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'Electric Buses Now Cheaper Than Their Diesel or CNG Counterpart, Could Dominate the Market Within 10 Years' (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Transit vehicles today are mostly powered by gasoline, diesel, and CNG, while batteries only represent about 1 percent of the market. It is currently a small part of the industry, but it's also the fastest growing fuel source in the sector and it's starting to become highly competitive. Electric bus maker Proterra is ramping up production and currently claims to be cheaper than diesel and CNG. It leads CEO Ryan Popple to make a bold prediction that battery-powered buses will dominate the transit bus market within 10 years. More specifically, he says that the majority of new bus sales will be electric by 2025 and all new bus sales to transit agencies will be electric by 2030. Proterra has so far only delivered a few hundred all-electric buses, but they have been announcing several major deals lately, like 73 buses from King County's Metro Transit, that seem to indicate there's a shift in the transit industry.
As a local boy, King County (Seattle, WA) makes sense for this. The downtown bus routes have overhead wiring. The city already has a vast network of electric buses running, so adding battery operated buses to transition on/off the connected wired network makes sense. They're probably one of the easiest metros to make such a transition.
Buses are communist already and now you want to make them run on sunshine? Stupid libs!
Of course electric busses are cheaper. So are electric taxis and other high mileage commercial vehicles. Busses are an even more obvious target for electrification because they are big enough to encompass large battery packs, follow predictable routes and timetables, tend to taxed heavily due to creating a lot of pollution, and cost a lot to start with so the extra for a battery pack is a lower proportion of the overall price.
China is really leading the way here, on track for near 100% EV bus sales by 2020.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm always dubious of claims like this. There's an XKCD out there conveying exactly why we shouldn't put much stock into this CEO.
However, I will say that I am deeply impressed with the electric buses that run off of an overhead catenary wire. Cities should seriously look into electrifying heavily used bus routes. Easy way to save fuel cash and cut pollution down too.
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
Going from one electric bus to two electric buses doubles the market share.
Engine sounds would be much too annoying. What they need is a spoken warning that runs in a loop: "Careful, incoming vehicle! Careful, incoming vehicle! ..."
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Nonsense, Due to efficiencies of scale the worst coal power plants to EV systems are still likely to be twice a pollutant efficient as a ICE vehicle. Yes I am using hyperbole and I would welcome someone with enough time to disprove me.
unless it's wind/solar/wave
Those are unlikely to provide enough power when you need it (I assume batteries would be charged in the early morning hours when there is little demand for the buses). On the other hand, hydroelectric and nuclear are zero emissions and very dependable.
As an aside, this headline is a great example of Fake News. Note that it doesn't actually say electric buses are cheaper and could dominate the market; it only quotes a guy who manufactures electric buses making that claim.
Caramel Nitrogen Gagh
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A lot gets said, and total carbon output has been studied a lot. For example, http://www.ucsusa.org/publicat....
It already works out cleaner even if your grid is power by fossil fuels, thanks to better efficiencis and regenerative breaking. Even in places that aren't rapidly switching to zero carbon sources, the coal -> gas migration is dropping CO2 intensity of grid electricity.
At least for the region mentioned (King County / Seattle WA), we're almost entirely hydro electric thanks to the Grand Coulee Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - I know others around the world are not so lucky.
The old "clothespin and playing card in the spokes" trick would suffice. Of course the new buses would need spoked wheels for that to work, but it would sure look and sound cool.
It's well known for homes that electrical heat is the most expensive form of heat, by far. Cars have relatively small cabins but even in places like Finland they add (aftermarket?) kerosene heaters in the engine compartment so the driver doesn't kill the battery range in the cold heating himself. Otoh, heat is just a excess byproduct in a normal engine.
How're these buses going to do it?
You must have checked a loooooong time ago.
Electric-car battery costs: Tesla $190 per kwh for pack, GM $145 for cells.
That's still $125,400 in batteries if we use Tesla's prices but it's nearly four times less than you thought.
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Convoluted Neutrino Guacamole
If you'd bothered to actually go to the Proterra website and read up on the topic, you'd not have posted your rant. Amongst other things, they can fast-charge in five to 15 minutes using an overhead fastcharger that can be located at bus-stops. Considering that bus drivers need breaks, and there are often
built-in delays at route-end to support the schedule, a 15 minute recharge for 300 mile range once or twice a day works quite well.
Well for one, ICE vehicles don't come with a shitload of radioactive byproducts being spewed into the air.
Singapore took the electricity generation into account when coming up with CO2 ratings for electric vehicles. Due to Singapore's reliance on natural gas for power generation, Teslas are now taxes as high polluting vehicles there. I can only imagine how much worse that rating would be somewhere that relies on coal generation.
Well it's cause of Obama's evil market regulations and war on fossil fuels. Now that Trump is in office, he'll correct that by putting tons of regulations on electric. Don't worry, he'll balance it out by removing two regulations from the fossil fuel industry for every one he puts on clean energy.
Sarcasm aside, I'm starting to be glad that Peter Thiel is close to Trump. Theil is friends with Musk, who of course is leading on electric cars. Seems unlikely that Trump will kill electric cars with that influence. Crony capitalism is better than the worst case scenario I suppose. Which is the redneck coalition simply destroying everything mainstream America has an interest in out of pure spite.
I had to look it up, thought I'd post it here for anyone else who was wondering what the heck CNG is.
I have seen the mess of cables necessary to support electric trolleys in Seattle and elsewhere. With batteries, you could reduce the overhead wiring to straight streets and above bus stops,where it is cheap to install and power, allowing charging during normal operation. At stops, the bus stops for a while to take on and let off passengers, and buses have stops for a few minutes at the beginning and end of routs at terminals to allow the drivers to get up and use the facilities. All are good opportunities for high rate charging.
Some buses run on batteries, but I've seen several systems now for buses that get power from overhead lines (similar to trains). The summary seems to be overlooking these vehicles.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The whole point is that you break the dependency on fossil fuels. The electricity can come from any source. Today it may come from coal, tomorrow it may be nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal or some other source.
Eat the rich.
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse.
And what is your point? Electric vehicles can be powered by both/either fossil fuels or non-emitting sources of power. Nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc are all potential sources of generation, none of which emit substantial carbon during normal operation. Roughly 1/3 of power in the US comes from non-fossil fuel sources so right off the bat your emissions drop by up to 1/3 per vehicle. And it's a lot easier to control emissions from 1 power plant than millions of little engines. Electric vehicles give you a choice of power sources and make it easier to control your pollution. Internal combustion vehicles do not.
Most routes round here have an interchange or large station at one or both ends, usually with at least 10 minute waits. So they could be topped up through the day. There is also the idea of inductive pads at each bus stop. Even if electric buses currently only worked on 50% of routes that would be a nice saving in emissions.
Buses and other large vehicles use most of their fuel accelerating. Electric buses and freight trucks actually can coast for a hell of a long time on barely any fuel, but have to stop and then accelerate frequently. Regenerative braking diminishes this cost, extending service life on a battery charge.
Buses are complex and require motor and drive train maintenance. Drive trains in electric vehicles are vastly-simpler--no gearbox--and hub motors provide an option amounting to wiring and an electrical control box. Far less maintenance, far less wear, longer service lives.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging. Some of these buses can recharge 100% in under an hour; and for buses going into service to meet peak demand, you'll end up with them coming in and out at different times during the day, allowing you to keep a turn-over reserve: a bus comes in, plugs into charging, and an hour later the driver takes a bus that hasn't gone out yet; two hours later, the guy who came in for lunch break when that new bus departed takes the bus he left behind, which has had two hours to charge. This reserve fleet also allows deployment of a new bus if one suffers mechanical breakdown, which is generally standard; meanwhile the amount of miles driven in total is spread among more buses, giving them a larger service life.
The logistics aren't that ridiculous.
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Due to efficiencies of scale the worst coal power plants to EV systems are still likely to be twice a pollutant efficient as a ICE vehicle.
Citation needed. That also isn't a particularly meaningful comparison since only about 1/3 of US power comes from coal. It's quite possible to power an EV entirely with non-fossil fuel sources.
Yes I am using hyperbole and I would welcome someone with enough time to disprove me.
No thanks. You made the claim. Cite your source and prove your case. Don't ask us to do your homework for you.
