TLeaf wrote:Our local transit agency (King County - Metro Transit) is going to be trying out a few of the fast-charge Proterras with the first one set to arrive before the end of this year. Benefits of the quick-charge buses as I see them include:
a) Less weight - Heavy buses tear up the pavement not only on public streets, but also at the bus maintenance facilities. There's also implications for the maintenance shop needing to have the appropriate hoists for dealing with the heavier buses & batteries. Oh, and now that I think of it, safety might also be affected as weight relates to stopping distances, impact damage, etc.
b) Cheaper infrastructure - I'm guessing that it's easier to put in a couple dozen fast charge stations out and about (probably fed by different substations, if you want to talk about resiliency) than it is to put in a few hundred overnight charging stations at a maintenance base (a typical base around here has 200-300 buses). Come to think of it, this is probably a pretty big factor.
On the downside, there's the possibility of shorter battery life expectancy and the problem of a downed/damaged quick-charge station really messing up a bus route. This is where I really like the battery/electric trolleys which run on overhead wire most of the time but can go off-wire for some miles.
Admittedly, here in the northwest we don't have time-of-day based electrical rates, so the math might work out different in other areas...
There's a lot of factors that will go into the decision, and as with AE, the best AFV for a particular job tends to be situation-specific rather than a general option, at least until the tech is more mature.