Virginia Has Big Plans For Electric School Buses In 2020 (arstechnica.com) 59
Dominion Energy, the utility that supplies the Commonwealth of Virginia with most of its electricity, is about to begin an ambitious plan to roll out electric school buses in the state that will store electricity when not ferrying kids to school. "Earlier this week, it was announced that phase one, which begins in 2020, will start with 50 electric school buses built by Thomas Built Buses in partnership with Proterra and Daimler Trucks," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The buses will be Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouleys, an electric version of one of TBB's existing buses. Each one will carry 220kWh of lithium-ion battery storage for a range of about 134 miles (216km), and they will recharge in about three hours using Proterra's 60kW DC fast charging system.
Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.
Dominion Energy says that replacing a single diesel school bus with an EV bus has the same effect as taking more than five gasoline cars off the road, and by 2025 it hopes to have deployed 1,000 EV school buses to the Commonwealth. Should all go well, it wants 50 percent of Virginia's school bus fleet to be battery electric by 2030. The utility is offsetting the costs to school districts, in part because it wants to use the buses for vehicle-to-grid storage when they're not on the school run. In fact, a school district's suitability for V2G is the main determining factor in deciding which districts will be chosen for the first 50 buses.
Electric Busses are gonna eat Diesel's lunch (Score:5, Informative)
I live near where the tourist buses park. There are a huge number of tourist buses that are parked overnight, then drive ~60 miles to a hotel, pick up a bunch of (often asian) clients, drive them to the four to six tourist traps scattered about the city, about 20 miles worth of driving with "full load", then drive home about 60 miles back to the overnight lot, possibly stopping off to fill up on diesel.
That's not a whole lot different from school buses.
If you look at what brand name diesel engine companies charge for parts, what a full time diesel mechanic costs, variable fuel costs, plus the noise/environmental havoc they create... electric buses are probably going to get here a lot faster than electric cars. They're also going to make cities a lot quieter. Average idle rumble of a commercial grade diesel engine permeates through walls and can be heard blocks away, sometimes even the next street over.
China is rapidly expanding into the electric bus market, some would even say they have it cornered; A 56 seat tour bus (average size) with a 300 mile range would probably be successful in 96% of applications; a 450 mile extended range model would cover the other 4% (ski bus, long distance/grayhound long haul line). Plus you have the average city bus which probably only does 300 miles in a day. LiFePo battery tech (the slightly heavier, industrial grade alternative to laptop batteries) is getting really cheap, and is significantly safer too.
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Its a game of thermal efficiency and then also energy usage efficiency.
Our Leaf gets the gas equivalent of ~90 miles to the gallon compared to a normal gas powered hatch at ~35 mpg
1 gallon = 33.70 kWh
Gas Car @ 35mpg = 35/33.7 = 1.03 miles per kWh
Our Leaf gets ~ 3.7 miles per kWh
So for every unit of energy that goes in to the system we get more equivalent work done
Now go back to thermal efficiency.. reality is for that Gas car is while it's consuming 33.70 kWh with every gallon, most of it goes a way in hea
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and for those areas the change to electric will take an eternity.. another option is to move closer to the equator.. I've heard it's nice down there :)
on a side note, I've never understood why we have so much population that still lives in the bitter cold.. when there is so much open space in areas with better climates
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Well for one group of people it's because that is where the mines (mineral, energy, food (farms are mines for food - discuss), whatever) where they work are. Not everyone works in interchangeable cubicles with virtual products.
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Because even if we set aside calculations about CO2e, electric buses have zero *tailpipe* emissions and produce dramatically less noise and vibration. All of which are unequivocally good things, particularly in urban settings.
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How are EV buses going to do much for them since their current and future power are coal based [japantimes.co.jp]?. They don't seem to be solving their pollution problems.
You can place your coal plants away from people, but can't do that with tailpipes. Plus it's a lot easier to install one big scrubber on a stationary coal plant than it is to stick a million tiny scrubbers on tailpipes. Stationary power plants also run at better efficiency than an ICE because they can be optimized to run at the most efficient RPMs, while an ICE has to make compromises to work with the varying power curves to move a car from stop to 110 km/h.
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The numbers for covering the top of a bus with solar panels looks different than for cars. The bus will have a lot more flat surface area.
The bus also does a lot more stopping (and stops a larger mass) than a car, making regenerative braking much more beneficial.