Not enough gets said? In every single article in Slashdot about electric vehicles a paid shill like you comes forward and claims that EVs actually pollute more than a Hummer running on baby seal blood.
entropy happens
Aren't there bus routes in Toronto that have been using overhead electrified wires for electric buses since the 70s or 80s? I want to say Roncesvalles and Queen?
I can't imagine the batteries can last all day, do they have swappable battery packs?
They could be swappable. However they also are big enough to have very large battery packs which should last a good long time presuming the power to weight ratio make sense. Also remember that electric does not necessarily mean battery powered. You can draw power from a tap like many light rail systems do and it's still electric.
gawd, is that old chestnut the best you can do to disparage the advance to a more sustainable system? infrastructure takes a while to get into place, lots of people with electrical vehicles are likely to have solar on their houses with which they will charge their cars.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Yeah. I get it. You're being foolish and shortsighted.
Renewable energy is the way of the near future. But that is no reason to oppose the Keystone Pipeline. We need carbon based fuel in the now. Let's produce it here. Make jobs here. Don't send money to the Saudi religious nuts. And use the tax revenue from said production to fund alternative solutions.
Re immigration? When do you say no? When we have a 500 million people (in 30 yrs) or 1 billion people (in 70 years)?
Who gets to decide? The people living here? Or do they have no say?
It's foolishness to say that the people here have no say.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
This AC is a flaming jerk, like most ACs are, but in this case he's not wrong on some points. The vast majority of people don't want to use public transportation. Aside from the various inconveniences of it, personal safety risks, personal health risks, etc, it's viewed as something that poor people use, and even poor people tend to want to maintain at least the appearance of not being poor. This is nothing new, either, humans have always been this way, and I see no reason that will ever change about humans, either; people want personal transportation. Has nothing to do with 'Americans' or any other nationality, has nothing to do with 'greed, avarice' or any of the other nonsense that this AC is spouting, it's just pure and simple human nature.
Public transportation will always have a place in civilization, but it will never replace personal transportation. Electric vehicles are not only more efficient and non-polluting in and of themselves, they're also lower maintenance and quieter; they are the future and we should embrace it. Concerns about where the energy comes from are temporary problems; re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past. Continuing to research and develop energy storage systems will also help. So-called 'renewable' sources like solar and wind will supplement and tide us over until the new generation of reactors can be brought on-line. Meanwhile we'll continue to chase practical fusion power, and other more exotic sources of energy.
It's remarkably easy to buy renewable-only power from renewable sources. It all feeds in to the same grid, but the bill comes from the renewable sources. Since there's a limited supply of renewable power that companies and people are trying to buy from it tends to cost 1-5% more than normal electricity, but you're using only green sources of power.
When I lived in Dallas for 7 years I got my power from Green Mountain energy and cost about 4% more than regular energy, but my house was 100% renewable powered.
It's not much of a stretch to assume that the buses will be recharged with renewable power as well. Something like 70% of the power for washington state comes from Hydro as it is.
moox. for a new generation.
Never forget the General Motors streetcar conspiracy
Don't let history repeat itself.
Well for one, ICE vehicles don't come with a shitload of radioactive byproducts being spewed into the air.
Dirty Coal can be placed hundreds of miles away from people. We could even put it inside of a giant glass bubble where nothing escapes. Besides efficiency of scale, it's much easier to monitor, filter, purify, etc... a small handful of power plants than it is thousands upon thousands of tiny little power plants. We also have the option of doing renewable, biowaste, or even off planet power generation once everything uses electricity.
"unlikely to provide enough power when you need it "
Which is why there are large energy storage solutions. Heck, the OP left out hydropower, which is the largest clean renewable energy source in the US today. In Canada, hydro is the largest source of electricity, period.
And no, it's not fake news, it's just poor journalism because they're parroting an unsupported claim. There's nothing to indicate that it isn't true or was simply created from whole cloth.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
In this kind of direct weight-for-weight comparison, you should calculate the total weight of the propulsion system with the energy source.
Combustion engine + fuel weight VS electric motor + battery weight.
I'm sure someone with a better knowledge of engines would probably add other components than the engine alone, like the carburator, etc.
Also, we're talking city buses here, not privately owned cars that people use for long drives. So the usual anti-electric-cars arguments just don't apply here.
I'm not sure how much range is dropped by adding more weight, but something the size of a bus can have more batteries than a car.
And you don't need to charge a battery at the same speed you can fill a fuel tank. A lot of people mentioned having multiple buses in rotation. Drivers need breaks to eat, etc.
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I wish the article had a little more analysis and technical detail. Anyone know what drives the competitiveness of electric buses vs other vehicles? What technology changes are changing this cost equation and how do they impact other vehicle markets?
Why are buses more competitive but cars aren't?
Is this about the ability to recapture energy when braking on electric vehicles? For buses used in cities stopping regularly, I could see this being a big deal.
Do form factor differences allowing better engineering decisions?
Does the high usage of buses make the fuel cost difference more dominant in the equation, making up for the higher capital costs? Would that mean that electric vehicles will come to dominate the taxi market too (until the taxi market is overwhelmed by self-driving vehicles)?
Someone needs to search for "coal is mostly only used in third-world countries".
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The electric buses in SF are plenty loud, tire noise, old creaky suspension, flexing frame etc etc you can hear them coming, especially as they accelerate up the hills we have out here. They're not as loud as the shitty diesels that they have running around the flatter areas (electric buses are superior from a torque standpoint going up hills) but they're loud enough.
moox. for a new generation.
Incomplete sentence, cannot be parsed.
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See this report for example; excerp - "About 37 percent of Americans live in regions where a Leaf’s greenhouse gas emissions would equate to a gasoline-powered vehicle rated at 41 to 50 m.p.g.". That's about what I get from my diesel car, which is a 2 litre sporty car that delivers a lot more performance than a Leaf while delivering 45mpg. And that's taking the grid in those areas as a whole; it probably isn't 100% coal even in the worst places. So I'm afraid you're wrong.
Oh no... it's the future.
re-introduction of nuclear power, in the form of redesigned, safer fission reactors, is also something we need to embrace, rather than succumbing to the 'nuclear boogieman' of the past.
You talk about human nature wanting personal vehicles and then take exactly the opposite argument here. Human nature doesn't change just because its convenient for your argument. People are afraid of nuclear fission whether or not those fears are justified. That is human nature and it is unlikely to change. And their fears are not without some rational basis in many cases. The problem with fission as a power source is simply that when it goes wrong it can go REALLY wrong. Given that humans are imperfect sooner or later you are going to have a major catastrophe if we rely on nuclear fission. We've already had two good sized disaster and they are unlikely to be the last. There has been no breakthrough that eliminates the problems and risks associated with it. Are modern reactors safer? Probably. Does it matter? Not really. Should we use more fission? Perhaps but it probably won't happen.
I think fossil fuels are a clear and present danger to us as a species but thinking that we are just going to switch over to fission to replace fossil fuels is mostly just wishful thinking. Nuclear fission simply has become to big of a boogey man and a political hot potato to be a realistic alternative any time soon.
They are the most delicate of delicate snowflakes.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Somethings that are not considered in these comparisons is all the pollution put out on the journey from initial searching for oil, drilling test wells, drilling the well, extracting the oil, transporting it to refineries, coal fired power used to generate electricity to refine, transporting from refineries to gas stations and subsequent burning in the vehicle? I'm sure there are probably more steps of pollution emissions on the oil's journey from underground to the exhaust pipe of your vehicle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
So... Why not just use regenerative breaking in a Hybrid solution and get the best of both? Oh wait, they already do that... Only the guy quoted in this article doesn't sell that kind of buss....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The majority of people are poor, so using a form of transportation that poor people use is pretty natural for them. However, the main problem with most public transport is that it sucks. Where it doesn't, everybody uses it, rich and poor, just like they do the sidewalks.
You aren't wrong, but the efficiency of fixed energy generation is far higher than your average internal combustion engine. Even a gasoline electrical generator will outperform, because it can run at it's most efficient RPM, and has a fixed load on the output.
Electric vehicles are the future, even if they are powered by today's fuels.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I don't care that much. It's about money. If they're cheaper then they'll take over.
Hm, is it by any chance a Volkswagen or an Audi? Are you sure about those carbon numbers?
Lithium is more common in Earth's crust than lead. Plus unlike coal and oil, you use it over and over again and can be reclaimed after batteries are no longer rechargeable (or obsoleted by newer technology). Any shortages are just because we haven't ramped up mining/recovery of it. Once demand is really there we will probably extract it from sea water where it is in relative abundance (and fare less destructive than your apocalyptic mining hyperbole would be).
