California District Launches Country's First All-Electric School Bus 94
joe5 writes "Well, leave it the golden state. The Kings Canyon (near Squaw Valley) Unified School District recently launched the first all-electric school bus in the United States. The bus is a modified SST Trans Tech model based on a Ford E-Series van chassis — and Motiv Power Systems created the electric drive train. (The project was a collaboration between those two companies plus the California Air Resources Board.) The electric bus can carry 25 students with an estimated range of 80 to 100 miles— and while it costs more than a standard combustion engine version, is expected to save about 16 gallons of fuel per day. Thanks to a federal highway program, three more electric buses are on their way to the Kings Canyon district and similar programs are in the works in both Chicago and New York."
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All Hale the Tea Party! XD
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That might be the case, but it might also not be the case.
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I remember getting big whiffs of diesel exhaust while crossing between busses when I was in school (not on purpose, had to twice daily to get to/leave school). That can't be good for developing minds.
Too bad 80-100 miles doesn't cut it for out here. Half of our busses go 20-30 miles out of town to pick up kids, some go 50 miles out.
Great for in town routes though.
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There are always outliers where this is going to be the case, but llikely the vast majority of school buses in urban areas could be replaced by something like this with lower running costs.
Now, you didn't say where you lived or if you had done a proper analysis of how they were collecting students.. but considering the cost of driving a bus such a distance, might it not be cheaper to collect the more distant students in a smaller vehicle?
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Small town in the middle of nowhere. When I was in highschool there were something like 75-100 students living 25+ miles out of town. The furthest out kids had 2-3hour bus rides (due to stops).
Combine with winter temperatures that sometimes strands normal buses by freezing the diesel fuel into a gelatinous blob, I sadly predict electric buses will never come to this chunk of the US.
Though I do hope electric buses take off in places that can utilize them. The bus barns that maintain a school's fleet would be
Re: Cool (Score:2)
You really think there are 40 year-old busses on the road carrying school children?
Trust me, that is not the case.
Re: Cool (Score:2)
No it can't be good. One puff of something smelly surely will impact brain development! And THIS right here is why we have scientific studies - so we can do away with shitty opinions like this.
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Especially when you add in lower maintenance costs for an electric vehicle.
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Please cite your source. I might agree if this were a 3rd generation vehicle with 10000+ already on the road and a proven track record.
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It's rather speculative, but a good inference can be made simply from the vast reduction in the number of moving parts.
Re: Cool (Score:2)
Are we including battery replacement in this imaginary 'reduced maintenance cost' scenario?
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Doubt there is anything for a bus like this, but if you look at a Prius there is quite a bit of data on the maintenance costs.
The rengertice breaking saves on brake pad wear, to the point that Toyota reports they don't need replacment till 100,000 miles. The Power Shift transmission has fewer gear sets, resulting in less wear on them, and has no clutch, CVT belt, or torque converter. Plus there is no timing belt, alternator, starter. And since the ICE is not running all the time it's experiences less wear a
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Re: Cool (Score:2)
What do you imagine a replacement battery pack will cost for a school bus? And remember, you'll be going through batteries like no one's business because school buses are run for (typically) two runs in the morning and two runs in the afternoon, requiring probably two complete charges in a 24 hour period, five days a week, 40 weeks a year...
That's a lot of batteries.
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What do you imagine a replacement battery pack will cost for a school bus?
On the order of $0.10/Wh, by the time it matters. Modern Li cells are outlasting anyone's expectations in traction applications; they're not the weak link that you imply.
Re: depends how you define school bus (Score:2)
How many kids could you get in such a bus?
Re:Cold (Score:4, Informative)
Many EVs let you turn on the heating remotely or on a timer, so that the vehicle is warmed up while it is still plugged in and charging. Then it only needs to maintain that temperature, which requires a lot less energy. The charge process itself also generates a fair bit of heat which can be used.
Have a read of some of the EV forums. Electric cars are pretty popular in northern European countries where it gets very cold for much of the year, not least because they have this feature and tend to work more reliably than ICE cars.
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The real question is what happens if you get a cold snap in the middle of the day. Since most suburban school districts stagger the school day for elementary, middle, and junior/senior high schools to minimize the size of their bus fleets, it's quite conceivable that these th
Re:Cold (Score:4, Informative)
even if you don't heat the garage, just being in a structure will help cut some of the cold. My old pickup has a manual transmission that gets stiff in cold weather, to the point that i have to warm the engine for 10-20 minutes when the temp is under 10F just for the shifter to move right. In the garage the time is at the lower number, but, when i park outside, the higher number is more common.
at the very least, a school bus would probably be a ideal use for this type of tech. Predictable loop runs, twice a day, stored in the garage(and charging) while school is in session.
