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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.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A bus will only get a few mpg, but carries a lot more people. Replacing every bus in the states would be far less helpful for our environment than doing the same with cars/trucks/SUVs. I get the feeling this article is just for generating press for electric buses.
I know i'm old but there was a time when most buses ran off electricity using an overhead wire for power transfer. What's with wanting to go to battery power for this use. It's not like we could have forgotten this technology and with an update using today's technology we have to be able to make it better. Buses have defined routes so we can't argue that it limits flexibility...buses aren't cars, they don't have to be able to go down every road.
The biggest inefficiency with a (short-route) bus is stop-starting a heavy vehicle laden with people.
We have electric and hybrid buses in London, but using a Flywheel (first developed as a fuel-saving measure for F1 cars) to preserve kinetic energy has made the greatest difference to efficiency for London buses.
Trolleybus networks were rolled out in a great many Eastern European cities decades ago, with liquid-fuel-consuming buses often serving a minority of routes (typically ones going beyond whatever the city limits were when the trolleybus lines were build). It's amusing to think that we are going back to this, though now battery technology should be advanced enough that cities no longer have to deploy unsightly wires down all the thoroughfares.
Shanghai has had some buses using these for several years. They recharge at some of the bus stops.
I read the entire article, and the full summary, and no where is mentioned to single most important datapoint for evaluating the claim in the headline:
How much total CO2 is generated by buses as compared to cars? Since they didn't put it in the article (and since the article reads like an advertisement for an electric bus company), I'm going to guess it's just an advertisement.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Reno recently purchased 4 of these spending about 1 million per bus:
http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/nevada/reno-unveils-4-new-electric-buses
How much advantage is there in using electric over CNG?
It's pretty well established that the bulk of public transport users are the poor. How about freeing up land usage and getting rid of zoning so they can walk to work instead of having to catch public transport at all?
The battery on the Model S is replaceable by robots, surely you could put a rooftop battery on there, and then just swap them out at large bus stations near neighborhood substations for charging? Who on earth builds an industrial grade public bus without swappable batteries in this day and age?
Propane and natural gas powered buses have had their fuel tanks on the roof for decades now. With hooks and simple optics it wouldn't be hard to lift an old battery pack off and swap it for a fresh one in under 5 minutes.
moox. for a new generation.
not to nitpick... oh fine, I'm nitpicking. Buses aren't significant -- as in important -- but they are statistically significant, as in reliably measurable. There is a 0% chance that buses don't exist and are really just a random fluctuation in your data.
If you are going to be limited to certain routes, why not electrify the routes and then save the weight of the batteries? Then you won't have to worry about recharge times either so you'll get more daily miles out of each bus too.
You might get the occasional free-rider but only on april 1st.
Instead of a single bus driving around picking people up and dropping them off, have stands with small electric vehicles for individuals. Instead of waiting for a bus, you go to a stand and check out a vehicle and drive it to where you want. Or it drives itself. With self-driving electric vehicles, you could keep all the stands in supply.
This has to be one of the best use cases I've seen for wireless charging stations. Put one at every bus stop where it's practical. Just by sitting there, while letting people on and off or just waiting to get back on schedule, the bus can be recharging. Also, buses are long, so the density of power sent through the charging coils doesn't have to be as high as with a car.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
good news, we're never leaving Afghanistan. Enjoy your permanent war on terror for some stupid toxic batteries.
Humans like cars, not buses.
And if you taxed larger or powerful cars heavily*, people would drive more fuel efficient cars. High gas taxes are doing that in some parts of Europe.
In the USA, at least, cars are a status/phallic symbol and thus are larger and/or more powerful than they need to be in a practical sense. There are times I wanted a more powerful car to compete with other more powerful cars during rush hour. But that's size escalation. If you lower the average then there is less need to compete with beefy cars.
Further, taxing beefy cars would encourage more to take public transportation. I know conservatives will balk, but taxes would help with three problems: traffic, pollution (and GW), and gas dependance. Four actually: gov't revenue to help pay down debt and other uses.
* Exemptions would be made for large families and legitimate business use.
Table-ized A.I.
You forget the solution that is always 'sold' to people is that they need to buy something. If we gave a shit about the environment, the big ass ships would be nuclear, and people would instead fix their old cars as making new cars is far more damaging to the environment. But that doesn't sell, and the consumer needs something to buy in.
I'm always amazed how duped the 'smart' and general public is.
But they love buying new things, Bernays was a freaking genius.
In San Francisco a good percentage of our bus fleet is electric with overhead wires, so the tech is still there, works great, and is not as expensive and problematic as batteries. Trolley buses, look it up. Only issue is the wires are U G L Y
The newer buses even have enough battery power to go a block or two off the wires on battery power and pass an obstruction, something that would bring the old trolley bus system to a standstill.
The largest container ships have huge particulate emissions, but that's because there's no regulation on particulate emissions according to international law. It would be difficult to change that, because regulating ships requires an international agreement. That said, it should be done.