Letter To Iran
it is well known, if you've read other articles about EV buses, that the upfront cost of an EV bus is higher but lifetime costs of electric is a less than diesel with the benefit of a better smelling city. http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Electric busses may make a lot of sense in city traffic. How do the long "refuel" cycles impact fleet availability?
"Fastest Growing" is a meaningless term without context...
It's ok - after the brakes are broken, they regenerate. He DID said regenerative breaking!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
is that the same problem for walking out in front of an ultra quiet Rolls Royce or Mercedes ? If you are waling into a road looking at your phone or talking to someone without looking where yo are going, you don't get any sympathy if you get knocked down.br. unfortunately there is tyre noise, that can;t be removed.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Most routes round here have an interchange or large station at one or both ends, usually with at least 10 minute waits. So they could be topped up through the day. There is also the idea of inductive pads at each bus stop. Even if electric buses currently only worked on 50% of routes that would be a nice saving in emissions.
In addition to your excellent points, buses have the ability to change their routes, unless they use overhead electric power, without any infrastructure costs beyond a few signs. By redesigning routes you could probably add in enough time to do a quick charge, without disrupting travel. Bus companies have a lot of passenger use data that can be used to redo routes to make electric busses viable on most routes..
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Yeah, but thing is....it is still a BUS.
Doesn't matter what you do to the engine or externals of it...who wants to ride a public transportation bus around sitting next to some smelly bums?!?
In Toronto, Canada, about 2.75M people per day. The entire city basically shuts down if the TTC is not running, and there's major chaos if the subway has issues.
For some deranged reason you think only poor people who cannot afford bathing ride public transit. In Toronto at least, every aspect of society uses it. There are professional sports players (Blue Jays, Raptors) that take transit to work and practice. There are Bay Street (think WallStreet.ca) high rollers that take the TTC (and GO, the regional rail system) to work.
Perhaps if you lived in an area that has infrastructure that is non-third world quality you'd have a different opinion. The TTC has many problems with it, but Toronto probably has better transportation options that 90% of American cities.
Well for one, ICE vehicles don't come with a shitload of radioactive byproducts being spewed into the air.
Neither do coal plants. The radiation is in the ASH, not the fumes, and nearly all of it is in the form of thorium, which is not biologically active, and does not bioaccumulate. If you inadvertently eat some thorium, you will just poop it right back out. Thorium is already pervasive in the environment. Every cubic meter of the earth's crust contains about a gram or so. There are plenty of good reasons to phase out coal, but "radiation" isn't one of them.
.
What a beautiful world this will be
-- Cheers!
You are stuck in the "There is no point in getting rid of ICE as long as we have coal and there is no point in getting rid of coal as long as we have ICE" loop.
It is easy to get out of that reasoning. You just solve one of the problems and then the other one is easy.
Plenty of countries already have carbon neutral electricity generation, for them getting rid of ICE is a priority.
Some countries have a mix of half coal and half carbon neutral. Switching to electric is still beneficial.
China specifically has loads of coal power plant but they really want to move pollution away from the cities. For them it is important to switch to electrically powered vehicles.
The only place where it doesn't make sense is in rural US where it is extremely important that your vehicle pollute as much as possible since this shows the faggots how big your dick is.
Joe sixpack doesn't give a damn about what makes his car move as long as it's cheap.
-- Cheers!
well, look for the numbers, the data all out there. let me help you until you find out how to use google http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"I read the internet for the articles." - no you don't as proved by your comment
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
According to this it looks like the vast majority comes from hydro, with nuclear and non-hydro renewables about tied (the nuclear energy being the Columbia Nuclear Generating Station that is only a couple miles from Hanford), with natural gas and coal bringing up the rear, also about tied.
Running electric buses in Seattle, a place that has had electric "bendy" buses using overhead catenary wire for decades, makes a whole lot of sense.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Because they are so efficient that even when they're coal powered they are still releasing less CO2 then diesel powered buses. Also, the air in cities gets a lot cleaner and healthier when ICEs are banned.
-- Cheers!
go back to sleep, you've been dreaming nonsense.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
it's than, not then. I slapped myself three times for that.
-- Cheers!
Love some of the answers, but it is Compressed Natural Gas.
Easy fix: pay the fuck attention when crossing a street. Look up from your fucking phone every once in a while, or natural selection may catch up.
Also: oh no, we might not have to hear noisy stinky rattle-trap diesel buses bellowing black soot down the street anymore? And you think this is a BAD thing?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
you are bullshitting yourself, it would help if you did some research on EV buses etc before commenting. here's one solution for you. https://cleantechnica.com/2017...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
As long as the wheels on the bus go round and round, I think we will be fine. Now all we need are 99 bottles of beer on the wall.
this is what you are talking about. https://cleantechnica.com/2017...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Yeah, but thing is....it is still a BUS.
Indeed. TFA says that "in ten years buses will be electric" is a "bold prediction". Nonsense. Here is a bold prediction: In ten years buses will be gone. When (or if) self-driving technology takes off, buses will be replaced with much smaller vehicles that take one, or a few, passengers from wherever they are to exactly where they want to go whenever they want to go there. Since there is no driver to pay, this will likely be cheaper than current bus fare. No one will want walk ten minutes to stand in the rain at as bus stop, waiting for a bus that is late, and then creeps through traffic, stopping every other block, and then finally arrives 30 minutes late so you can walk another 15 minutes to get to your office. Ten years from now people will look back on that and laugh.
World wide that may be true.
But in the first world, you have to use an absurd definition of poor.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Too much gets said about how great electrically powered vehicles are, but they're only zero emission at point o suse. Not enough gets said about where the electricity to charge those batteries comes from - unless it's wind/solar/wave, then it's actually quite a lot of emissions in the overall system.
Why do you believe that? It seems every Slashdot article about electric vehicles has someone making this point. However, converting all of the world's power grids to renewable energy only solves 30% of the problem. By converting transportation to electricity and converting the power grids to renewable energy eliminates the majority of carbon emissions. We should do both.
You appear to be completely dismissing the value of electric vehicles because our electric grid doesn't have enough renewable energy. However, we have the resources to tackle both of these issues at once, and it seems to me we are succeeding.
Slashdot is not ignoring renewable energy, but electric transportation is important too.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Right now a tesla battery would cost around $190/kWh and gm $145/kWh. One kWh can power a one horsepower electric motor for just over an hour. A horsepower is 746 watts, and despite common misconceptions not nearly 100% efficient - they tend to be 50% at peak power, near 10% efficient at peak torque at low speed and 90% at low torque high speed. This is true for pmdc and induction motors. City busses get about 4mpg average and often run for long periods. A electric pack for a bus would easily run 10-20x the size for a ev like a car. So we are talking about costs of up to half a million dollars for a good lithium pack before subsidies and sold at a reasonable profit margin.
Since a large chunk of emissions comes from manufacture simply throwing busses away after 10 years because of a half million dollar battery would be disasterous. The cost to subsidize them would be significant. The real push needs to be lowering the cost of the battery to a much more manageable up front cost.
If you look at where sales are, China is the biggest manufacturer and user. China is also investing massively in renewables and reducing coal use (hit peak a few years back).
We are already seeing BYD cars in the UK, and busses are soon to follow. Our own manufacturers need to catch up fast.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Piles of fried smart cars which happened to drive in the same lane behind the buss...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
whats your definition of poor? if you think everyone in the first world can afford to run a car then you must be living in a different world to most of us
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Ah yes, the power of color glossy ads and slick websites.. The advancement of technology..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Even if all electricity were to come directly from coal, which do you think would add more pollutants to the atmosphere? A million cars, each with a little dinky catalytic converter on them, or a few coal plants with gigantic industrial scrubbers that are not limited by size/space/weight constraints?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
you can't accuse someone of being shortsighted then keep banging on about needing an old tech.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
You gotta get past denial dude.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Getting smog out of the valley I live in is a huge benefit of electrical vehicles. There is something about certain cities where air pollution tends to accumulate. Most big power plants, even coal, tend to be in locations where there are not many people and where there air currents and climate don't cause a huge lingering cloud to form.
California gets 7% of their power from hydroelectric. While a conventional automobile gets 100% of it's power from combustion of fuel and that means emissions.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Under the new EU and other nations (e.g. Canada/Mexico/Japan/China) requirements, all-electric busses are required in all markets for all fleets.