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My thought on that, is that they would use that bus for the shorter range routes, 100 miles, while it seems small, would probably be fine.
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I've often wondered if combustible fuel heaters would make sense on electric vehicles. I know that seems backwards, but where ICE's are very inefficient, especially as utilized in motor vehicles, burning fuel for heat is very efficient. Also external combustion has very low emissions (other than CO2 of course).
Undoubtedly people would ridicule such an idea, complain it's no longer zero emissions (not that electric vehicles are either, depending on how the electricity is generated), blah, blah, blah, but it
Re: Cold (Score:2)
No, they don't - they really, really don't.
I can't imagine a single school district that can justify the expense of such a structure - it is more cost-effective to leave them outside.
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The local school district here in Minnesota has a small garage where they store their wheelchair-accessible buses, but the rest get to sit outside. That seems to be pretty much the norm. Each parking spot does have power though, to run the block heater that each bus is equipped with.
Add a range-extender engine, perhaps PV too (Score:2)
Since buses are so big, seems they are a good candidate to add an on-board range extender engine, for those trips that might exceed battery range.
Also, seems they also have lots of roof surface area where PV could be installed, to also help with range, or running accessories, or charging when just parked in fleet parking lots, or at destinations.
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PV could be installed, to also help with range
It doesn't need any "help with range". Fleet vehicles (like school buses) are already a near-ideal case for electrification; they follow well established routes and schedules. Range is either sufficient or not, and once sufficient, the marginal value of additional range is zero.
Re: Add a range-extender engine, perhaps PV too (Score:2)
Unless you want to take kids on a field trip...
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Unless you want to take kids on a field trip...
It doesn't make any sense to optimize for outlier trips like that, unless you have money to burn. Rather, you keep a few diesel buses around.
PV is better (economically, for efficiency, and for the grid) when it's stationary and grid-connected, and range extenders negate the benefits of the simple electric powertrain (bringing back ICE maintenance). A "range extended" EV embodies the complexity of both a full-power EV and a convention internal combustion powetrain.
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Diesel has an energy density of 36 MJ/l, or 136 MJ/gallon. If you assume 12 MPG, a school bus driven 100 miles a day will consume 8.3 gallons. With a conversion efficiency of 30% (30% of the energy makes it to the pavement and moves the bus, the rest is lost as heat in the engine, transmission, and tires), that's 136 MJ/gal * 8.3 gal * 0.3 = 339 MJ of energy consumed. Or 3.4 MJ per mile.
A full-size school bus is about 2.4 mete
Re: Add a range-extender engine, perhaps PV too (Score:2)
Or you could just add 10% more batteries to the bus.
Buse
hmmm.... (Score:1, Troll)
I wonder how much oil and/or coal it takes to create the electricity to charge this bus everyday?
And yes, I know that CA just opened the worlds largest solar farm [independent.co.uk], but we all know most power on the grid is still carbon-burning.
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Assuming all the energy is generated via coal, it would generate about two thirds of the carbon emissions. On one hand you have vastly improved efficiency of the power plant vs. the diesel engine. On the other hand, petrol is rich in hydrogen which burns to water, while coal is pure carbon so it will generate more CO2 for the same energy. If you use natural gas (CH4), then it drops to about half what the Diesel engine would generate.
A more realistic view would take the energy whole mix into consideration, w
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fantastic comment...why in the world would you post as AC?
+3 awesome
Braking vs. Breaking (Score:2)
Excellent comment but I still find it grating when the word "break" gets used where "brake" is correct and vice versa.
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Replying to this to undo a moderation mistake. Great post!
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It depends on where you are. In some parts of the US, hydro and nuclear make up a very large part of grid power.
Re: hmmm.... (Score:2)
Where is most electricity generated in the alternative methods you listed?
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I'm not sure what you're asking.
In my area (upstate New York), more than 50% of electricity is made by a combination of nuclear, hydroelectric, and "other renewable". (This last is almost negligible.) The remainder is natural gas and coal, favoring natural gas.
Of course, we are one of the cleanest-electricity regions of the country. But we're not the only cleaner-electricity region. For example, parts of Tennessee get most of their electricity from hydroelectric.
Useful links:
EPA eGrid [epa.gov]
NYT article [nytimes.com] on the regi
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Next question?
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California at present gets less than half of its electricity from fossil fuel sources and most of that is from natural gas. According to Wikipedia in 2011 8.4% of their electricity was from coal and 36.5% was from natural gas. I can only presume based on California politics that those percentages have dropped a bit since then.