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LiFePo4 isn't "industrial", it's just harder to set on fire by exceeding the rated discharge rate. It also costs a lot more than LiPo (much more flammable) or basic Li-Ion (moderately flammable.) Once you get any of them burning, though, they're all hard to put out.
Li-Ion is still the cheapest lithium battery by a wide margin.
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Diesel is actually the most efficient fuel you can burn in an ICE engine. Because it works by compressing the fuel until it auto-ignites, the burn is extremely efficient. Larger diesel engines in generators, ships, trains, etc. can hit about 55%
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Diesel trucks can usually manage about 45% efficiency. That's better efficiency than an EV charged with electricity generated from a fossil fuel plant (about 40% efficiency for a coal plant, 60% efficiency for a gas plant * 95% transmission efficiency * 85% battery charging efficiency * 85% discharge efficiency = 27% or 41% efficiency overall).
If you penalize EVs for the inefficiency of producing and transporting electricity you should apply the same rules to diesel. Raw oil needs to be extracted (which uses energy), transported from the extraction point to the refinery (more energy), then refined. Refineries use a lot of energy: petroleum refining is the second most energy-intensive manufacturing industry in the United States, and accounted for about 7 percent of total U.S. energy consumption in 2002 (numbers from here [energy.gov]). After refining, the fuel
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Except an EV is easily 3-5 times as efficient energy wise than a ICE engine or a diesel engine. That's why even the lousiest of lousy EVs get 100MPGe (most are getting 125-150MPGe) over a diesel or
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Re: Electric Busses are gonna eat Diesel's lunch (Score:1)
, what a full time diesel mechanic costs
And what do certified, authorized, unionized electro-mechs earn?
The sad part about this stems from recharging these batteries. Batteries are not used to charge batteries. Power plants are used, running on oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear supplemented with wind and solar energy. 100+ years of internal combustion engines and still piss poor milage. Supposedly we went to the moon, send spacecraft out to the edge of our solar system and yet, fuel milage still resides in the 19th century. What gives?
There are
Sorry, kids (Score:1, Informative)
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The grid will be wanting to dump power over lunchtime. That is when solar will be reaching it's peak output. The buses will be sucking down that excess, and using it for the afternoon drive home. After that, there will still be a few hours of daylight to pump the batteries back up before the buses will used to feed the evening peak draw when everyone gets home to run their appliances. The buses will then do a slow draw overnight as an off-peak load.
Unfortunately, the kids will be disappointed that thei
Not pointless at all (Score:5, Informative)
The benefit is not all about carbon.
Diesel engines emit particulate matter and noxious fumes. On school buses, these are spewed out of the tail pipes, conveniently placed at schoolkid-face height. Switching to EV buses will save a lot of nastiness going into the air we breathe. This is a win based just on keeping the air cleaner around population centers. And Dominion's generating fleet is only 12% coal (based on MWH produced).
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It's not just diesels. Gassers make just as much soot as diesels.
https://slashdot.org/story/165... [slashdot.org]
They also release more HCs, and their HCs are more volatile. Heated catalysts are supposed to solve that problem but they haven't taken off yet.
All ICEs are lame.
Re:Completely Pointless while power comes from car (Score:4, Informative)
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How long does a vehicle last? 15 years minimum. If it's a diesel or gas vehicle it will always be a diesel or gas vehicle. If it's electric it can shift its fuel source over those 15 years. If we wait 20 years to adopt electrics we'll end up with a bunch of ICE cars with long lifespans remaining; cars that won't be able to take advantage of the green energy we've developed over the coming 20 years.
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It doesn't just get its electricity from carbon.
It gets energy from solar.
It gets energy from wind.
It gets energy from regenerative braking.
three hours? (Score:2)
60KW DC for three hours is a max of 180KWh. So it might be better to say "they will recharge in about four hours". Unless they're assuming that 20% of the energy in the battery is off limits for other uses....
Re:three hours? (Score:4, Informative)
That is exactly what EVs do. The vast majority of the wear on a Li-ion battery [batteryuniversity.com] comes from topping it up to 100% charge, or discharging it to 0% charge. If you've ever had a laptop battery which only lasted 5 minutes, that's what happened to it. You charged it to 100% or discharged it to 0% too often, and killed it.
