Exactly. The high cost, inflexibility, and maintenance requirements of overhead wires all make them unattractive for new installations.
Battery electric buses, on the other hand, can operate anywhere that diesel buses can, and a fault with one bus or one section of wire will not break the whole route.
Many cities also consider overhead wires to be visually unattractive. Birmingham's new tram network is being built to use overhead wires on suburban tracks, but switch to battery power in the city centre to avoid having to install overhead wires there.
Are a few overhead wires actually more expensive than the massive batteries electric buses require? They are certainly less damaging to the environment.
If building a new network from scratch or replacing diesel, then yes, there is no doubt that battery electrics are cheaper. Also, batteries are charged overnight, allowing cheap off-peak energy to be used.
The argument about batteries being damaging to the environment mostly relates to cobalt mining. However, buses typically use iron-phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries which contain no cobalt.
Even better. An electric bus in Montreal takes 5 minutes to charge for about an hour of route driving. The charger is at the end of the route. While the driver is having a break, the bus is charged.
An article that lambasts the project because it was insanely expensive and sucks. $1.2M buses with a range of 37km. They charge those batteries so often they will need replaced frequenty. A charging station is $800k. For an 11km route. The cost for an overhead wire installation for 11km is roughly that same price, and it would save all the battery costs for the 7 buses that will eventually use it.
>There’s no way they’d install overhead wire in Montreal for that much.
Yes, there is. Montreal runs $60k per km.
>I’m glad the city is forward thinking in some areas.
The city isn't forward thinking, it is exploiting ignorance to steal from people. Wasting tons of money on stupid nonsense like this is possible precisely because people think "oh its green so its ok" when it is the same corporate bribery to corrupt politicians to steal from the people as always. This is tremendously wasteful, and still burns tons of diesel. Tram buses would cost less and stop burning diesel period.
How so? You're talking about literal tons of batteries, and the charging stations for them. And you have to replace those batteries every decade because their useful lifespan is less than 20,000 cycles.
>or replacing diesel
Sure, if you are just replacing a couple of buses it would make sense.
>Also, batteries are charged overnight, allowing cheap off-peak energy to be used
Batteries have to be charged multiple times per day. It isn't feasible for a bus to carry around an entire day of energy in batteries, the extra weight uses more extra energy than is worthwhile. And lots of places don't have cheap off-peak electricity, they have a single rate.
"You're talking about literal tons of batteries, and the charging stations for them. And you have to replace those batteries every decade because their useful lifespan is less than 20,000 cycles."
If the lifespan of the batteries is 20,000 cycles, then they would last 54 years with daily cycling! In reality, the cycle life is probably less than that, but is still sufficient to ensure many years of daily service.
Diesel buses do not usually last much more than 10 years in daily service anyway.
"Batteries have to be charged multiple times per day. It isn't feasible for a bus to carry around an entire day of energy in batteries"
That is incorrect. The range of a battery electric bus is hundreds of miles, more than enough for a full day's duty in most cities.
London, for example, has several hundred battery electric busses, including double-deckers, many of which have been in daily service for several years now. These have been very successful and there are hundreds more on order.
Their strategy is to install chargers in the depots where the busses are parked overnight. There is currently no facility for charging on-route or topping up during the day.
I expect that at some point in the next 1-2 years, London will commit to purchasing only zero-emission busses with the goal of an all-electric fleet by 2030 or so.
>If the lifespan of the batteries is 20,000 cycles
It is less than, as I said.
>then they would last 54 years with daily cycling!
Which isn't the case unless they are buying 10 times the batteries and swapping them all day. They can't run all day on a single charge.
>Diesel buses do not usually last much more than 10 years in daily service anyway.
What? There's tons of Diesel buses that are decades old and in use. And what on earth do diesel buses have to do with anything? We're comparing batteries vs wires.
>The range of a battery electric bus is hundreds of miles
Not any of the ones anyone has. And those buses are burning diesel to heat the bus in the winter, which would not be needed using a tram bus.
>I expect that at some point in the next 1-2 years, London will commit to purchasing only zero-emission busses with the goal of an all-electric fleet by 2030 or so.
What does that have to do with anything? Electric buses are "zero emission" (move the emission somewhere else) regardless of batteries vs power lines.
Again, you are incorrect here. If you don't believe me, please come to London (or any one of dozens of cities in China and Europe) where battery electric buses routinely operate all day, every day, with overnight recharging only.
> "There's tons of Diesel buses that are decades old and in use."
In London, virtually all diesel buses are retired by the time they are 10 years old. They often are then sold on to other operators where they get less intensive use, but in London it is uneconomical to continue operating old buses. Maintenance costs increase with age, and breakdowns are costly and disruptive.
> "Electric buses are "zero emission" (move the emission somewhere else) regardless of batteries vs power lines."
All electricity is not equally polluting. In the UK, and many other grids around the world, the peak demand periods are in the early morning and evening - exactly the times when the most buses are on the road!
At these peak times, more fossil-fuel power plants are typically active, so the carbon intensity of each kWh is higher. But overnight charging means that electric buses shift their energy use to when demand is lowest. Overnight electricity is not only much cheaper, but largely produced by renewables and nuclear, so the carbon intensity is low.
(OK, this may not be applicable in Montreal where most electricity is produced from hydro. But it does apply to the grids of most major European, North American, and Asian cities.)
London once had the world’s largest network of overhead-wire trolly-buses. But they were abandoned in the 1960s in favour of diesel buses, because they offered more flexibility and lower operating costs.