However, ships already have extremely low CO2 emissions per ton-mile. They are already extremely fuel-efficient. The largest ships have 1/15th the fuel usage and CO2 emissions per ton-mile as a tractor-trailer truck, and massively better than your car. If you drive one mile to the store to buy an article of clothing, you have emitted vastly more CO2 than was emitted by shipping it halfway around the globe by containership.
That will have almost no effect on your CO2 emissions.
Let's get away from the bus paradigm altogether. Use small (self-driving) vehicles to move people, instead of large buses. Small vehicles are more flexible and don't clog up traffic as much. They can be disinfected easily between uses by providing wipes or a spray for each new patron to clean the surfaces with.
To really reduce emissions we need nuclear power. Converting CO2 heavy transport to using electricity generated by CO2 heavy coal wont do any good:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...
I was wondering about that part.
Is it 30 miles at 30mph with no stops?
Or is it 30 miles of stopping every 200 feet to pick up and drop off passengers?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Or insist they design a bus with an easily swapped out battery pack. It may way a thousand pounds (453.592kg), but that's what technology is for.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Right, because if you aren't talking about global warming, you won't breathe either!
They out of sight, out of mind. Further, there's really no one to regulate them. Most ocean going boats are registered in countries with the least stringent of regulations and neither the motivation nor ability to do otherwise.
Frankly, if ever there was a case to be made for nuclear power, it would be these boats.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Even better, put them on rails and go really fast so that we can finally get the rapid mass transit of the future!
Or maybe 1968.
Many bus routes are short & fixed so you can have install fast chargers at several points along the route. But I do like the idea of battery swapping.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
We should have been working hard at improving nuclear power, and solving its problems, to the point that this would, by now, be a no-brainer. So those polluting diesels are another thing we can blame on the environmentalists that shut down nuclear power research in the '70s.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I seem to remember (I used to be involved with the local CIC many years ago) that all public transportation including buses collectively account for percentage of commuters, in the US, down in the single digits. (Less than 10%.) This is from memory, but I think the highest usage of mass transit (which again lumped all forms into one statistic, not just buses) was in Massachusetts, and even there it was in the low tens. (Maybe 12 - 15%.)
Comparing the pollution of individual buses directly to individual cars is disingenuous because buses typically carry more passengers per mile. (Although the big articulated bus I follow home at night with typically six or seven passengers seems to be the exception...)
Conclusion being, converting to electric buses won't make an appreciable impact on the air pollution level. They're not collectively a significant source of pollution, compared to other major sources.
Moreover, it is my understanding that the black smoke seen in bus diesel exhaust is mostly particulate matter which eventually settles out of the air. It makes storefronts and sidewalks dirty, and tends to stick to your clothes and skin, but doesn't contribute to global warming in a meaningful way.
But it would make people feel good, I guess, to not see a big gout of black smoke out of the bus they're following, and I suppose that has marketing value. But I don't see how the electric part could work without overhead power lines.
Incidentally, our commuter buses all have the "powered by Biodiesel" stickers on them, but a local article revealed that the requirement to be able to wear the sticker was that some very tiny percentage of your total fuel (less than 20%) be biodiesel. That was disappointing.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
3D-print it at home.
Done
Have gnu, will travel.
There's probably just as much easily obtained lithium in California than in Afganistan, and if that's not enough there's more in Bolivia than anywhere else on the planet in a salt lake that has a railway line running right onto the salt. The lithium in Afganistan thing is more along the lines of "we have this land, what can we do with it?" than it being better to get it from there than anywhere else.
kill the commercial airline industry and make people stay home, and QUIT importing crap from all over the world because those HUGE cargo ships burn some of the nastiest fuel in the world, keep manufacturing in home countries, if Sony wants to sell electronics in the USA they need to build them in the USA, same with all other manufacturing, so reconfigure the global economy so companies have to build what they want to sell in those host countries
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Busses are too few and at this time, generally do not lend themselves well to pure electric approaches.
Far more important are the large number of Commercial vehicles, esp. Semis.
About 3 years, O and the Dems tried to push a tax break that would enable us to move new commercial vehicles off diesel and over the nat gas. Sadly, the neo-cons/tea* fought that because the large oil companies do not want to see the price of oil plummet.
What is really needed is to drop the massive subsidies that we have on oil/nat gas/coal, and the moderate subsidies on hybrids and electric vehicles.
Instead, we should have a set of LIMITED TIME subsidy that solves a few of these issues:
1) for any pure electric car with a range of 100-149 MPC (via epa rating), they get 7.5K. For any pure electric with a range above 150 MPC, give them $15K.
