LAUSD to purchase 180 electric school buses
dailynews.com
dailynews.com
Another comment asks "I guess we hope these busses will last 35+ years?" so I guess the answer must be "yes" if 35+ year old buses were the norm
Say each car transports 2 people, it's 15 cars, where their combined emission is less than a single bus.
On a personal note, in the 90s, I used to judge the bus noise from a couple of streets away to know that I needed to bolt to the bus stop to catch my bus... Being electrical it will very silent :) Good luck!
Also consider that the cost of diesel is likely to stay high into the future.
http://archive.today/ohDsz | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-17/the-world...
Given this prevailing trend, I do wonder what percentage of projected lifecycle opex is attributable to fuel, and whether any savings will be realized in the end.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
Also: School buses generally run on CNG, not diesel. They usually have special filling stations for that. They can toss all of that (but then they have to make EV charging stations lol).
But yea, the stinky old detroit screaming jimmy diesels have been gone for decades now. They phased those out when I was a kid lol.
This made me curious, because its definitely not true where I live. I don't know about "gone for decades", but one decade ago LAUSD had one-third of their fleet running CNG[1]. Pretty interesting.
[1] https://www.socalgas.com/documents/innovation/natural-gas-ve...
The article you referenced is the average price consumers pay, much of cost is going to come from peak times.
Today, we know how LADWP commercial time-of-use[1] is windowed while fossil fuels remain the dominant energy source, but I have yet to encounter an argument supporting a thesis that these windows will immutably hold (or shift favorably) in the near future, let alone throughout the expected lifecycle of these buses; mean reversion is far more likely, rendering an "off peak hours" operations efficiency strategy moot.
As a selling point to the public, the article claims the investment will:
> ...save the district $2 million on bus maintenance and fuel costs annually.
I'd be interested in sanity checking which sphincter and under what assumptions they pulled that number out of. The going concern in my mind is this +10% CAGR trend in the average cost of electricity for the locality as evident in BLS data previously cited. If that trend continues unchecked, electricity is projected to cost +33% more in 2026 relative to today when the fleet of buses reach full operational capability, and over 3x more by 2035 when the state is postured to be at 100% new ZEV sales.
To be sure, I'm not trying to assert that this isn't a net positive for the district...just level setting the narrative that a decision being sold to the public as an investment which yields net lifecycle savings is looking much more like an outright expense increase to be carried by taxpayers with notional 2nd-order effects conveniently dismissed.
[1] https://www.ladwp.com/ladwp/faces/ladwp/commercial/c-custome...
The economics of distribution are weird. A lot of the infrastructure runs on 100-year old lines that are fully depreciated which have $0 capital costs until they don't. Costs are proportional to capacity rather than to usage. There are massive scale effects -- building a line that carries twice as much current is only slightly more expensive. But the big one is threshold effects. I have 100Amp service to my house. That service is over 60 years old and fully depreciated (aka basically free). OTOH, upgrading it to 200 or 400 amps will cost a lot of money. That same effect is rippling through the entire grid. I installed a 24Amp car charger instead of a 50Amp one to avoid upgrading my service.
And peak usage is always going to be during the day, even if California goes 100% EV and mostly charges at night. Peak air conditioning demand is going to be higher than peak EV charging demand.
Cheap overnight rates keep peak demands below capacity to avoid having to do expensive distribution upgrades. Even if it seems odd because the cheapest generation is during the day.
Southern California gets roughly 5 kWh/sqm/day on average (though much less in the winter).
Electric school buses apparently have batteries of about 100-300 kWh, so a dollar panel on the roof could get a 5% charge on a good day.
That doesn't really make sense, when maintaining, cleaning, and setting up more efficient tracking solar on roofs (you need a huge parking lot for all those school buses afterall) or in solar farms would be easier, cheaper, and more efficient
A lot of sun in Los Angeles to charge between 8:30a-2pm and 4pm-sundown.
Either way there are a ton of non-financial benefits here, this is great to see.
Those districts are in the same atmosphere as the rest of us.
If it's bad to use them to burn diesel in LA, it's bad to use them to burn diesel anywhere.
So while it would be best to stop burning fossil fuels entirely, we benefit if LA paves the way on electric buses. If they have to defer to cost by selling old stock to those who wouldn't be buying electric anyway, it's still a net win. And slightly better if the other pollution they still make doesn't produce the same concentration it does in Los Angeles.
If the entire planet experiences catastrophe and there is a mass extinction and agricultural collapse, I feel like this is a distinction without a difference.
Then again, perhaps you are right, as it appears we are imminently headed toward this future even if every diesel engine on the planet stopped operating today.
Not every environmental policy is about stopping the planet from warming. Sometimes it is about stopping our kids from breathing exhaust and waters from getting filled with microplastic.
They have been in service for a while here in the UK, and the operators are happy with their performance: https://chargedevs.com/newswire/dennis-eagles-new-electric-r...
Some of the smaller authorities are 100% switched to electric: https://news.cityoflondon.gov.uk/clean-air-city-corporation-...
Of course, with all that stopping there's potentially huge regenerative breaking potential so maybe it's not incredibly hard.
Is it worth it compared to getting new ones in 10-15 years (based on sibling comment)? I don’t know.
But maybe electric fleet vehicles will change the calculus n when you refurbish them vs just replace them. Time will tell.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-life-span-of-a-sch...
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-life-span-of-a-sch...
From that, I suspect seats get beat up.
So it's unlikely there's a valid case to be made that the cost of electric busses would be preventing expansion of public transport.
Which means operators only care about annual operating, insurance, maintenance, and finance costs. The total is important[1] not the relative amounts. If electric buses are cheaper on an annual basis and can handle the route, those guys will buy them. (Accountants are going to accountant)
[1] The opposite of people who buy personal cars who focus exclusively on capital + finance costs and ignore insurance, operating and maintenance costs.