Van-Bus (Score:3)
You can paint it yellow, but it's still a really-short bus. That might make sense for very low-density areas, but I was surprised when I needed to hire a school bus for a Scout event last year that the newer full-sized buses actually get pretty amazing mileage. At 10-15 MPG, it's terrible for a car, but when you're carrying 60+ people, that's fantastic. Especially considering you can still buy a pickup truck that gets similar mileage. I was expecting the answer to come back at "7MPG highway" or something more proportional to automotive mileage.
Kudos to the anonymous mechanical engineers who design these things. I suspect it would be really hard to build a full-sized EV bus that used less total fuel, considering the transmission and charging losses, and the fuel equivalence for the additional wealth needed to purchase such a thing.
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newer full-sized buses actually get pretty amazing mileage. At 10-15 MPG
Wow. Seriously. Compared to what you get with cars, SUV's, etc. that seems amazing. I wonder what accounts for that fantastic efficiency compared to smaller vehicles.
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A buses cross sectional area may be 3 times that of a car but it's capable of carrying 8 or 10 times the number of passengers so it still wins for efficiency.
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Seriously competing with an international market instead of assuming consumers will just buy the latest monster SUV out of Detroit.
They are trucks with a bus body. The sort of people who decide to buy them will gladly get Mercedes, Scania or whatever to build their bus body on if they can save a bit on fuel.
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People say this all the time but an ICE is one of the least efficient ways to generate electricity, especially in the fossil fuel genre.
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I dunno. Consider how much mass school buses have, I would think you could recoup a huge amount of energy with regenerative braking alone. And unlike cars which only stop at red lights and stop signs, school buses also stop at every pickup/drop (every kid's house in rural areas) and a
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At 10-15 MPG, it's terrible for a car, but when you're carrying 60+ people, that's fantastic.
it's not that fantastic. I knew a dude who had a tour bus converted into an RV that would get 10+ MPG pulling two cars on a big trailer. And that's a way heavier bus. The big problem with modern buses is aerodynamics, they have none. Around town it's irrelevant. On the highway it's serious.
But this is California (Score:1)
Because the government is now not getting fuel taxes (in their eyes "losing revenues to tax dodgers"), they'll want to tax it in other ways.
Miles traveled. Number of kids ferried. ANYTHING so they can make a buck.
Finally! (Score:2)
I've long thought this is an obvious application for electric vehicles, what with predictable routes and whatnot. Another one would be the small local delivery mail trucks, especially as those things are constantly stopping and starting - a very inefficient way to use an ICE, and one which puts a lot of wear on the engine.
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I've long thought this is an obvious application for electric vehicles, what with predictable routes and whatnot. Another one would be the small local delivery mail trucks, especially as those things are constantly stopping and starting - a very inefficient way to use an ICE, and one which puts a lot of wear on the engine.
You would seem to be [evworld.com] right about that. [usps.com]
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Another one would be the small local delivery mail trucks, especially as those things are constantly stopping and starting
I bet they could deliver milk with one of those!
Price? Cost? (Score:2)
Like most stories about electric busses, electric trucks and electric cars, this one includes no useful information about cost. Who thinks that without a taxpayer handout, this thing makes any economic sense to the Kings Canyon Unified School District?
Pure Pork.
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If you're going to think of it in those terms, even a petrol powered school bus is a "hand-out"... Since a brand new diesel-powered school bus can cost around $100K, and the school district will spend that amount (over its lifetime) for maintenance.
Needs a catchy name for PR (Score:2)
Something to do with electricity.
We'll call it the "Short Bus".
$400K for a short bus (Score:2)
$400K for a short bus? Sure, it saves $11K per year on fuel costs (minus electric cost which isn't in the story) but still, a conventional bus of that size is around $50K so paying an extra $350K seems like an excessive amount for the extra greenness.
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Actually, E-Series short buses with the barest accomodations (for which most school buses would qualify) can be had new for that kind of price. You can still get a 2000 E-450 airport shuttle with a 7.3 powerstroke and a nice interior, especially compared to a school bus, for anywhere from $6k on up. Oddly, though, you can buy a used long bus with a Cummins for the same kind of money, and even at about the same age.
Anyone calculate the MPG of the bus? (Score:2)
If the bus has a useful range of 80-100 miles and would otherwise consume 16 gallons to cover those 80-100 miles, that puts the MPG of the bus at between 5-6 MPG...
Seriously? They drive school buses that are THAT inefficient?
Interesting experiment... (Score:2)
It could lead to a new definition of "rolling blackout".
Great idea (Score:2)
Predictable route, with range clearly defined, Times of use also known, recharges inbetween runs, topped up by mains at school/depot if needed. Electric/Solar buses seems like a brilliant idea
The Electric School Bus (Score:1)