This should drop by $1.5K each year. 2) a subsidy for any commercial vehicle using [LC] Nat Gas. In addition, if this is for a serial hybrid, the subsidy should start at the same amount (i.e. a serial hybrid using Nat Gas will have double subsidy what a simple nat gas truck would have. In addition, the large the vehicle, the more subsidy for it. Finally, the nat gas subsidy should drop by 20%, and the serial hybrid should start dropping after that. So, that means that the nat gas subsidy is gone after 5 years, and the hybrid portion will be a steady rate for the first 5 years, but then drop 20% for the next 5 years, meaning that it will last 10 years.
Commercial vehicles makers are ready to do nat gas. It will be expensive at first, but will drop rather quickly. It is the hybrid portion that is of interest since it allows a company to focus on creating pure electric vehicles down the road.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
To really cut emissions we need emissionless power generation. The closest thing we get to that in reasonable power density is nuclear.
They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.
One word: Pirates.
First we need batteries that aren't a complete joke.
The energy density and efficiency of batteries versus gas are not comparable.
Here some fool is going to say I'm not taking into the consideration the cost of pulling the fuel out of the ground or the cost to the environment. You're right... I'm not... because that's not what I'm talking about. I'm also not talking about how neither gasoline nor batteries taste like chocolate. The issue is that the gasoline is very energy dense, relatively inexpensive, low maintenance, and thus EFFECTIVE as a fuel source.
Batteries by contrast have so many fucking problems it boggles the mind that anyone could think we could replace gasoline with them without bringing the whole system to its knees.
For one the weight/mass to energy ratio is not comparable. For the same energy batteries must be larger and heavier.
Second, they wear out fairly quickly. Possibly we could mitigate this with flow batteries but I haven't seen anyone actually propose that for automobiles. Regardless, we are comparing a gasoline tank to a battery. Both serve similar functions. How long can a gasoline tank last? How many "power cycles" can it sustain? Compare that to a battery. Is it a fair comparison? It is a realistic one. that is what you are proposing to compete with and its laughable given current technology.
Third, batteries are hardly more environmentally friendly then the petrochemical industry. Ever seen a battery factory? Lead contamination is pretty common... as are a dozen other heavy metals that seep into the ground over the years. Often the land around large battery factories look like the surface of the moon. Lifeless... oh and completely toxic. Go Captain Planet.
Fourth, they're more expensive. It doesn't matter how you add up the numbers. They cost more. Which means transport goes up for everyone and everything which means everything imported goes up in cost. ... I could go on and on... but really... just no.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
> The 15-30 largest container ships in the world (depending on who's estimates you're using) produce more pollution than all the cars combined. ...and one volcano puts out more CO2 than all of the world's industry combined...and turning on a fluorescent light burns more electricity than it does leaving it on for four hours....
Why do people keep falling for this? Do they have no concept of the numbers involved, or does people's brains just break down when faced with differences of more than two orders of magnitude?
I understand that these are major polluters.. I've seen pictures in a Britannica "Science and the future" book of bulk transport ships using large servo driven metal sails. I wonder to what extent this technology has been explored. When doing a google search, I found this http://www.cnet.com/news/cargo... ..But it doesn't look like it was actually built.
I've heard anecdotal evidence that a transport ship is equivalent to 50,000 cars.. And this site http://www.viewzone.com/sixtee... claims that it's much higher. I'd be interested in in a reliable source for this. I understand that they use different fuel depending on how close they are to a human settlement, and the cheap stuff is a really big polluter. It's a solid a room temperature and has to be heated up to flow into the engine. At the very least, I'd like to see electrostatic percipitators on the smoke-stacks.
We once had world trade based on sail. Much/ most of that cargo does not need to get to it's destination quickly..
A half full bus is dramatically more efficient than each of the passengers driving their own car. Plus there are many alternatives to batteries for relatively few vehicles traveling fixed routes - trains, trolleys, natural gas, biodiesel. The first priority should be getting people to ride public transportation, even legacy one. The second is getting ones that can not into electric cars. This is not even on the radar.
The largest container ships have huge particulate emissions, but that's because there's no regulation on particulate emissions according to international law.
The lack of regulations is why container ships use Bunker No. 6.
It is one grade above the stuff we use to make asphalt and the dirtiest part of oil that can still be used for fuel.
If allowed to cool to room temperature, it turns into a semi-solid.
Countries have started creating regulations for marine engine particulate emissions near their shores,
but banning bunker fuel would have serious effects on the global shipping industry and product prices.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The batteries could even have small motorized wheels of their own that allow them to automatically detach from the bus and self-navigate to a charging station. Then a new battery could crawl up under the bus and hoist itself into position and lock-in.
They are testing them (ugly as hell), but why not Hybrids? A city bus is the *perfect* use for an hybrid vehicle. They are always stop and go, and have the mass to properly regenerate the batteries, and yet every driver looks at me like I've got two heads whenever I mention Hybrid...