The average cost to fuel (electricity) such fleets is 1/10th to 1/20th the cost of an equivalent diesel bus. The maintenance is, on average, about half that of a diesel bus.
There are some deviations from this: very rural areas need to set up either battery swap or rapid charge stations, which are easily fueled with wind and solar. However, almost all fleet bus lines operate in urban centers, where this is not a problem.
One drawback: this cuts pollution in urban centers dramatically. In some places in the Western US, pollution from trucks, bus, and cars is up to 40 percent of all pollution.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Here in Winnipeg the city Transit service has been testing electric buses for a local coachbuilder for quite a few years with what I have heard to be good results.
http://winnipegtransit.com/en/...
King County is also already a large customer for their hybrid diesel-electric buses.
https://www.newflyer.com/buses...
If they can work well here in our cold winters and hot summers they can probably work well in most places in North America.
I can't see that happening in cities where buses carry 100-ish passengers. can you imagine how long a queue of small self-driving vehicles to replace that one bus load would be snaking into a city and when one stops, the gridlock that would cause?
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Well we need some buses now, people can't wait N years for a self driving car infrastructure to appear. If we have to throw all the new buses out in 10 years, fine at least we had a working bus system for those 10 years.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Batteries can easily hold a charge for a day. The question is how much work is that battery doing in a day? Winnipeg says its buses travel 50K kilometers/year, which works out to 85 miles day. Bump that to 100 to account for days off due to maintenance, and that's still within the range of most EVs these days. And that's city driving, so they'll be using regenerative braking to recharge frequently.
Lower fuel costs, less maintenance, I can't see any reason e-buses won't work.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
In Canada, hydro is the largest source of electricity, period.
Depends on where you live in Canada. In Ontario it's nuclear(~52%), and the brain dead liberal party who's in power wants to get rid of nuclear. They also want to ban natural gas, much like the liberal party out in BC wants to ban it. Keep in mind that those "energy storage" solutions don't always translate very well. On top of that, not every place on the world is lucky as Canada to have vast stores of water for hydroelectric. It's also one of the reasons why other "green" forms of energy generation work so poorly here. Too much dead time from wind especially in the summer. Too much cloudy weather in the winter. And both of those drive the cost of electricity through the roof. In Ontario wind and solar count for under 17% of generation and make up over 50% of the cost at the consumer level(0.18kWh@ peak aka right now).
Om, nomnomnom...
We need carbon based fuel in the now.
Don't know about you, but gas is under $2/gallon where I'm at. Natural gas is holding steady over the last 5 years. Hard to justify any desperate we-need-it-right-now measure.
Let's produce it here. Make jobs here.
The Keystone pipeline takes oil from Alberta, Canada and moves it to Port Arthur for sale and shipment. Apart from building the thing, how would this make jobs here?
Global warming is a far more pressing problem. We don't need more oil, we need less. Any money put to this pipeline would pay far greater dividends in renewable energy sources. Wind, solar, tidal, hydroelectric. Oil was great in its day, but just like coal - it's rapidly becoming unnecessary.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Actually, that's a feature. Accelerating Darwinism for those whose daily existance is consumed with staring at and thumbing at their phones all the time.
Against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain. --Friederich Schiller
Short sighted re immigration and the belief that Trump wants "nasty smoggy pollutants" because he and the Russians agree on one thing. Money should not go to the Saudis as they spend billions in spreading their religious zeal to mosques around the world.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
They're qualities that are culturally encouraged or culturally disavowed to varying degrees in different parts of the world. What appears to be human nature is highly subject to ones environment.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Busses drive all day long every day. When are they supposed to recharge the batteries?
Bus stops. The clue is in the name. Especially the major bus stations at the beginning and end of routes where they already sit for significant periods between runs.
Thing is, busses drive fixed routes on a predictable timetable, in cities where they're never that far from electricity, so its straightforward to set up the infrastructure. That makes them much more practical for electrification than private cars (which have to cope with spontaneous road trips). I think its safe to say we're mainly talking urban busses here, not long-distance Greyhound-type routes.
Plus, who cares if they're not cheaper, or if you don't believe they'll stop polar bears from melting? This is still taking a substantial source of particularly nasty particulates off city streets.
I can't see cities jumping on the idea of busses that have to come back to the depot to be swapped out every 4 hours.
Why not? The drivers have to be swapped out regularly, too.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
If only someone could figure out how to transport electricity long distances.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I was a software developer in SF for many years.
My buddy never made it through college, but he got a job driving electric bus in SF.
He retired early - I'm still pounding the keyboard.
I wish my salary and benefits had been close to his.
Really? You don't know what CNG stands for?
Fossil fuels are dirty, old, inefficient, and obsolete. Besides, we'll be needing them for the raw materials for polymers and whatnot.
It's simple economics.
As is usually the case, conservatives are on the wrong side of progress into the future. They want to keep things the same but that is an impossibility. Life is change and therefore will always be at odds with conservative values.
That is precisely the side that conservatives are on: the change will happen when it makes since economically. Not because of burdensome government intervention, but because of innovation and simple economics.
Existing hydro power is great, but expanding capacity would be a mistake. Aside form the significant ecological disruption of building a dam, and the fact we're now unwilling to pay for infrastructure (and it's really bad if a dam fails), the good spots are taken.
There are no energy storage solutions that are currently workable at scale. That's not to say we won't get there. Eventually we'll have to, because solar power is the only currently-proven tech that scales to all the world using power at US levels. Either fusion or modern reliable fission could scale up, it's mathematically possible, but both seem unlikely this century.
Solar with natural gas backup really seems like the way to go forward, but it hasn't quite hit the price point to make it desirable yet. I'm sure it will soon enough (in infrastructure terms), given the pace of the technology. Heck, extremely low-tech solar thermal will always work if there's a crisis (more expensive than other options, but less than 2x more), but you still need that backup.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
They must have factored all the costs in to produce their cost/benefit analysis, including the interest cost on a diesel purchase.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
politics rules
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
All buses in the US bought by Federal Government or are heavily subsidized. All buses are replaced every 8-10 years. At 4 years all buses get brand new drive trains. Proterra uses its own fast DC chargers on the roof of the bus. Proterra will be a big company soon. Thomson Energy is a start-up that sells electric drive trains for the mid life overhaul. yeah!
From which orifice did you pull that misinformation?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
A bus driver must have a lunch break at some point
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I can, but since I seriously hate driving, public transport it is. My only grudge is that neither buses nor trains are reliably punctual all the time.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
i doubt it, a bus takes a lot of passengers at one go and if you replace each passenger with a small vehicle, you'll have city grid lock in no time especially when one breaks down. Your "final destination" non stop is not realistic, what about all the thousands of "final destinations" before your stop that have to stop to let someone off (unless you've got a 1000 lane highway of course)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
...the main problem with most public transport is that it sucks...where it doesn't, everybody uses it, rich and poor...
I ride with everyone from poor moms with 2 kids in strollers and homeless folks to guys in 3 piece suits with $500 pairs of shoes. In between are everyone else from high school kids to college kids, and the breadth of the middle and upper-middle class workforce.
I bus about 35 minutes each way. I could drive that in 20-25 minutes, and there's an added 5-10 minute walk/wait on each end for the bus. End result is that I spend 80-90 minutes per day commuting on the bus for $50/month vs 40-50 minutes driving for ~$150/month (parking, gas, & wear and tear). The added advantage to busing is that I can do ~30 minutes of work each way, putting out fires before/after work, dropping an hour off my work day in the process.
So the end result is that I spend about as much time away from home busing as I would driving, for $100/month less. And that $100 can go straight into one of the bars or restaurants on the way home, an added perk of not having to drive.
Part of why I chose to live here was the investment in public transportation. When I consider moving jobs, I look at the commute possibilities as one factor. I'm generally not willing to give up my life and sanity driving in rush hour traffic. The year I did that I was far more stressed and angry than I ever was before or after. It's going to take a pretty significant pay raise to make me want to do that again.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
"There are no energy storage solutions that are currently workable at scale."
Yes, there are.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
From this site, it looks like it would be ~1.7-1.8 times worse if powered by coal (2.07-2.17 #/kWh compared to 1.22 for natural gas).