Given what we now know about the health and environmental impacts of diesel, it can be argued that this was a mistake. However, it would be very difficult and costly to reinstate such a network today - we are talking about thousands of miles of wires, and surely huge opposition from businesses and residents who would not want wires cluttering their streets.
Battery electrics offer the best of both worlds. The smooth, quiet passenger experience and zero emissions of a trollybus, with the flexibility and low fixed costs of diesel.
Don’t waste your time on this guy. He’s just a troll, and therefore feels special attachment to the trolley. You can easily back him into a corner where he’s require to call the current US President “a left-wing New York liberal”, then continue infuriating you with arbitrarily requests to prove everything from first principle.
Calling people you disagree with trolls and then going back through their comments to post irrelevant ad-homs in other threads doesn't seem like it is within the spirit of the commenting guidelines as I read them. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong.
I am replying to both posts here since HN rate limits replies.
>Again, you are incorrect here. If you don't believe me, please come to London (or any one of dozens of cities in China and Europe) where battery electric buses routinely operate all day, every day, with overnight recharging only.
I do not need to physically go to London to know you are incorrect. I can speak to an operations manager in London and ask him directly. There are absolutely no electric buses in London that operate a full day. Zero.
>In London, virtually all diesel buses are retired by the time they are 10 years old.
Yes, lots of cities do that. They are not retired because they need to be, they are retired because federal funding is available to retire them. Those exact buses are sold at a huge loss to private companies who operate them for another 30 years. In countries where there are no programs to throw the public's money in the garbage buying new equipment that isn't needed, diesel buses operate for 30-40 years.
>Overnight electricity is not only much cheaper, but largely produced by renewables and nuclear, so the carbon intensity is low.
It is not much cheaper. If it were actually a net benefit to shift electricity usage to night time using batteries, then that would still be done. You don't need the batteries in the buses to do that. It is actually much better for them not to be in the buses. There's lots of trollybus systems all over the world in active use. None of them install batteries to shift electricity usage to the night time. The reason is obvious, it isn't cost effective. You can't pretend a negative that you are stuck with is a positive when if it were actually a positive it would apply to the system you are fighting against too.
>However, it would be very difficult and costly to reinstate such a network today
There is nothing difficult about running wires. We already have people who do this job. It would be expensive. But it is less expensive than batteries, which is why cities where there are no corporate interests bribing politicians to buy expensive battery systems are buying trollybuses. You can't compare wires to nothing and proclaim them expensive, you have to compare it to the alternative, which is much more expensive.
>Battery electrics offer the best of both worlds
No, they do not.
>The smooth, quiet passenger experience and zero emissions of a trollybus
They are not zero emissions, they burn diesel all winter to heat the bus.
>with the flexibility and low fixed costs of diesel.
What low fixed costs of diesel? The only definition in which diesel is low cost is upfront purchase price, and by that measure battery powered buses are high cost, 160% of the cost even. In any long term cost comparison, trollybuses are cheaper than battery which are cheaper than diesel.
Various media reports claim London routes 507 and 521 run fully electric, with the city saying in the announcement that trials showed the busses running 16 hour shifts without recharges (https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayor-unvei..., some newer media reports repeat that that's how they operate). So apparently there are some buses running like that, even if only on relatively short routes.
Buying a handful of electric buses as the start of a migration away from diesel is a lot cheaper to get started, and a lot less commitment than installing all the infrastructure before you can run a single tram.
Copper is not cheap anymore, thats why copper cables get stolen at night in a number of countries. Plus there may be new safety considerations compared to when trolleys were retired.
There are probably hundreds of volumes of new city planning regulations that were added in most countries in the West in the past 50 years. Assuming this does not impact installing new equipment and facilities is naive.
Wires are expensive and not environmentally friendly to make ether. Remember we are talking about kms/miles of wires, not the few meters/feet in a house.
Relative to what they used to cost, sure. Relative to batteries they are quite cheap. It takes a lot of batteries to move a bus, and they have to be replaced every few years because they are charged and discharged multiple times per day.
Batteries are a commodity. Production can get outsourced to whoever can deliver the best value. Up front costs are smaller and you never have to worry about infrastructure upgrades because there's no special infrastructure. You can just replace your diesel buses with electric as they come due. You automatically get upgrades buses every few years because buses don't last 40+ like trains do and you aren't ever forced to upgrade your overhead electric infrastructure
The wires are planned and owned by an (intentionally) inefficient government bureaucracy and installed and maintained by expensive local labor and you can't just change routes on a whim, you may be forced to do a full system upgrade in the future, etc, etc.
In somewhere like China where the government can just tell people where the trams are going to be and that's that the wires are probably the better solution in more cases. In the west where have to work with the public to get their approval for infrastructure it's generally a better all around solution to buy electric buses to replace your diesel ones even if it is less environmentally efficient on paper.
Edit: Some of you are appear to be taking my factual statement about the efficiency of government poorly. The inefficiency of government is a feature, not a bug. Government that can do good things (like install wires for trams) quickly and fairly unilaterally can also do bad things (like waste money installing wires for trams where nobody wants them) fairly unilaterally. You can't have it both ways and sometimes you just have to work around the system and if that means buying the buses with batteries then that's fine.
Maybe phrase it better in the future, in a way that does not buy into the widespread, tiresome cynicism of “goveerment waste/incompetence/beaurocacry/corruption”.
I.e. “Stringing wires in a dense urban environment requires co-ordination with many stakeholders and balancing of interests, such as the preservation of the visual appeal of historical landmarks, local shopkeepers’ interest in preserving parking spaces possibly occupied by the support structures, the disruption by construction crews...”