They prefer to go Electric instead of Hybrid (which would be better IMHO)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Every time I hear stars in LA brag about their electric vehicles, I recall the biggest polluters in the western US includes the Intermountain Power Project, which is owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, but is located in Utah so that the California customers don't have to deal with the pollution. There are a number of other massive coal plants in Nevada, Utah and Arizona that are similar massive polluters that don't serve the local population, but are power exporters.
People say "Oh, I pay extra for wind power". That means nothing, everything else you touch in your life runs on fossil fuels of one sort or another. Plus, the wind farms are terrible for bird and bat populations.
It's too bad that the environmental movements are full of people with LibEd degrees who don't understand basic science, and put feelings above thoughts. Until we develop something better, Nuclear Power is the only realistic option that makes electric vehicles somewhat green.
I'm tired of the LA pollution being shipped east to the Navajo Nation power plant or the IPP, and LA's yellow nitrous pollution fouling the air in my deserts.
In Toronto we used to have electric trolley buses powered by overhead wires. I'm not sure why they were discontinued in 1993; but it occurs to me that newer buses could use the same basic idea to operate in a 'tethered' mode for some parts of their route, (long straight runs in urban areas for example), while using battery power for other parts. I know it sounds like a bit of a throwback, but it could offer some real advantages as far as vehicle range and battery longevity are concerned.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If you believe the environmental cost of making a new car exceeds the savings of using it instead of an old car, then you are the one that is duped. This has been debunked many times. Guess the person who thinks they are 'smart' is you.
Except for the battery, a street car was often an electric "bus". It drew the power from overhead lines. These were common until we were forced into automobiles by a combination of post-war cultural attitudes and downright bamboozling by the likes of GM.
So yes. Switch back. There. FTFY.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I don't know if this is a troll, but if not you may be a bit confused about who is "falling for this". It seems you are as you just listed a few outright lies and distortions.
and one volcano puts out more CO2 than all of the world's industry combined...
Liar:
Because while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
and turning on a fluorescent light burns more electricity than it does leaving it on for four hours....
Liar:
Turns out, however, that power surge is so brief that its energy draw doesn't amount to much: the equivalent of a few seconds or so of normal operation, according to U.S. Department of Energy estimates.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/turn-fluorescent-lights-off-when-you-leave-room/
Why do people keep falling for this? Do they have no concept of the numbers involved, or does people's brains just break down when faced with differences of more than two orders of magnitude?
I have no idea why you fall for shit you hear on AM radio. But if you can prove EITHER of those claims I will give you 50 dollars.
In the USA, at least, cars are a status/phallic symbol and thus are larger and/or more powerful than they need to be in a practical sense.
You can apply that same "phallic symbol" to anything; I think of it when I see people showing off all their Apple crap every time they sit down. Saying things like that is an easy way to get people all worked up ("America Sucks, It's all their fault"), but that's all.
I drive a small car (average 33-35MPG) for my daily commute, but I need a larger car to move things and construction materials to work on my house. Why should I be punished for that?
I use it for work as well, but who is going to decide what is an allowable exemption? You? How much use does it take to be legitimate business use? Why should large families have an exemption, they are a big part of the problem. We know what causes pregnancy now-a-days. Frankly, we should tax large families because they take so many more resources.
My large SUV gets 21MPG highway, though I average about 17 with city driving. That's better than a Volkswagen bus, should they not be taxed even more for wasting more gas? Or is it all about the appearance of the vehicle, like when I traded a Chevrolet vehicle for a Toyota and was congratulated by friends, despite the fact that (1) the mileage was about the same, (2) the Toyota had to be made in Japan and then shipped over with considerable fuel use. They did not care; American brands were bad for the environment, Japanese were good. Logic does not come into it.
And why should people be able to buy gas-wasting AWD Subarus? Most days of the year, even in snow country, you don't need AWD, yet it wastes a lot of gas. They should be taxed for buying a feature they don't need. And bike racks on the cars, they really increase wind resistance and lower mileage, that should be taxed. How about people who drive miles every weekend to participate in marathons and other runs? They don't need to do that, they could sit at home or take a bus. They should be taxed for wasting fuel. A lot of pollution is generated by ski resorts, we should tax them for wasting energy, tax them even more if they care caught running lifts that are not 100% full (they should stop the lift unless the seat is taken). And nobody needs to ski, we should tax all of those people for wasting gas to drive there, and triple-tax them if they fly!
Where does it end? And who makes the decision? The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Oh, and high-end sports cars already pay a "gas guzzler tax".
A bus holds so many people that their waste is undone by the fleet of cars they replace. You would do better to digitize management of the bus system where the routes differ on demand and add call boxes at bus stops etc. Ideas like that, including robot bus drivers. That would save more than replacing them. One could do something similar for taxi... but just look how the beginnings of that are turning out... can't wait to see the fight the robot google taxi causes...
How about automated trains where the robo taxi syncs up for going longer distances? lots of options possible. If you chuck public road funding completely you have a TON of money to invest in just about any kind of system; likely all of them are cheaper than what we do now in the USA. Just think of the insurance... oh, never mind, insurance will lobby away any possibilities.