On a related note, doing the math from the Tesla-provided specs, the car should be using about half the energy/km as stated in the article, where the numbers come from the "United Nations Economic Commission for Europe R101." Sounds like someone's metrics for mileage are not terribly accurate (not picking sides, just noting).
Watch for Uber-style ridesharing to become unified with mass transit in areas where this is available, so that with one app you can arrange a ride from single address A to address B, with a single price for both transit modes, and with prices for alternative routes so that users can choose between changing from car to mass transit at stations for less vs taking a car the whole way. Users will make choices based on weather, traffic at time of day, and proximity of a transit station to one address or he other. (How much will I save if I walk a block? If I walk 5 blocks?)
Now envision what happens when the ridesharing part of such trips takes place in self-driving cars.
Getting into a city for work like london on time by car means going about 5:30am and having a large wallet for parking.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
if you are going to count the ecological costs of producing electricity, the study should also take into account the ecological costs of producing fossil fuels, and the costs of fighting wars to keep energy flowing. How many wars have we fought for solar or wind power recently?
blind people have better hearing than you and they will generally have a dog.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Too bad that you lose too much energy over long distances huh? And HVDC isn't deployed in most of the world where it would be actually beneficial. Transporting electricity from northern quebec to southern ontario is cost prohibitive, energy prohibitive, and too expensive with AC transmission means. Sucks for reality huh.
Om, nomnomnom...
its early days so they will cost more but the ongoing costs offset that. Its a city report so the health side of things are taken into consideration. All cities either have EVs or are testing them or at least compiling cost/benefit reports
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Which doesn't necessarily mean the bus has to take a break too. Another driver could take over.
Ohm's law and arithmetic.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
google what to do with old EV batteries. hint: recycle into home storage battery
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I caught a taxi from Schipol Airport one day, an all Tesla fleet. I asked them how they get around given the limited range of an electric car. The answer was easy: Taxis actually aren't rolling at high speed the entire day. They average between 300-600km / day. They have a company 3 company mandated breaks, one of them is 30min. They take that lunch break at the Amsterdam Zuid-Ost Supercharger. No one in the fleet has ever run out of power or had to take their vehicle off the road when it could have been serving customers.
I'm not entirely sure what your angle is here (sarcasm and whatnot not translating well over the tubes), but there is a difference between facts and numbers. OP gave numbers -- which might be true, out-of-date, or flat-out wrong -- with little proof. As another poster pointed out, OP is off by a factor of ~4-5 from Tesla and GM prices for batteries.
Regarding cost for 660 kWh = $100-$200 claim, this appears (?) to be loosely based on the residential cost of electricity, not the wholesale cost, which is a factor of ~10 less. I'm not sure how buses in Ontario would work, so I can't say what the proper pricing would actually be...but using the wholesale prices from 2016, this works out to be ~$11 to fill up, using the off-peak residential rates it's ~$60, and the peak prices yield ~$120 (excluding inefficiencies).
If we want to get more into the weeds, then yes, I just gave some numbers with "proof" which may be flawed. You're welcome to disagree with my sources -- they could be wrong, and I'd appreciate any corrections to my numbers and/or reasoning.
I agree with ShanghaiBill, plus
And the inconvenience factor of buses increases exponentially if you have children and multiple destinations.
Note to the people who'll say kids can travel alone on subway, bus, etc now. That's sort of true, but they have age cut-offs, but many require that child have someone meet them at the destination, but I have no one to meet them. Plus, where I live, it's a stupid thing to do.
I also expect we'll have a solution from the self-driving sector to handle children. Whatever they come up with, a self driving car ride will be better then having a kid get on the bus, ride to the subway, then transfer to a second bus, and then walk a few blocks to their music class.
OTOH buses/rail is great for the large volume of rush-hour office-worker commuters all headed to and from downtown. It worked for me, and I use public transportation when going to places where parking is difficult to find. However, the self-driving car will also solve that problem.
I plan to name my self driving car Lassie so I can yell at it: "Go home! Go home Lassie!".
Fewer than 10% of households in the US don't have a car, and the numbers in Europe are comparable. Given that many people in dense cities don't really need a car, the portion of people who can't afford to own a car is even lower. Granted, car ownership isn't the same as being able to afford to run a car, but still...
Running a car is not necessarily the greatest expense in car ownership. If you've purchased an old used car and seldom drive it, the greatest expense is combined government fees (license, registration) and government regulations (mandatory inspection, mandatory insurance).
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Also, I did not include partial charging. It tends to reduce battery life. It's a big marketing point from EV manufactures, but ultimately it's pretty useless to charge 10 minutes every few hours of travel (how ever long it takes to go 40 miles on your route). The ideal is to load up that 100kWh battery to max by the morning, and have most of your buses out all day long.
My math says 1250 A @ 480V to fully charge 100kWh pack in 10 minutes, of course like I said nobody is charging them to the top in 10 minutes and the charge currents for these batteries is not linear.
Medium commercial sites have 800A to 1200A service, a large commercial site can have one or two 4000A services. You'll need that 4000A service if you want to charge more than one bus at a time. I used to work in an iron foundry, and it took over 500kWh per ton of steel, unfortunately I don't recall the size of our service but it was 3-phase for our industrial motors and probably quite substantial.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
And one world government, also. Hard to find a rallying cry that's resulted in more bloodshed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AZjwLhS6jc
The freedom culture of the United States of America is the best in the world for human beings. Let in too many uninformed (and sometimes vicious) immigrants and that culture will be corrupted and destroyed. Don't think it can't happen here; other nations have been corrupted and destroyed from within.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Conservatives forget the real costs of coal, and oppose making polluters pay for their actions.
Heck, they oppose doctors being held accountable.
Parking lots and idiot drivers that reverse out without looking. With some noise you can be aware that that stationary car you just walked past, is no longer stationary. Double this idiocy in xmas shopping, bonus level if part of your attention is also on bratlings with self-preservation skills of lemmings.
That said, a noisy intersection makes it irrelevant. We were nearly hit by a bus that ran a red light while we were mid crossing...only the premature laughter of some hobo gave us a heads up (and the bus wasn't running the light 'that fast'). In retrospect it was rather hilarious.
If it takes 10 minutes to charge one battery, then you can charge lot of busses during the night, one after the other. You don't need to charge them all at the same time.
Your claim about partial charging doesn't seem to be accurate either. In general, what seems to kill today's Lithium Ion batteries appears to be topping them up to fully charged. It's probably better for battery life to max out at 90% charge.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
You said 'majority'. That word has a meaning.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
False. "Concentrations of uranium [in coal] fall in the range from slightly below 1 to 4 parts per million (ppm)... Thorium concentrations in coal fall within a similar 1–4 ppm range"
[citation needed]
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Super capacitors have been replacing batteries for the last 20 years...
love is just extroverted narcissism
"they spend billions in spreading their religious zeal to mosques around the world" - not unlike all the missionaries the catholics sent around the world to indoctrinate
False equivalency.
How many terrorist attacks/car-bombings/mass shootings/suicide bombings have Christians performed in the last 50 years against non-Christians simply because they were not Christian?
The major and most relevant difference between Islam and Christianity in this context is that Christianity went through reformations to be compatible with modern civilization, whereas Islam has not. Christians do not kill apostates nor tax/enslave non-Christians, nor throw homosexuals off rooftops or stone women to death who were raped.
There is plenty to criticize about Christianity, but currently it is far and away more benign than Islam and the two are in no way equivalent in terms of violence against non-believers. Islam needs it's own reformation, but sadly, it looks like the only way that will happen is when enough Muslims bent on violence are eliminated by force.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Actually you have it backward, modern civilization is modern because Christianity went through reformations. It is far easier to live in a manner that doesn't conform to any specific religion when the religious people that live in your town aren't actively trying to kill you and/or each other for it.
Easy fix: pay the fuck attention when crossing a street. Look up from your fucking phone every once in a while
Shifting the burden of attention to the pedestrian doesn't work so well for blind people.
You don't know what "at scale" means. Yes, for pumped hydro storage, like hydro and geothermal generation, there are spots where the solution is workable. But mostly, not (and it brings the problems of new hydro construction). It's just not going to be practical to build 30,000 hydro storage plants at the scale of today's largest (just the for the US).
Batteries aren't even on the table, many orders of magnitude too low.
Eventually someone will find a good solution that works at scale. It's bound to happen. But, like fusion, it hasn't happened yet. I do think it's a more tractable problem than fusion, however.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Wrong.
