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To Really Cut Emissions, We Need Electric Buses, Not Just Electric Cars
An anonymous reader writes: All the EV attention these days is going to Tesla and other sedan manufacturers, but this article makes the case that it's far more important to switch our buses over to electric power than our cars. "Last year, according to the American Public Transportation Association, buses hauled 5.36 billion passengers. While usage has fallen in recent years, thanks in part to the growth of light rail and subway systems, buses still account for more rides each year than heavy rail, light rail, and commuter rail combined—and for about half of all public transit trips." This, while managing around 4-5 miles per gallon of gas, and public buses usually average about 50,000 miles per year. The electric buses themselves are significantly more expensive, but the difference is made up dramatically lower fuel costs. And there will be difficulties: "The range—up to 30 miles—limits Proterra buses to certain routes, so it's hard for an agency to go all in. Drivers have to be trained to brake and accelerate differently, and to maneuver into the docking stations. And Doran Barnes of Foothill Transit notes that some of the cost advantage of using electricity instead of diesel can dissipate. Electric cars can be charged at night, when power prices are low. But buses have no choice but to recharge in the middle of the day, when utilities often impose higher peak usage rates."
Diesel engines are powerful but they pollute A LOT. And don't forget ships. That bunker fuel many of them burn is NASTY.
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A bus will only get a few mpg, but carries a lot more people.
Sometimes it does. I see a lot of buses driving around 90+% empty.
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I see a lot of cars driving around 80% empty. To and from work, I must admit that one of them is mine.
The US Navy has been all-in with Nuclear power. R&D has been non-stop. If they haven't "solved its problems", it's unlikely throwing even more money at it, would do so.
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Seriously? Do you really believe a bunch of hippies put the breaks on something as profitable as Nuclear power?
Coal and oil lobbies, the folks paid to store nuclear waste instead of processing it into new power. Look at those folks. Follow the money. When anything of importance happens it's always money.
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It's also a question of flexibility. Sure, the bus doesn't need to go down every road, but they more or less can, providing flexibility
A electrically powered bus with overhead wires _and_ a battery could go down every road, more or less. There's still the problem of long haul trips. I'm still a little unclear on why the buses have to have a fixed battery capacity that has to charge in place as opposed to swappable, extendable batteries. Buses travel around on fixed routes with set schedules. Why can't there be multiple batteries for each bus, left charging at swap stations along the route. Make them automated. The driver can drive up, hop out, put a key into the swap station, position some forks onto the battery in the bus, push a button and have the used battery hauled out and a charged one slotted in. The whole thing shouldn't take more than five minutes. For long trips, why can't a bus haul a battery trailer with extra capacity?
In Japan we have trams with both a pantograph and a battery pack the pack covers areas where they can't put up cables. Buses are doing the same with inductive charging at bus stops.
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The problem is the manpower to operate it just doesn't scale well to something as small as a ship.
Why is it then possible and viable to have nuclear powered submarines but not ships?
Economically, it should not be. Because the value metrics and usage requirements for a submarine are vastly different to those for a ship. Both go on water, but when a submarine is underwater it needs a controlled non-toxic emission propulsion and power system - older and smaller subs use electric batteries, which are charged when on the surface by a diesel engine which exhausts out into the air, so they have very limited underwater endurance. A sub with a nuclear reactor does away with the electric battery element, has no need of diesel engines, so it can stay underwater for months at a time - even to the point where they can if necessary complete an entire tour of duty without breaking the surface of the water.
That ability to stay underwater and (probably) undetected gives the ability to project power into areas and in ways where highly visible surface ships just would not work.
The reason it works is that submarines are not used for economic activity - their value to the Navies that have them falls into the "money is no object" category and profit is irrelevant in the face of security and force projection.