If congress wasn't so corrupt, we could have had the USPS go electric in a big way and jump start the industry. City delivery is a perfect place for electric; more so than a bus-- especially when most stop every 30 feet and never go faster than 40mph peak.
Nuclear has emissions, of a different kind. + a disaster every decade. Fusion... is always 5 years away. More work on storage is needed.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
.. to provide batteries at 1/3rd their current cost.. then the bus will have ~100 mile range while costing the same. (Space/weight isn't an issue, since a regular diesel bus already weighs around 75,000 lbs.)
Better yet, have batteries slotted into the bus like a giant laptop battery. A robotic arm can swap them out in seconds.
We need to get away from vehicles altogether, and switch over to R.A.H's rolling roads. Portable power supplies? Don't need them.
For some types of lithium-ion, the effect isn't that severe, especially if you don't fast-charge above 80%
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
However, heavy bunkers are hell on the top cylinder in slow speed diesels (110 rpm or less). Valve metallurgy has
negated a lot of the effects of this and although steam plants can use heavy oil they lose a lot of energy transfer
and hence are not very efficient. Medimum speed (Above 200 rpm) have terrible reliability problems trying to burn
bunkers. A lot of companies insist that the cheap fuel saves money but it's double edged versus the overtime they
pay engineers for valve maintenance. Exhaust temperatures tend to be a lot higher burning bunkers (150c or so
higher) and the risk of stack fires with high sulfur/carbon content increases dramatically if any turbo oxygen reaches
the stack. Total hydrocarbon consumption by ships as a percentage of all consumption is probably not that high and
alternative vegetable fuels work quite well for the most part in either slow or medium speed engines. The veg oil
market doesn't have the volume to supply all forms of transportation but in a narrow segment such as shipping,
it might be viable as an alternative. The billionaire shipping companies have been screwing around with the fuel
cost/maintenance cost issues for years. They'll do anything to save a penny. Tax breaks and subsidies to use
alternative fuels makes sense in this case. (In my belief.)
I can see why we'd want to stick with bunker fuel for ships, since only ship engines can burn that kind of fuel. It takes huge engines to burn that kind of fuel. As you pointed out, no. 6 bunker fuel isn't liquid at room temperature so it's necessary to pipe the exhaust past the fuel tank in order to melt the fuel, so the fuel will flow into the engine.
Without ships, bunker fuel would kind of be a useless waste, since no other engines can use it. I suppose it could be burned for heat or electricity, but oil is an awfully expensive way doing those things.
I'm more familiar with the economic aspects of the ocean shipping industry, than the engineering side. I wonder if it would be possible to filter out some of the crap that comes out of the smokestack. That way ships could continue to use bunker fuel without harming the health of people around. Something akin to a catalytic converter on cars.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And the carriers are desperate to increase fuel economy too, as it's eating them alive. They're equipping their trucks with small generators to power the sleeper compartment without running the main engine, and many truckstops are now equipped with umbilicles that don't require the trucks to idle or generate their own power at all; some just supply HVAC and have a couple of power outlets; others interface directly with the cabs' systems.
Unfortunately, the things that are best for efficiency are also more dangerous. Multiple trailers, more weight, more volume, more cargo in a single trip. The Aussies have it down fairly well with their road trains, but there's so little traffic on the roads they run those on that it's not nearly as dangerous there as it would be here.
We would do well to improve our rail system, and to use tractor trailers for regional and local delivery, last-mile as it were. Rail is a lot more efficient than tractor trailers are.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
They use what is called a "Viscotherm" which is a 10kw electric heater to warm the fuel. Not exhaust.
Sorry. Been this way since the steam days. They use either an auxillary 500kw diesel (cat 396, Jimmy
1271) or an online steam Turbo generator in the case of a steam plant. This is a fatal negative feedback
loop in the steam case. If you lose the TG you lose fuel, hence the diesel backup for the viscotherm.
Yes, I'm a marine engineer.
A 30 mile range? What kind junk are the buying?
A BYD electric bus has a nominal range of 155 miles. It sounds much more reasonable to me.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Sure, a city bus might get 5 miles per gallon. But it's also carrying up to 80 people. If each of those people were driving a car, it'd be the equivalent of each person getting 400 miles per gallon.
There are probably only a few thousand busses in any given city, and they're carrying a whole bunch of people. Replacing busses with cars isn't going to make any real impact on the environment. Replacing the hundreds of thousands of cars in that city, though...
The range is 30 miles. Periodically, the busses will fully recharge in seven and half minutes.
