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Electric Buses Are Hurting the Oil Industry (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Electric buses were seen as a joke at an industry conference in Belgium seven years ago when the Chinese manufacturer BYD showed an early model. Suddenly, buses with battery-powered motors are a serious matter with the potential to revolutionize city transport -- and add to the forces reshaping the energy industry. With China leading the way, making the traditional smog-belching diesel behemoth run on electricity is starting to eat away at fossil fuel demand. The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the country's entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transporters -- the equivalent of London's entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance. All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla to Toyota. For every 1,000 battery-powered buses on the road, about 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel will be displaced from the market, according to BNEF calculations. This year, the volume of fuel buses take off the market may rise 37 percent to 279,000 barrels a day, about as much oil as Greece consumes, according to BNEF.
Vancouver, BC has a fairly large electric bus system, and has had it for over 50 years. The trollybus system covers most arterial routes, and while the buses are primarily powered off the overhead wires, they can go for short distances (under 1km IIRC) on internal batteries. The latter capacity is primarily used to get around detours or accidents.
With one of these systems, your buses are as clean as your power supply, and you don't need to muck around with expensive/polluting batteries to the same degree.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
"Perfect" should not be the enemy of "good".
I've been spending a month or two a year in China for the last decade or so, and the air there is definitely a lot cleaner than it was in 2007.
As another poster already pointed out, it's heaps easier to put one scrubber on one smokestack than it is to put a million of them on a million automobiles. And it seems to be proving effective.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Most high flow cats (including mine) require MIL eliminators.
In the VAG/Bosch world, that could be programmed away. I don't know about your rustang. The only car I ever put a high-flow cat on only had one O2 sensor, a pre-OBD-II 240SX. That was CARB legal. Now I'm driving a pre-facelift D2 A8, which has the same exhaust they used on the S8 which tells me I don't need any more of it and it's definitely not limiting output. Post-facelift cars have cats and pre-cats. However, for all D2 A8s there are software fixes to patch away the downstream cats entirely so that you can run whatever you want, or nothing...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Just not being dependent on someone else for energy has so many plusses it's even worth it if it costs more. And with green energy you get a much better environment as an extra! It really has almost only plusses.
-- Cheers!