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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.
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.
You need to get folks to live where they work
Scattered coworking spaces and work-from-home with virtual offices.
I can attest that this is fine for some kinds of work, but not for others. Close collaboration and team work suffers when people are not actually face to face, and working from say a "home office" hasn't been shown to be real good for productivity or information security. But it has it's place I suppose.
Good luck with your venture, I wouldn't mind working for a San Francisco company at their wage scale from here in the Midwest and I wouldn't mind staying a few hours later each day to support communications until 5PM west coast time. I'd make a killing for Texas...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
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.
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
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.