StarMetro in Tallahassee, which has a fleet of 72 diesel buses, found itself coping with budget problems when the price of diesel spiked in 2007. Fuel is typically the second-highest cost for a transit system, behind labor. StarMetro was Proterra’s third customer, ordering three buses in 2010 and two more in 2011, backed by federal funds. “We put them on our most visible route,” said Ralph Wilder, superintendent of transit maintenance. The buses can easily handle the 18-mile loop, which runs from Tallahassee Community College to the Governor’s Square Mall. On this route, all buses stop for 10 minutes in the middle, to wait for connections, so charging up the electric ones doesn’t add any time to the trips. Recharging takes about 7.5 minutes.
So, $825,000 for the electric bus, but only $80,000 in fuel costs over 12 years, vs $447,000 for a diesel bus with $500,000 in fuel costs. In theory, economical, but there are also air quality improvements-- depending on how the electricity is sourced.
San Francisco still has trolley buses. They're powered from a pair of overhead wires. The current generation of buses also has some battery backup, so if they lose their trolley connection while turning, the bus can get back under the wires on battery power and reconnect.
They're a pain. Too much overhead wire, and limited routes. NYC got rid of overhead wire a century ago, which was a really good move. SF has these mostly because, at the beginning of the bus era when other cities were converting from trolleys to buses, Diesel buses lacked enough engine power to climb the hills.
I grew up using Wellington's electric buses my entire life. ...
And now the council is going to scrap the lot of them - how fitting that slashdot should run an article
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10202967/Wellingtons-trolley-buses-to-go
Politicians in the pockets of industry again...
I think it's very safe to assume that nearly every single person reading this site or writing comments here has ridden on a bus.
Yes, I'd prefer driving a Ferrari along a deserted Autobahn at top speed to riding a bus. Stuck in traffic and looking for ages for an ultimately expensive parking spot - that bus is looking good. Trains look even better especially with WiFi.
Another problem is that these busses often have very high voltage on their batteries requiring special certifications to work on them.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
I mentioned in another post that there's a chemical in oranges that can be used - a plane has already flown with a mix of half of that and half conventional fuel. Of course that fuel was not actually extracted from oranges but was instead made using yeast modified with some genes from oranges.
Around here it could be 15 miles hooked up to the trolly wires and 15 miles on battery, 24 hrs a day. Great way to extend the trolly network and its all hydro power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Wouldn't it make sense for fleet vehicles, like buses, to be designed with interchangeable power/battery packs? The batteries can be charged when electricity is cheapest, and, during the day, the vehicles can change battery packs without having to wait for the drained batteries to be charged.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...
We've had electric buses for a while in Milton Keynes. That 30 mile range can be dramatically increased with small top up charges at the end of the routes. Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles, Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles etc... Then have a big charge overnight.
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.
Companies like Bechtel, Westinghouse, and GE got special access to governments wherever they wanted, due partly to their oligopoly on big-project experience. Coal plants and refineries didn't damage the "we are the future" mojo of the big contractors who were just biding time.
They were paralyzed by their own analysis of the economics of fission-generated electricity:
1. All the efficiency is in breeder reactors. Nothing else comes close, so don't exclude them from the discussion. All the other options sound like a steam-powered motorcycle.
2. The only problem is that breeder reactors are vulnerable to being weaponized and would inevitably become vectors for the proliferation of fissionable explosives. But killing that research deflated the righteous and greedy zest to shove political decisions on a government -- but only in regard to nuclear energy, and only for the moment.
3. Fusion. Just wait. It's okay, it's not like you can't take take over the world with just oil-field services.
I think there's enough plastic crap all over the US that we wouldn't have to import the resin. Recycle.
Just start small with hybrid motors in the buses, enough to get them rolling again from their frequent stops (and red lights of course). If you just improved the fuel mileage a couple of miles per gallon, it would make a huge impact overall.
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it." - George Santayana
Not only that, but electric buses are not nearly as loud as diesel buses.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
because electric vehicles don't cause emission from powerplants.
no, I don't have a sig
Why not a diesel generator on board to charge the batteries? 30 miles doesn't seem adequate for most bus lines around here -- I figure most local busses run a route end-end of about 12 miles in about 2 hours, so a single bus could likely run the route 4 times in a shift.
The busses could be charged at the bus garage overnight and a generator consuming way less fuel than an engine could be used to extend the battery runtime. Kohler says their 20kw diesel generator uses about 2 gph at 100% load.
Very practical. Thanks.
What you describe is with the current situation, which is currently crashing all around us. Bus usership is skyrocketing in the city where I am (Hampton Roads). If that trend continues ... and I admit that I do NOT see national statistical evidence that bears me out, but if it continues, then the automobile may be less relevant.
Now, that said, I think there is something far more important than electric buses, and that would be electric metro trains that can dock at speed.
First, because electric is best suited to short stretches without power, and buses and autos fail at that.
Second, because if you can use a system in which every trip is nonstop, one way, and moderately fast, it will clean out the short-hop airline industry AND some of your more extensive auto use.
