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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.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...
You do notice that this is from the U.S. goverment. Unbiased enough for you?
n 2016, the California grid region, which covers most of the state and a small portion of Nevada, imported a net daily average of 201 million kilowatthours (kWh) throughout the year from other western regions, or about 26% of its average daily demand. Those imports were supplied by the other two regions that make up the Western Interconnect (WECC). The Northwest region of WECC, which includes most of Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Washington, and a small area of northern California, supplied a daily average of 122 million kWh. The bulk of the remaining imports to the California region, 68 million kWh per day on average, came from the Southwest region of WECC, which includes much of Arizona, New Mexico, and small portions of Nevada and Texas.
I'm only posting this link because it is from the California Goverment, and it provides a break down of how the energy they produce is broken down. Good information.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/alma...
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
I mean, maybe in general. But this is California we're talking about.
I recall that just a few months ago California also tossed out all fossil fueled power generation plants in a similar move. I'm just curious how they figure on charging these new buses so they can actually use them?
IF smog is your concern, do CNG powered buses. They run exceptionally clean and CNG generally doesn't require major changes to existing internal combustion engines to work.
IF you are really serious about CO2 emissions, then your problem isn't city buses, but population density. You need to get folks to live where they work and give up their cars, in mass numbers. This will require that you stop enabling the long commutes to the suburbs, heavily regulate cars and hike the price of motor fuels though the roof.
Problem is, most of these "solutions" are not very popular with the voters.... So we get this kind of stuff that sounds good but won't ever really work.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
Haven't most municipalities gone to natural gas?
https://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/NGV_ICCT_2005.pdf
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
Considering progress BYD and a couple of others are making on electric buses, there's a decent chance that they might make it around 2030s-2040s. Buses need replacement every 15 years or so in a developed country as repair costs begin making them less profitable than investing in new ones and donating the old ones to some less developed country. Note that these are Finnish numbers, may not apply in US, our buses pretty much all go to Estonia etc after ~15 years where work time of repair workers is significantly cheaper making older buses that need more time at the shop per distance driven economically viable.
So If they start putting in infrastructure, and phase out non-electric replacement units next year, they'll probably have much of infrastructure in place and buses actually being mostly fully electric by mid-2030s. 2040s at the latest. Time frame is tighter than optimal if they're actually aiming for 2029, but economy wise, it's probably doable without having to push significant raise on ticket prices, as operational costs of electric vehicles tend to be lower while buy-in and infrastructural costs higher. So if they equalize those against each other correctly, they may be able to get an implementation without having to raise ticket prices.
And once infrastructure is in place, it's just higher buy price vs lower usage and fuel costs.
Glad you asked.
answer.
The article says the CO2 reduction over 30 years is the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road. But they don't do the math.
The projected total reduction over 30 years is equal to the emissions of 4 million cars in 1 year, based on current emissions. But cars will change over the next 30 years too.
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.
I really don't understand why steep hills are a problem for a BEV bus. Hill starts work really well in car-sized EVs. And obviously, downhill stretches allow for lots of regen.
I'm curious to understand more.
I think hybrid/natural gas is already in place in many places ... because it's also cheaper.
But I think the first step would be to make public transport more attractive. Cutting the emissions of buses makes sense in Europe, but in the US, you need to first convince people to use them instead of their cars. That would actually have a net benefit on emissions.
Adding constraints to public transportation is only going to make it less attractive, hence less used.
There are always buses in the depot doing nothing for a while. They use lots of buses during peak rush hours and then scale back between peaks that so all they have to do is swap a bus and change its number while the driver has lunch and then the bus gets charged. And don't forget the driver has a bladder that will emptying from time to time. Simple.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Buses have to make so many stops that regenerative braking would be a lot more advantageous on buses than on almost any other type of vehicle
But if we want buses to be less detested even in cities that have a popular, comprehensive transit network, having fewer stops would be a big improvement. If you can take a bus, you can walk one block. I know urban dwellers who Uber-commute to a subway station every day because the bus takes two hours to go three miles.
