other hand, petrol is rich in hydrogen which burns to water, while coal is pure carbon so it will generate more CO2 for the same energy. If you use natural gas (CH4), then it drops to about half what the Diesel engine would generate.
A more realistic view would take the energy whole mix into consideration, which also includes Hydro, nuclear, renewables, etc. An even more interesting question is to think on the margin: how will the energy market react to a consistent marginal increase in consumption ? Will it add more nuclear and solar plants or will burn more coal ?
Another thing to consider is the start-stop nature of the workload: this is the environment the electric motor shines because it naturally lends to regenerative breaking. You have no idle burn at the traffic lights and no coupling inefficiency due to the discrete nature of the gearbox. The electric motor turns electricity into mechanical energy with over 90% efficiency, almost all of it moves the vehicle forward, and much of it can be recovered during breaking. These fact alone can skew the calculation by a factor of 2:1 - 3:1 in favor of the electric engine.
Doubt there is anything for a bus like this, but if you look at a Prius there is quite a bit of data on the maintenance costs.
The rengertice breaking saves on brake pad wear, to the point that Toyota reports they don't need replacment till 100,000 miles. The Power Shift transmission has fewer gear sets, resulting in less wear on them, and has no clutch, CVT belt, or torque converter. Plus there is no timing belt, alternator, starter. And since the ICE is not running all the time it's experiences less wear and Toyota reports you don't need to replace the coolant till around the 8 year mark.
Of course this is countered by the lump sum of the battery and expensive dealership rates for when repairs are needed; but this wouldn't be a comparable factor on this kind of bus since you'd need the manufacturer to repair it regardless; and the poor MPG the old ones had would more then makeup the cost of a replacement battery years down the line.