Third, because if a reasonable public transit system is offered for medium- and long- trips, then short-hop electric becomes more viable.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Judging by the Anonymous reply to your post, it appears it's you who has no idea. It seems you are the one who has no concept of the numbers involved... You seem so convinced of things which are patently nonsense, to the point that you will lambast others who are correct. So weird.
You actually solve those problems by:
1. Decreasing the wealth gap
2. Providing adequate healthcare (including preventative care) and protected sick leave
If you ignore the cause of crime and sick people on public transport you'll never fix those problems. Treating the symptoms fixes nothing.
In Arlington, VA, the local ART (Arlington Transit) buses run on natural gas. Quoted from the website, "ART is environmentally friendly, operating on clean-burning compressed natural gas (CNG)."
http://www.arlingtontransit.co...
I see them all the time around town. Not only do they smell better than their diesel brethren, they are MUCH quieter. Almost silent.
The containers ships have got to dock somewhere, the easy option is to tell heavily polluting ships they are not allowed any where near the dock - California and Denmark have already done this, If the EU, US and China followed suit then these ships would have nowhere to go.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
According to the IPCC personal vehicles contribute about 5% if the worlds CO2 emissions. Since most electricity is produced using non-renewable fuel, they pollute somewhere in the same range as gasoline cars. What does this mean? It means that anyone who talks about personal vehicles and any change to their use whatsoever as a solution to climate change is a moron. Most environuts I have met are morons. Please note, before you get your panties in a bunch, I am not a climate change denier, I am just pointing out that anyone talking about cars as a solution to any problem related to climate change is a moron. Even if we all stopped driving tomorrow and decided to bike to work, it would have an entirely insignificant impact on CO2 emissions.
Changing from gasoline cars to electrical cars will have almost zero effect on CO2 emissions when you consider that walking instead of driving will have a theoretical maximum effect of 5%.
The largest CO2 emitters are electricity production, the agricultural sector etc. This is where we need to start. Starting at a place with a maximum 5% effect is simply retarded. Here is a tip to the environuts: Stop yapping about cars, cars do not emit CO2 in any statistically significant manner.
As for buses, it's basically the same, though the total CO2 emissions are even lower. Again, according to the IPCC the entire transport sector accounts for about 15% of the CO2 emissions, so any discussion involving changes to transportation as a means to solve the CO2 emission problem is retarded.
Late astronaut Wubbo Ockels proposed this a few years ago already - more info here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superbus_%28transport%29 ; a superbus that electrically travels up to 250Kmph with 23 passengers.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
has anything really changed re: tesla on the actual net pollution front? last i checked in, while electric cars 'burn clean', so long as the power that comes to the car from the 'wall socket' is still generated by either burning coal or natural gas which was most likely produced by fracking (which releases escape methane and is 10s of times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2).
is there any legitimate data on the net benefits (if any) of switching to electric cars taking into account the methane impacts of fracking on the greenhouse situation? without that, the whole electric cars as a solution seems like more PR and hype (granted, hype that will no doubt make a lot of people very rich) than something that gives people (san franciscan's in particular according to south park) a reason to feel smug.
or is it more about reducing dependence on cheap oil, and thus, to theoretically at least give america less of a reason for meddling in the ME?
Warning before buying electric buses in your city :
Toxic gas released from electric bus : http://www.lapresse.ca/le-sole...
City retire all electric buses : says technology is not ready : http://www.lapresse.ca/le-sole...
We got MANY problems with thoses... MANY!!
I can't call that English
Actually, the use of more public transit vs cars will cut emissions regardless of whether the public transit is electric or not. Likewise, shipping more freight by rail instead of highway will, too. Of course industrial emissions far outweigh vehicular emissions but that's a whole different topic.
Alas, there isn't a will to do that, so the alternative is looking for less efficient ways to cut emissions, such as electric passenger cars. While better than nothing, the impact is infinitesimally small.
And where does the electricity come from? Coal-fired power plants probably
Are you really comparing the emissions from a power station (outside of the city) to thousands of cars/vans/buses in the middle of the city? You do realise that it's far easier to clean pollution at a power station than it is at every single exhaust pipe, right? Do you want anyone to take you seriously?
Actually, that would be an interesting study. Obviously increasing the use of electric vehicles is going to put more demands on the power grid and require increased production at the plants. Most likely the demand to recharge will be a night, so solar is probably not an option, which leaves coal and natural gas (given the hydro-electric and nuclear is relatively fixed by external factors).
So the question to be solved is whether a large conversion from combustion engine vehicles (gas and diesel) to electric reduces emissions enough to offset the increased emissions from power generation? I would guess that the balance is in favor of electric, but to the best of my knowledge, that question has not answered by the scientific community.
What we REALLY need is to source the vehicles' electricity from a renewable power source. Otherwise you're just burning the fuel 10 miles down the road and buying an overpriced car or bus.
Back in 2010 RIPTA got money to buy a number of Hybrid Gillig buses. So 5MPG becomes 10MPG and so on.