All electric vehicles need to make The Jetsons car sound.
=Smidge=
Autonomous vehicles will make buses obsolete. Seems like smaller autonomous ride sharing vans would be more practical to group people going to similar destinations.
"You don't know what "at scale" means."
I do. I also know it doesn't mean what you think it means.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"People who depend on fossil fuels for their livelihood" and "the religious right" are orthogonal properties. Sure, there's some overlap in the sets of people, but it's disingenuous to suggest there's somehow a religious connection. A coal miner or oil field worker is going to support fossil fuels regardless of his religion.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
My math says 1250 A @ 480V to fully charge 100kWh pack in 10 minutes
722 Amps since, at 480V, it's probably going to be three phase.
However, in the scenario you're suggesting, it would be more prudent to do battery swapping.
=Smidge=
Based on what? We have a few GWh pumped hydro storage worldwide, and only at sites where the geography makes sense for it. Other energy storage models are unproven even at GWh scale. How do you imagine we'll store 30 TWh? There just aren't 30,000 good sites -- not even close -- and that would be one Hell of a lot of acreage to flood.
"I'm right because shut up!" is a very poor argument, unlikely to persuade many.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
No. They'll just wait until the Darwin principle gets rid of all of the idiots who don't look around when crossing the street.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Which doesn't necessarily mean the bus has to take a break too. Another driver could take over.
Could. But the logistics of having a network of substitute drivers all over the city to take over just for everyone else's lunch break, then having to return it back it the original driver, is a lot harder to solve than just taking the bus out of circulation for 30-60mins.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging.
I'm not so sure about that. This only makes sense if you would have taken the bus back to the depot anyway. There is quite a lot of overhead in driving them back to the depot. The buses can only be taken out of traffic at the final stop, and those can be quite far from the depot sometimes.
Today the buses basically run non-stop. When I was driving it was basically in 4 shifts of 1.5-2.5 hrs, with breaks in between. The buses never stop for any longer period of time, you just replace the driver, when you pass by one of the traffic hubs.
The only time the bus stands still is after the final stop. There is usually some margin before the return trip.
Electrical buses are surely taking over soon, but probably not for this reason. Most likely charging will be done at the first/last stop, and maybe some top up at the intermediate stops. It does not necessarily need to be fully charged either. It is okay that the battery level gets lower during the day, as long as it lasts until it gets returned to the depot for scheduling reasons.
Your other arguments are absolutely right though.
Anyone steeping out into the road without looking visually risks killing one of the already millions of silent journeys conducted by cyclists. I unfortunately knew a victim of such an incident. Consequently any person blind or otherwise using traffic noise as a proxy for determining whether it is safe to step out into the road is a sociopath. It is never acceptable under any circumstances ever.
They're qualities that are culturally encouraged or culturally disavowed to varying degrees in different parts of the world. What appears to be human nature is highly subject to ones environment.
Apparently it only takes a very short amount of time in an environment to exhibit "human nature" as illustrated by the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments...
Perhaps it is more accurate to say what appears to be human nature is highly subject to one's societal situation. I probably would not even attribute much to the environment which you grew up in or which you currently live. Probably even less nurture, than simply nature+immediate circumstance. Remember we have quite a bit of so-called "reptilian" brain-functions in our human brains...
Joe sixpack doesn't give a damn about what makes his car move as long as it's cheap.
As long as there's a way to get a "cool" version to impress their friends. If all electric cars look like a Prius, I'm sure many won't give a damn about them (and no, Joe sixpack can't afford a Tesla Roadster or other electric supercar). Make electric cars like a F150, Mustang or Camero, then nobody will care if they are electric...
I thought the "better hearing" was just simply paying more attention to sounds.
Just from the summary (because I didn't read TFA):
. . . claims to be cheaper . . .
. . . only delivered a few hundred all-electric buses . . .
. . . make a bold prediction . . .
. . . seem to indicate there's a shift . . .
It's fairly safe to assume that this is just CEO Ryan Popple's dream and he's actually begging for money from investors.
[public transportation] it's viewed as something that poor people use,
Not in England, Washington DC and surrounding metropolitan area, or New York.
I would agree with you if you said "buses" but not if you say "public transportation."
Bus companies have a lot of passenger use data that can be used to redo routes...
Although that is theoretically possible, if you've observed the actual process that public bus companies need to go through to change routes (public hearings, legal protests, community outreach, political meddling), and the potential uncertainty on how that affects the farebox recovery rate, you would realize why they don't just change their bus routes to something more efficient even though they have the passenger use data to justify it...
Why would a bus driver need to return to the same bus after eating lunch?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Norway is 15 people per square mile. The United States is 84 people per square mile. 6% of US electricity is from hydropower; if the US were 15 people per square mile that figure would be 34%, and if every brook and trickle were dammed it still couldn't be doubled. Environmentalists in the US tend to oppose new hydropower because the supply lakes tend to silt up. Other people oppose hydropower because they don't want to lose their homes.
So, if you want the US to be 100% hydropower we'll have to shut down aluminum production and almost all other industry, stop heating houses and generally speaking fall into poverty. You're damned right I'm a naysayer.
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...my diesel car, which is a 2 litre sporty car that delivers a lot more performance than a Leaf while delivering 45mpg. And that's taking the grid in those areas as a whole; it probably isn't 100% coal even in the worst places. So I'm afraid you're wrong.
For the consumer electric is a cheaper "fuel" than gas or diesel. Tree-huggers and climate-deniers can argue all they want about carbon footprints, but it doesn't matter because it's the green cash in people's wallets that will make EVs happen.
Also, you might be surprised at the performance of a Leaf (or any electric car)... it's worth a test drive at a dealer for curiosity's sake if nothing else. I own a Leaf, and while it's by no means a Tesla, it's still quite fast off the line as it has the electric advantage of instant power/torque. The acceleration curve flattens considerably above 45 mph, where ICE cars would still be accelerating well, but personally I don't feel the need for punchy acceleration at high speeds (your results may vary), and I can still get my Leaf going over 80mph, which is fast enough to get a speeding ticket most anywhere in the US. I'm not an EV zealot though... I acknowledge they aren't for everyone (yet) and are not perfect, but there are a lot of misconceptions about EVs, performance being one of them. Put it this way, Porshe isn't investing in EVs for their carbon footprint! ( http://www.businessinsider.com... )
Note to the people who'll say kids can travel alone on subway, bus, etc now. That's sort of true, but they have age cut-offs
That is a cultural convention. In Japan, it is normal to see 5 year olds travelling alone on the subway to and from kindergarten.
The primary material outputs of petroleum burning engines are water and CO2, both of which are 100% recyclable. They don't even have to be transported to a recycling center.
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You DO understand that battery recycling is a messy dangerous and toxic business right?
You are dealing with an input that is a mixture of corrosive electrolytes, metal parts and plastic which is not easily disassembled in a safe way. Once you manage to separate the stuff, you have to then refine the metals, neutralize the corrosive materials and deal with the huge amounts of industrial waste all this creates in a safe and environmentally responsible manner. It's not usually easy..
For instance, lead acid batteries are often recycled for two reasons. First, lead is expensive, second it is REALLY bad to dispose of bad lead acid batteries directly into land fills. Sulfuric acid and lead are both bad bad bad for the environment. The process goes something like this.. Pulverize batteries into itty bitty pieces in a big hammer mill..... Separate metal from plastic by dumping battery chips into a tank of water, lead sinks, plastic floats while the acid dissolves into the water. Treat the water to neutralize the acid being careful to capture any vapors to make sure they are not toxic and of neutral PH. Scrape the plastic off the top of the water and dispose of it, scrape the bottom of the tank to recover lead chips which are then refined in the normal way. Oh, and eventually you will want to change the water in that tank, which will need to be properly treated to remove as much lead as you can...All your employees will need to wear full protective gear including respirators and heavy gloves because it's REALLY dangerous in your factory. Remember all that hazards waste you will be creating will need to go someplace safe and not just buried in your back yard...
Someday, you will also want to shut down that factory too.. Trust me, even knowing in advance, it's a horrible mess to clean up something like this...
It's a similar problem when building new batteries from the recycled lead.. It's a little cleaner, but it still produces toxic wastes, fumes and is a danger to your employees and the local environment...
Batteries are *really* messy sir.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I can't see that happening in cities where buses carry 100-ish passengers.