Sounds odd considering that the buses can recharge on the downhill with regen braking. Seems okay for a 45 ton dump truck https://newatlas.com/komatsu-e...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Does that count replacing the battery pack every few years? Don't forget, those things run on the same battery technology cell phones use, and a cell phone battery only lasts a few years.
Not to mention climate issues - you can't use those batteries in any place where it gets too cold or too hot, which is - well, basically, everywhere.
You do not need to replace the battery pack every few years. Also, batteries work just fine in cold temperatures - sure, they lose some range while it's cold, but not permanently. You can also preheat the car to avoid the problem. In Norway, home of reindeer, snow, ice and skiing almost 50% of the car sales in September was pure electric cars. Granted, the last month of a quarter is higher than usual but on a normal month, like November, it was 41%. In addition to this, hybrids are another 25-30%.
Well, it actually is cleaner CO2. Because burning natural gas pretty much only produces CO2 and water. While burning coal produces a whole lot of other crap.
More to the point, a power plant is far more efficient than an ICE in a vehicle. So you get more miles traveled by the vehicle from the same CO2 production, even when you account for losses along the way.
According to a 2009 article from MIT.
The ones in Shanghai right now have been on the road for three years without incident, without failure whatsoever, which in the bus industry is phenomenal,” says Clare, who adds that his company is in talks with New York City, Chicago, and some towns in Florida about trialing the buses. “It will end up being a third generation of the product, which will give 20 miles [of range per charge] or better."
I don't know the specifics of it, but, it's certainly possible for two fuels to have differing amounts of energy produced versus CO2 released.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs...
So, yes, at least according to EIA.gov, natural gas IS "cleaner" than Coal. Not even getting into side-products released when burning coal.
A great side benefit of this often not talked about, is now much urban noise pollution this reduces.
Buses travel some roads regularly that are are not often travelled past some time in the evening, so to eliminate bus engine noise will really improve the lives of those that live along bus routes.
The widespread switch to electric vehicles is going to be so much faster than anyone can possible imagine...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Is there a formatting instruction for slashdot somewhere?
You were saying?
Ezekiel 23:20
Found this http://www.sfexaminer.com/muni... and then this https://www.electrive.com/2018...
It's not "cleaner" CO2. Burning natural gas simply produces /less/ CO2 than burning coal to generate the same amount of electricity.
I'm old enough to remember when environmentalists viewed natural gas as a "bridge" fuel on a path to reducing CO2 emissions. Then of course fracking resulted in an abundance of natural gas supply and it became bad.
Trolleybuses have a far longer lifespan than diesel buses, this extended lifespan is probably valid for battery buses as well.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The fact that this informative post is modded "-1" right now is a sign of how certain types of groupthink outside of distro yelling and anti-M$ posts have gotten to Slashdot as well.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Considering progress BYD and a couple of others are making on electric buses, there's a decent chance that they might make it around 2030s-2040s.
Blue Bird sold the first full-electric bus (a school bus) in the mid-nineties. It had a range of around 100 miles, which is plenty. It survived the pilot project.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
San Francisco, one of the most eco friendly places and Big Brothery cities in the country, canÃ(TM)t do this. They have tried in the past but due to the cityÃ(TM)s extremely steep and tall hills, the only safe way to get busses up and down them is to use diesel busses. [...] Additionally, SF uses overhead cabling to provide power to these electric busses.
When they don't have onboard batteries, we call them trolley[-]buses. The overhead cabling, when used with a wiper contact, is called a pantograph wire. It's not EVs that don't work well on hills, it's pantograph systems, which is why they don't use their electric buses on the steepest hills.
One obvious solution is to stick with the pantograph system, but add battery for those periods when the buses have to be out from under it. This would require relatively little battery, and it could also be used during acceleration to reduce the maximum draw from the system per vehicle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The last coal plant in California is currently being decommissioned.
Thanks -- per drinkypoo's post below, it's clear that the issue is not with BEV buses, but trolleybuses.