But bus service in RI mostly focuses on the urban side - with routes of 2 to 5 miles. So they'd benefit from going all electric.
Having lived in the SFBA without a car, I say with confidence that Americans who can afford cars will never use buses in great numbers until someone finds a good way to make the buses less disgusting. Kick out the lowlives who drop food on the floor or spit on it, the ones who clip their toenails in public, the ones who haven't bathed in three days, the ones who play the music they like with no thought of whether others want to hear it, and I'll gladly use them.
Public transit works in Japan because Japanese people are polite and consider others. It will never work in the US until Americans learn to do the same.
Our area just picked up a few Proterra electric buses for use in the Catbus system, which serves Clemson University and the surrounding areas. There were some huge federal grants involved, and they have been riddled with problems, but have finally started running and carrying passengers. We're mostly a rural area and the bus system is free for all to use - paid for by Clemson University student fees and some taxpayer money from surrounding municipalities (Cities of Clemson, Seneca, Pendleton, and Central, afaik).
The buses are neat. They use overhead inductive chargers that are located at various places around town. I haven't ridden one yet (I prefer to get around by bicycle), but I hear they're pretty nice.
I am sure the impact on air quality is almost unmeasurable in our vast expanse of rural countryside, but in cities the impact could be huge.
I wonder how much tidal energy could be harvested to charge a ship while at rest/dock if the appropriate hardware were installed.
As always, storage becomes the issue in general though.
City and school buses are the perfect target for hybrid ICE/Electric propulsion (along with FedEx and UPS delivery trucks). They accelerate and decelerate a huge mass every block or so. Recapture as much of the energy as you can while slowing to speed up again. The power of the ICE needn't be anywhere close to what it is currently. Maybe not even electric—some mechanical means of storing energy for short periods would be helpful, and probably a lot cheaper. Just DO SOMETHING to avoid throwing away all that energy put into accelerating every block.
Since there's already a lot of experience using CNG for buses, use that and avoid much of the complicated emissions-control equipment. Buses are so big that putting a reformer on board and fueling them with methane but powering them with fuel cells might be feasible.
Who's the tea party candidate? I want less government oppression coming from the democrats, and less welfare money wasted on young people breeding out of control on it, instead of it going to the old people, military, roads, like it was supposed to, and things like NASA, that could put up space stations from Moon based materials, and secure the future of all life from Earth even in the event of a nuclear holocaust or global biotech invented military disease catastrophe. (Btw, I take any opportunity to say Fuck Monsanto and all their biotech crap, including things like Roundup (R)tm.) But because we have so many hungry mouths popping even more hungry mouths out of control starting with age 13 girls on welfare money, we cannot afford a space program. Fuck the democrats and their overbearing taxes like mandatory Obamacare on people trying to keep it together, collected to feed these people breeding out of control on the backs of, then outvoting, the hard working people who can only afford to raise one child and send him to college, while trying to stay out of bankruptcy.
Remove that form the equation, and buses start looking very attractive. And that doesn't just apply to big cities. I live in a small but pretty dense town, parking is a huge issue. Bus service is pretty crappy. Something needs to be done, whatever it is will be expensive.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Being a bus weighs 10 times as much as a Tesla and a Tesla battery weighs 1000 lbs you would need a 10 thousand pound battery. Standard lead acid batteries for electric forklifts ( about a cubic meter) weigh 4000 lbs and can be swapped out in a few minutes with a roller equipped charging station. Doubling the size of that system would be no problem.
Listing two obvious fallacies doesn't prove the initial statement is one, although at best it could only be true of sulfur based pollution. Of course, sulfur dioxide helps keep the planet cool anyhow, so maybe we shouldn't count it if it is released in the open ocean.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
http://www.waveipt.com/
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Convenient but, realistically pirates have no use for a cargo vessel beyond ransom. Nuclear fuel rods aren't exactly something they can walk into a reactor, pluck out and carry off either.
Regardless of what powers the vessel, or its cargo, there's no reason why private security cannot be installed on them. Or as an AC put it less tactfully "Just shoot the damn pirates before they get close enough to come aboard."
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Instead of band-aid's and pointless get rich quick schemes, population control is the ultimate problem. It isn't what people are doing, it's how many people are doing it that is the real issue. Failure to see this fact and to belittle or marginalize it are anti-productive.
Diesel generators?
PACCAR near Seattle makes low emission and hybrid trucks.
There are electric bus lines. In fact, Seattle has some.
There are hybrid bus lines. In fact, Seattle has some.
There are even fuel cell trains. In Canada.
We have the technology, we just need to end all fossil fuel subsidies and tax exemptions and cheap mining/drilling and the invisible hand of the marketplace will make them commonplace.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another" --Albert Einstein
Casteism
I understand that this concept is nothing for you there in the USA as buses aren't big enough to open carry your beloved RPG-7...
-- 29A the number of the Beast