Standard buses have a capacity of about 40. On average, they have seven passengers on board (nine in Europe). Obviously, it would be more at rush hour and fewer toward the end of the lines, but still there are often a lot of empty seats. Buses have a different rhythm, and disrupt car traffic. SDCs, on the other hand, can drive in tight "platoons" that maximize lane utilization, and since they are not driving fixed routes, they can route around congestion.
Uber/Lyft are already causing a decline in bus ridership. On-demand SDCs will kill them.
Jerry Pournelle's A Step Farther Out ( ca. 1984 ) proposed orbital solar satellites transmitting power via microwave. It mat not be economically feasible, but it's not silly and it's not a new idea.
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Neither Tesla nor GM sell batteries. Panasonic and LG do, and they're the ones making the actual batteries. However, you aren't likely to be buying millions of them, so you'll get nowhere with them. Search eBay for people who are taking Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, etc. EVs apart. We have several of the 6cell modules from Volt packs that will be for sale once we can ship them. (hazardous material, blah blah.) If you're local to RDU, come get 'em :-)
In Leyden jars.
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Selling busses happens at county fairs and houses of prostitution. Selling buses is different.
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Gasoline powered electrical generators of the sort a consumer might buy for his house are neither fixed load nor particularly efficient. Even run under optimum conditions they are considerably more expensive per kWh than power from power utility, and that high price implies low efficiency.
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Wikipedia (ibid)
Yea, I see why you think reality sucks - it upsets your worldview.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
You probably mean reusing rather than recycling. Recycling will most likely come after the stationary use.
Ezekiel 23:20
If they care about battery longevity, they'll keep them between 20% and 80% SoC. (30:80 would last even longer. 80% DoD is still a decade of cycles) Getting to 80% SoC can, indeed, be done in 15-30min -- if you have nuclear power plant in your back yard. (we're talking many MW to charge a fleet of buses. One bus at a time... Just. No.)
The smallest office building I've been in was fed with 6000A 600V (3ph) service. (I don't know about the current office. We didn't have to build anything in it.)
Can I just call up Tesla and GM to buy them at that price, or do I go through a reseller? Or is that the bottleneck for the price (a 500% markup seems excessive, though... especially for such a large bulk purchase). Let me know, please! I'm 100% serious here.
You can go to Tesla's website and order the Powerwall 2 with a credit card[1] on the spot, then dismount it from your wall after it's installed and stuff it into your RV. GM does not resell batteries in any form. Powerwall 2 is 39 cents per watt hour, not the 19 cents per watt hour they pay wholesale, but still, it's only a 100% markup, rather than 500%.
I've been told that it's cheaper to buy naked cells, though I don't know anywhere else you can get Panasonic cells for 39 cents per watt hour and you would lose Tesla's sophisticated power pack cooling, charging, and discharging hardware and software. (Liquid cooling is integrated.) I presume you don't intend to use the batteries for motive power, in which case a Powerwall 2 is just what you need. You might even be able to get the electrician to install it directly into your RV for you.
It's more than double the capacity you were planning on, but it's a turnkey solution. I hear modern RVs all have 120V appliances now, so it's literally a drop-in installation, though exactly what gets wired where might be a little complex if you have a fueled generator as well as the external power connection. The electrician would remove the existing inverter, since the Powerwall 2 has its own. It's 44" x 29" x 5.5" and is designed to be installed vertically. A horizontal installation might work, but might void the 10 year warranty (And might not. You'd have to ask). It can peak at nearly 60 amps output and sustain 40 amps, so it should have no trouble starting up and running the typical RV air conditioning system without letting the voltage sag to anything electronic, even without external power. It's beefier than the typical RV battery system, which tends to top out at 30 amps.
----
[1] And holy crap, how did Slashdot not notice that change? There's a Powerwall 2 now (a nice clean rectangle, instead of the goofy truncated oval thing) and it's 14 kWh for $5500, with trivial credit card ordering, instead of having to call them. Much friendlier than the old way.
They are working great in Denver
cheaper, faster, quieter, better.
Man, you really need that seminar!
The poor still need some sort of system.
Even poor people value their time. Buses take two or three times as long as a car.
Using a large vehicle and a steady route is more efficient time and money-wise
Hogwash. Buses make sense only if you are trying to minimize the salary of the driver. Otherwise two or three vans would be cheaper to purchase and far more convenient for the passengers, since they could drive more frequent and more flexible routes. Once you deploy self-driving technology, buses make very little sense.
Actually you have it backward, modern civilization is modern because Christianity went through reformations.
Interesting.
I personally tend to think they went hand-in-hand in a sort of 'chicken -or-egg' sense, in that neither one was really possible without the other. I also believe that if Islam experienced a similar reformation the ME would experience a 'Renaissance' period somewhat similar to Europe's and become a far more peaceful, advanced, and wealthy region.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
30 TWh? The discussion is about powering electric buses. And, if you think it's acreage, the obvious conclusion is that you only think in a single dimension.
*plonk*
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Interesting! Sounds similar to the situation with Tesla taxies at the Stockholm Arlanda airport.
"I DARE you to make less sense!"
i said nothing of the sort.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
you don't need immigrants to destroy any country, it gets done from the inside by ignorant people.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Why would a bus driver need to return to the same bus after eating lunch?
I'm pretty sure there aren't hundreds of empty buses sitting around waiting for all the drivers who've just finished their lunch.
And if you are assuming rotating shifts, I can only assume you haven't really thought out the demand pattern for bus activity and driver shifts.
As stated, the most logistically simple option if for a bus and driver to be taken out of circulation during a break.
I ride with everyone from poor moms with 2 kids in strollers and homeless folks to guys in 3 piece suits with $500 pairs of shoes. In between are everyone else from high school kids to college kids, and the breadth of the middle and upper-middle class workforce.
Generally I've found the people who complain most about public transport are the ones brought up in towns/suburbs designed around the car, and hence the public transport options do suck. I lived in Singapore for a couple of years and hardly anyone owns a car because there is no point. Public transport is faster, cleaner, safer, cheaper and more reliable than any other option. And it is the only transport option that scales in larger denser population centres.
no, its not a false equivalency. the christian violence problem may have earlier with things like the crusades and inquisitions but movements/advancements like the Enlightenment and science helped quell the christian nonsense. The crusaders way the crusaders acted cold be seen as the model for ISIS idiots. Post crusades the christian nonsense was driven by the "normal" god- fearing person whereas the current violent islam problem is being done by extremists who are basically gangsters using the religion as an excuse.
.
"Christians do not kill apostates nor tax/enslave non-Christians, nor throw homosexuals off rooftops or stone women to death who were raped." - yeah, right, they never burnt or drowned witches or anything like that, people were never stoned to death even though its an instruction in the bible, people were never enslaved, check how the cathars were treated in france,
anyway its off topic
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Remember that guy Breivik? He has a body count quite comparable to the worst islamic terror attacks on European soil.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
But so is the whole petrochemical industry. Batteries are the lesser evil.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
LOL. It's only "prohibitive" because local generation is cheaper. Exact same thing with energy storage - if it's cheaper to build locally, that's what you do.
You're so close, put 2 and 2 together.
Yea, I see why you think reality sucks - it upsets your worldview.
Keep reading, let me know when you get to the source point and you find out that building those transmission lines are the equivalent to half the cost of a a 1GW NG-2 stage plant.
Om, nomnomnom...
Blind people already know how to deal with this, and they'll hear the noise from the 31-inch tires hauling a 16-ton bus down the road.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's no longer 1946. Modern fear of nuclear fission is due to media sensationalism.
Three problems with that argument. 1) Even if you are right and the fears are purely out of media hype, the fears still are real and they still matter. In politics perception is reality and politics matter here. If people are afraid of something they are going to fight it even if those fears are completely unjustified in the face of objective facts. 2) Even the most advanced reactors we have today are still not fail-safe with zero risk. They still depend on substantial amounts of human intervention to operate safely and any time humans are required there are risks. 3) Engineers still make design mistakes. Fukashima happened in large part because of engineering mistakes. There is no way to prove that the engineers have build a perfectly safe fission reactor given the state of the art in technology. Engineering mistakes are the most dangerous types of mistakes because they are the ones you are least likely to know about ahead of time and the hardest to mitigate against.
There also still is the waste disposal problem which hasn't been solved but that's a separate issue from safe operation.
Who's talking about little consumer generators? I'm talking about generating stations that power the grid. Even if running on petroleum, they are more efficient than any engine in any car.
