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California Requires New City Buses To Be Electric by 2029 (nytimes.com)
California has became the first state to mandate a full shift to electric buses on public transit routes, flexing its muscle as the nation's leading environmental regulator and bringing battery-powered, heavy-duty vehicles a step closer to the mainstream. From a report: Starting in 2029, mass transit agencies in California will only be allowed to buy buses that are fully electric under a rule adopted by the state's powerful clean air agency. The agency, the California Air Resources Board, said it expected that municipal bus fleets would be fully electric by 2040. It estimated that the rule would cut emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases by 19 million metric tons from 2020 to 2050, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. Environmental groups said the new regulation was an important step in cutting tailpipe emissions, which are a major contributor to global warming and California's notorious smog.
This will combine really well with increasing reliance on wind and solar power. Also electric buses if they are designed appropriately can when not being used directly as buses can have their batteries used as on-grid storage which can help smooth out fluxuations in the grid. Since buses also mostly have short distances traveled, it is easier for them to do their jobs on an electric system than cars, since the issue of short-range is less of a problem (the buses will always be near their recharge stations).
The only real downsides are twofold: First, that the date is 2029 which is a decade away; I wish the time-range for the mandate was shorter. Second, as California switches to an electric system, other places may actually take the old gasoline buses which isn't necessarily a good thing. The energy involved in making new buses is high, so using a bus for as long as possible seems like a good idea, but there's a point where continuing to use it hits diminishing marginal returns. For example, Bangor, Maine has in the past gotten old buses for essentially free from some cities which were otherwise going to scrap them, but there's some argument that the reliability and efficiency is so poor of these old buses that it may have cost more overall to try to use them.
Being that natural gas is a cheaper energy source, I would expect most of the power will be from Natural gas. But still having energy production centralized in particular locations, allows for easier regulations and monitoring of the pollution. So if we were to come up with a CO2 Scrubber it would be easier to put it on a smoke stack on a coal power plant, then on the tailpipe of every city bus.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No wonder you posted as Anonymous. That is a particularly ignorant and asinine thing to say. Completely bogus. EV's do have a higher manufacturing CO2 footprint, but their operating savings even when electricity comes from primarily "dirty" sources breaks even within 3-4 years and it's net savings for every year after that. California's grid is about 35% renewables, the rest natural gas and grid exchange power from the Pacific Northwest (which is over 80% renewables). So it's already much cleaner than much of America.
Face it, fossil fuels will be a thing of the past in a very few years.
Ãf(TM) show up for every fucking apostrophe when a post is made on iOS?
In your iphone, go to Settings - General - Keyboard and disable "Smart Punctuation". This is what is adding the weird UTF apostrophe when it should just output a normal single quote like God intended.
What the fuck are you talking about? Why would you think it matters that a bus is in use for 8 hours? It's range that counts, dummy -- miles travelled. 8 hours in city traffic may well use far fewer miles than two hours of inter-city.
In any event, this is obviously a solved problem given that Shenzen went electric-only with 16000 buses years ago.
A typical Shenzen bus has a range of 200km and doesn't travel that much in a day. It recharges overnight (actually, in two hours) and is ready the next morning.
While you lot are busy making Beavis and Butthead look smart with your idiotic snark, most of the world are just getting on with making the change happen -- including California.
Could you explain why California should never import electricity ever?
And why this "must never import" position doesn't apply to all the food California exports to every other state?