California's a big state, but there are so few city buses in the parts that do freeze regularly during the winter (way away in the Northern end of the state) that the impact will be small. They can heat the batteries in those few locations where it is relevant.
given that they already did conversions to existing buses for the natural gas initiative around 25-30 years ago, it should be no trouble to retrofit existing busses to electric if there is interest and the costs are worth it.
It's a bit more hassle to do an electric conversion, but it's certainly doable. It depends in large part upon the height of the floor how much space is available.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a conflation of trolley buses and battery electric buses. The former already exist in SF and do indeed have problems with hills. BEVs do not.
Who is going to pay for all this virtue signalling?
The existing bus system has energy network that is able to cope with long distances traveled and hours.
The many stops, in traffic all day. Start stop and short distance to the next stop.
The same bus can do both types of city and suburban transport.
The costs of replacing all existing support equipment and upgrading all support services?
Staff having to learn new skills to work supporting each new bus?
Whats the bus tax going to look like so a state can say its now moving poor people around with "electric" transport?
Poor people who cant pay much for each use of the bus. Who expect the "bus" to take them greater distances to work?
A bus tax to cover for low cost prices so the poor can keep using the "bus" service.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This analysis doesn't stack up. You have to consider the full energy requirements of a coal-fired EV vs a gas-powered ICE car. For example, you've not accounted for the energy costs of extraction, shipping and -- for gas but not coal -- refining. Studies that do take the time to account for all this properly typically find that the CO2e per km of coal-fired EVs is still ahead of gas-powered ICE cars.
And of course a focus on CO2 exclusively is wrong-headed. Better to have particulates and NOx centralised out of urban centres in a big power plant than pumped out into people's faces at street level.
And of course coal makes up an ever-shrinking component of electricity generation.
A standard ICE based bus run effectively all the time there's a need for it to be driven (i.e. when first people need to go to work to late evening revellers coming home), minus the necessary maintenance time. This is required for economic operation on city scale. Buses that aren't running should go into maintenance, preferably of preventative kind to ensure reliable running on actual routes. This raises confidence of time critical travellers that the bus will be there on time, and have them actually start relying on public transit instead of personal one.
That means that range effectively has to be infinite, with near zero time refuelling breaks. My understanding is that the way BYD et al address the issue is modern automated route planning software coupled with constant and careful observation of passenger flows. This way they have buses that can run for rush hour periods plus a few hours, so that during rush hour, fleet usage is maximized, and all of those buses can also handle being driven for an hour or two before and after rush hour. And during the less rushed hours before the rush hour and in the middle of the day, you can have less buses on the routes, during which time electric buses are recharged.
Unfortunately this strategy requires more buses being active and ready to use, so buy-in cost is significantly higher. You can't go with diesel strategy of "bus is driving all the time that is needed during active phase with drivers taking shifts". The range is simply not there.
So realistically, you need much more than 160km or so that you suggested if you were to do a 1:1 replacement, especially when you consider that this is transit during rush hours, with frequent acceleration cycles with high to maximum payload on long commuter lines. But as BYD already showed, and many European bus manufacturers like Solaris following suit, it's workable with advanced route planning software and sufficient fleet. So the problem is in process of being solved. I just worry that the goals set here may be too rigid due to being politically, rather than economically motivated/sound in terms of engineering. Public transit primarily serves those worst off, and the ideological part of green movement has a long standing tradition of pushing most of costs on the poorest strata of population.
Unfortunately EVs have a slew of problems of their own, such as how to generate heating, AC, etc effectively without the warm engine and many of its support systems being possible to tap for it. So while you have less complexity on ICE itself, you have more complexity on many of the supporting systems.
Notably, Musk himself made this point on his appearance on Rogan's podcast, by citing the problems they had making a workable AC system for the Tesla Roadster.
When it comes to bus repair, my understanding is that the supporting systems actually count for a significant amount of downtime, as many of those systems are under much more stress as they're exposed to passenger interaction. And unlike in a personal vehicle, people only take one drive in freezing cold or sweltering heat without heating/AC to reconsider using public transit again as just one example of such a system.