Also, an electric vehicle is powered by all sources of power, not just the one that today's diesel buses are. You could burn that diesel in a generator to get more energy out of it now for pushing the bus down the road, and then in the future shut down that diesel generator in favor of solar / wind / hydro / geothermal / tidal / nuclear / whatever and keep the same bus, with the same advantages.
If there's an ROI today, there's no reason not to switch right now, because that ROI only grows into the future.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Immediately after the end of World War II, the Greatest Generation was absolutely convinced that they were entering the Atomic Age and that it was going to be the best thing since sliced bread.
That's because they didn't know much/anything of the problems/risks with nuclear power plants. Nuclear power did seem like this amazing new technology straight off the pages of a science fiction novel and it had ended the war. Of course they were interested. There was a substantial lag between learning about it and what it could do and then figuring out what the risks and problems with it were. Over time we learned that there were significant practical problems with fission as a power source and some very real risks and it took a while for the public to absorb this argument.
People are by nature bad at evaluating risk (we tend to be risk averse) so it's hardly surprising that eventually public opinion in many places swung against nuclear power over time. Public opinion of the risk of nuclear power demonstrably is at odds with the real objective risk but if you want to build more nuclear fission plants then you need to deal with that very real fear in the political arena.
Then Green Peace set themselves against it. They spent the '60s and '70s telling the world how dangerous nuclear power was...
Greenpeace was a small player in a much bigger drama and I think you hugely overestimate their influence in this debate. But even if we stipulate to what you are saying, it is absolutely true that nuclear fission as a power source does carry substantial risks. To pretend that these risks don't exist would be foolish. You cannot argue that fission is 100% safe or that catastrophes cannot happen and remain credible. There isn't a fission power plant we've ever made that doesn't carry real risks and doesn't required oversight and maintenance from humans. Even simple designs like RTGs carry meaningful risks.
Then in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster happened, the greatest gift to anti-nuclear forces since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The reason Chernobyl was/is scary is that there is currently no way to prove that a similar disaster couldn't happen again elsewhere. It was confirmation of an already existing fear. There is not a single fission plant in operation today that does not have failure modes with potentially severe consequences. The failures are mostly remote but potentially very severe and that is the sort of risk we as humans are worst at evaluating. Use airplanes as an example - they are objectively very safe and yet many people are absolutely terrified of them because some of the failure modes are potentially quite severe and out of their control. Until you can trot out a scientist that can show that a meltdown or radiation release or similar disaster is provably impossible you're going to have a hard time getting public opinion back in favor of nuclear fission in many parts of the world. And even then a lot of people won't believe the evidence. I probably find that as disappointing as you do but it's the reality we live in thanks to human nature.
Human nature is to be scared of the things we're told to be scared of
And we've been told (with some justification and evidence) to be scared of fission for decades now. That's already done and reversing it is going to be really hard thanks to human nature. Getting people to accept something new is a lot easier than getting them to stop fearing something familiar that they think (rightly or wrongly) is dangerous.
For the record, I'm actually in favor of increased use of fission to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But to pretend that it is without risk or that it will be politically easy is just foolish naivety.
I've seen plenty of city buses drive back to the depot flashing "NOT IN SERVICE". Bus routes tend to be loops, as well; the final stop tends to be the closest stop to the depot on that particular route.
City buses also spend a lot of time on the side of the road with the engine compartment open to allow them to cool off. Sometimes they go out of service for 40 minutes due to overheating.
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But we where discussing "Clean Energy" and I was making the point that there is no such thing, especially on an industrial scale....
Making and recycling batteries is a huge environmental mess.... Photovoltaic Solar is it's own kind of environmental nightmare as are other solar technologies (to a lesser degree). Wind is more of an environmental problem than most people imagine, with huge fiberglass assemblies we will eventually need to get rid of not to mention the impacts of building towers and the birds that die..
Nothing is 100% clean.... Some things are cleaner than others, but all have their issues.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Laws are decided by the people who live in the country. Not the rest of the world.
I'm an atheist. How about you insist (and get Saudi Arabia to agree) that all people can go everywhere and we all follow our own rules. Why? Because we're all one people.
Stop making things up and then calling other people bigots for not following it.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
The majority of people are poor, so using a form of transportation that poor people use is pretty natural for them.
Gee, you sound like you think you know a lot about the poor and what they think, but in reality you're not a poor person, never have been a poor person, and never will be a poor person. So then you sound like a rich person saying "..oh, they're used to being poor and are perfectly happy with their little lives the way they are." which is a bunch of baloney. You really think the poor don't see middle-class and richer people in their cars and wish that was them? Or envy them? Or hate them because they're 'the lucky ones' while they comparatively have nothing? Think again.
So you live in NYC and poll people on the subway all the time, and know beyond a reasonable doubt that ALL of them are perfectly happy with the subway? LOL, no, you don't live in NYC, you don't talk to anyone, so you know nothing. Bet anyone $5 that if you polled 100 random people on a NYC subway, the majority would say "The subway is OK, but if I could get driven around in a car? Sure, that would be great!". Why do you think taxi drivers can make a living in a place like NYC? Because not everyone likes or wants to use the subway or buses. The only reason more people in NYC don't drive cars is it's expensive to park one there, enough so that it's not practical, and the traffic can be bad. But huge urban environments like NYC are the exception and not the rule, the majority of the people in the U.S. don't live in huge cities, therefore they own cars -- and like it.
There are new reactor designs that haven't even been built yet
Which means they are nothing more than an unproven idea whose flaws have yet to be uncovered.
that are inherently safer than the current generation, and that are much less complex designs
I'm sure they are safer. But marginal gains in safety unfortunately aren't enough. They still have a meaningful chance of catastrophic radiation release and that is even assuming they work perfectly as designed. If there is a manufacturing flaw or an engineering flaw then the risk is multi-fold worse. We have no reactor design that solves this problem even in principle much less in practice. So far it is a problem with fission that has proven to be irreducible.
Then there's using Thorium instead of Uranium. All would be better than the current generation of reactors.
Thorium is fine but it doesn't solve the fundamental problems with using fission as a power source. The problem is that we have no way to be completely certain that catastrophic failure and accompanying radiation release is impossible. We have no known reactor design that can safeguard against this possibility. It's the fatal flaw in the technology. Add on the fact that fission also creates a pretty nasty waste disposal problem and it's pretty easy to see why the technology hasn't progressed further.
The discussion was about a larger issue, but sure, buses, whatever, no one cares.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You are just nitpicking. It is obvious to everyone who isn't an imbecile that 100% clean energy is physically not possible. Hence clean energy means "far cleaner than fossil fuel". And this is what counts, because waiting for a perfect solution that might never come while continuing to use a bad one is worse than continuously updating to a slightly better solution.
And besides, IC production is very much the same "nightmare" as photovoltaic production but I see you posting on Slashdot, using a lot of semiconductor technology in the process. Looks like a double standard from here.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Cleaner than Fossil fuels eh? In what way cleaner?
Natural Gas is clean, nearly squeaky clean actually. The worst part is getting the wells punched and the distribution pipes buried. After that, you are pretty much going to get CO2 and water as a byproduct of energy production.
OH... I'm guessing you mean CO2 emissions means it's dirty.... Which is a whole pack of lies and points to what I consider an unfair description "Clean Energy" in trying to advocate we not use fossil fuels. "Clean Energy" is more of a PR campaign than reality or even a possibility. Which, if you read between the lines on my posts here, is my actual point.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Wanna buy a shirt?
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who wants to ride a public transportation bus around sitting next to some smelly bums?!?
Other smelly bums?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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You're never going to get anywhere remotely near wholesale prices, honestly.
I would just buy a whole wrecked Leaf, strip the pack out and sell the rest for scrap. You'll get OEM quality batteries and the price will be low, and you'll get 24kwh of batteries.
Looking on car-part, there's a Leaf pack from a wrecked 2014 for $2500 right now. That's $104/kwh.
That's the best you could do? :)
So if road users paid 100% of the cost of the roads, we wouldn't have roads?
I think you need to think about that one a little more.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Did you know that before we started massively subsidizing (socializing) the trucking industry, grocery stores used to have their own railroad spurs? True story. So capitalism can work perfectly well when we allow it to.
"The trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." --Margaret Thatcher
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
No, I'm saying people who don't directly use roads still benefit from them.
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