The strategy EV manufacturers (and many laptop makers) have adopted to ward this off is to make the charge extremes off-limits. They'll limit the battery's usage to between 10%-90% charge, or 20%-80% charge in order to maximize its lifespan. If you've been having problems with the battery in your electronic devices dying after just a year or two, you can do this too. Don't charge it up to 100%, don't let it discharge close to 0%. Take it off the charger somewhere between 80%-90%. And put it back on the charger when it drops below 20% My device batteries have lasted 3+ years with very little decrease in battery life ever since I began doing this ("+" because none of them have actually died before I replaced the device). Several laptop vendors include a software tool to limit the max charge % to help with this.
How about no school buses (Score:3)
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Local? Get accepted into the "school" thats a set distance.
Not local? Get accepted into a different local school in the area.
Lots of education needed in a part of a city that decade? Buy another building. Staff and provide a budget.
No hours per week on a bus are needed. No electric bus. No diesel bus.
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Re: LOLing @ Leafy Dudley Do-Right (Score:2)
Y'all
It's harder - but not impossible - to sound like an inbred while remaining grammatically-correct (rhough personally, I'd rather you didn't sound like one at all; it's grating on my ears).
Re: LOLing @ Leafy Dudley Do-Right (Score:2)
it's grating on my ears
If an explanation's in order - everyone already knows I'm a asshole - fiteen years in Oklahoma was more hick than anyone should have to tolerate.
Re: LOLing @ Leafy Dudley Do-Right (Score:2)
a asshole
Or something like that.
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All the best people would walk to a really great education in a good part of the city, state.
Below and well below average areas would accept the local well below average students..
The result show in every generation of testing and be hard for a gov to talk about.
The US has a way around that. The bus.
The bus can transport some for the below average students to areas with a good average result in education levels.
The really low and below average
Solutions! YAY! (Score:3)
For the first time in a long time I'm seeing Slashdot discuss solutions to global warming instead of another doom and gloom story about how fucked we are because of global warming.
School buses seems like a very appropriate application for electric vehicles. The mass moved is not too high, the distance traveled is short, there's a long time in the middle of the day to recharge, and it has a bonus on improving air quality around schools and homes.
We'll still need synthesized carbon neutral hydrocarbon fuels for things like long haul trucks and aircraft. The buses will need a carbon neutral source of electricity. And the school will probably need to keep some diesel buses for long trips for sport events and day trips.
See? We got this problem solved.
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This. Exactly this. School buses run twice a day, a predictable route, and have a lot of room for batteries. If a school district goes with this, it doesn't mean cheaper fuel costs, it means cheaper upkeep costs, because electric motors are a lot cheaper to keep going than IC engines, transmissions, and the mechanical systems that go with those.
It gives me hope seeing common sense things like this, which actively do something to combat climate change, as opposed to more doomsday scenarios that can't be d
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It means both cheaper fuel costs and cheaper upkeep. The upkeep costs aren't sufficient argument on their own, because an electric bus costs MUCH more, and it only costs about ten grand to repower a bus with a remanufactured engine. When a new bus costs over 100k that's really not that much. But most medium duty diesels have a B50 of somewhere between 500k and one million miles, so cold climates aside (where there is a lot of idling) most buses make it to their typical 10 year end of life without a major en
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Actually, blue bird both pioneered the modern electric school bus (back in '96, with a mere 100 mile range) but also sells them now (with a 200 mile range.) But their build quality has reportedly slipped in recent years (I'm in a Fb group for blue bird school and transit buses since we have a bus that bridges both worlds, a 1999 Q-Bus which was a former Yosemite shuttle and which I am slowly converting to an RV*) so no doubt more buyers are gravitating towards the the Thomas these days. Thomas is now part o
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Until the next Ice Storm.
Or the next Hurricane.
Or the next statewide Wildfire.
I don't recall seeing any wildfires around here so I can't comment on that. Lots of ice storms though. No hurricanes, but we've had our share of heavy rains with winds and flooding. Here's what happens with the schools, everyone gets sent home. If this happens before the school day starts then the school is already empty, so call off school that day.
I've seen things like this happen in the middle of the day, and that might be worthy of discussion. Assuming the buses had enough time to charge then they
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You people are clinically phucking insane.
And you like to prop up straw men.
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But ... (Score:2)
Excellent Move (Score:1)
It's a good step....Ilike it.
Ferret
amazing that this takes so long (Score:2)
The Demonrat Final Solution (Score:1)
Free market (Score:2)
What does free markets look like?
Getting rid of nasty, smog-billowing diesel engines is what free markets look like.
Which side will the Tangarine Shitgibbon support? (Score:2)
Der Trumpenführer will have to support both sides in this fight. Fortunately, he's that much of a moron that he'll be abl