Trolleybuses however have significant routing limitations, and cannot be easily shifted between routes in many cases. They're also very different in terms of how they're built compared to modern battery powered buses, that have challenges of their own. They're nowhere near as peak power limited, nor energy efficiency limited.
Every technology has a very unique set of challenges to be solved. Some experience is certainly shared among them.
It's easy enough to specify components which permit electric vehicles to climb steep grades. Because a niche case using buses NOT designed for greater TORQUE OUTPUT didn't work out, you assume it can't.
Need more torque? Spec accordingly.
Need more amps when negotiating very steep inclines? Run catenary power just like trolleys have used for over a century.
Diesel-electric locomotives worked the Saluda Grade (look it up) for decades. There's no inherent electric motor limitation preventing buses from traversing equally steep or steeper city grades.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
38% of California's energy is derived from burning hydrocarbons (mostly natural gas).
The real bottom line problem, if you pretend that it isn't gentrification, is that buses suck ass. There are really only a few places that they make sense on any level other than reducing the number of drivers needed to move a given number of people. They perturb traffic badly in cities if you don't give them their own lane, but if you can do that then you have room for rail, and it is much better than a bus at improving the driver to passenger ratio.
The self-driving car is going to murder the bus, though the bus will hang on for some time, doing damage all the while. If we just spent the same effort on PRT we'd really have something that could rival and even surpass the car. Instead, we'd rather rearrange deck chairs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's what people call "city planning". If your city has problems of the kind and in magnitude you're implying, your city officials have failed at planning in a catastrophic fashion, and you should vote in people who will urgently act to fix these problems as one of the higher priority tasks in terms of budgeting.
That's what people call "city planning". If your city has problems of the kind and in magnitude you're implying, your city officials have failed at planning in a catastrophic fashion
Sure, when it comes to planned cities, that's valid. Most aren't. They grew. For example, I come from Santa Cruz, which has horrible traffic problems now. You can't practically get across town anywhere near any of the rushes. But it began as a retirement community for Mexican war veterans. It wasn't planned. It became.
Luckily, there is a rail line there, but oh my god what a political clusterfuck is involved. There's been this battle over rail+trail vs. trail only going on for years, which is only now finally looking to be going the correct direction (where "correct" is defined as "with rail".) The battle is actually over rail+trail vs. nothing, because large portions of the right of way revert to private ownership if the rail line is removed, but some highly moneyed interests have managed to convince a lot of very stupid people that railbanking is a real thing and that a trail alone would better serve the needs of the community than having rail. There are public funds (a sizable quantity, mind you) earmarked for the project which will simply go to some other county if they don't go forward with rail, too.
In short, the traffic problem is the result of the deliberate actions of malicious actors, and really has little to nothing to do with planning. I would be shocked and amazed to learn that the situation was fundamentally different in the majority of locations. No matter which way you turn your head, you can find unscrupulous dickwads.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's not through the middle of nowhere. It's through the densest corridor of population west of Texas. Almost all of the cities in California line up in a neat line connecting north and south through the central valley, and it's not that way by accident. It's because that's *where the railroads put them in the first place*. It makes sense to put HSR there, so you can connect the vast majority of California's population.
I know if you drive down I-5 it looks like the valley is empty -- but that's because I-5 was built as a bypass. The ACTUAL corridor that follows the old railroads (where CA-99 follows as a highway) has sizeable towns and cities every dozen miles all the way from Sacramento to Bakersfield. Over 6 million people.
And the advantage of the train is that local services can stop along the way to service all these millions of people instead of treating them as "flyover" country. That's something people forget about HSR -- it's not just about nonstop trips from SF to LA, it's also about Stockton and Fresno being served in a way that aircraft can't. There is no such thing as a plane stopping for 90 seconds to pick people up at a city it's flying over.
Cities aren't organic life. They don't "grow" without planning. You have everything from city planners to architects to road building companies participating.
Just because you can cite failures in this process, doesn't mean process isn't there. It simply means that process failed for some reason, and there's a need for correction. Which is just as much of a planned action as the city growth itself was.