There's a lot of discussion here, but I haven't seen anyone link this slide deck which (albeit a couple of years old) does a great job describing DSNY's efforts to electrify and some of their results with pilot programs: https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSN...
A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options.
NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.
> We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours
This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows.
The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, so probably needs more time" current level 3 chargers can kick out 350kW of power. Yet this report talks about putting in 50 and 150kw chargers.
The mac trucks they are referencing have 350kWh battery packs in them.
The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day.
NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.
What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks?
Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
> ambulances
Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
> tow trucks
Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle.
> power company trucks
Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and they are always working on electrical things.
> that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation.
Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
There are few places where EVs are bad fits. The main ones are airplanes and ships where getting power is hard and the power density needs to be high.
For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
- Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge.
- The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck.
- The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.
> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.
Are you serious?! If my town loses power for two weeks I want fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, and especially power company trucks to work! Civic infrastructure should anticipate tail events.
> How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And you need a giant generator to charge any large vehicle in a reasonable amount of time, not just a generator that can keep the electricity on in the building.
The fire apparatus I’ve worked on have a 120V inlet called a shoreline to keep equipment (MDT, radios, cardiac monitor, portable suction, and Lucas battery chargers, interior lighting, etc) operational at station without draining the battery.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
Okay, work out the size of a generator needed to power one truck vs the dispatch offices. Now tell us how many generators you need.
Ever heard of diesel-electric drive trains? The vehicles have electric motors at the wheels and a much smaller then usual internal combustion engine that is an onboard generator.
You can have both at once. This is what happens with some trains, frequently happens in mining, and happens in some large industries. It is what occurs with hybrid electric vehicles.
The latest round of electric vehicles are getting 80km (50 miles) off the battery. That sort of thing is find for most of the service vehicle types you listed, and meets the requirements for greening a fleet and having alternative power options.
> Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning.
Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is getting enough of it out to keep multiple trucks going.
Fuel in ground tanks can be pumped out by manually pumping enough to power a generator to power the regular pumps... which is pretty trivial to set up.
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
Yeah, so I don’t know much of anything about NYC, but I used to live in Chicago and did some volunteer work that put me in a fire station for a few hours every few months. Fire trucks are busy vehicles. They probably would indeed be excellent EVs, but they get used a lot (even if actual fires are rare). Also, firefighters are used to plugging them in! Modern fire stations maintain good internal air quality by having an exhaust system that connects a hose to the diesel exhaust of the fire truck when it comes into the station and detaches when it leaves.
On the other hand, an extended family member is the fire chief in a small western town. Those fire trucks would be terrible EVs, as they spend days or weeks at a time out in the field dealing with large scale wildfires.
Target response times for fire trucks are measured in minutes. Fire damage increases on an exponential curve, a couple minutes can make a huge difference when lives and homes are on the line.
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
> ambulances [are] Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
Because they are neither low mileage and the medical equipment behind needs power. You never want your battery to go flat in an ambulance and lose the mobility and life support at the same time. Also, they're used the way EVs hate most. Accelerate and decelerate constantly while trying to plow through traffic in city centers and rush hours.
> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage...
I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
> power company trucks [are] Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment
I don't know how yours operate but the power company trucks I see carry a whole workshop behind, and some of them carries enough spare parts to build a sizeable transformer from scratch. If we are talking about cranes, their hydraulics will consume enough energy to affect their mileage considerably.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.
You'd need a couple of 1.2MVA generators to charge these vehicles if you want to do it quickly, with redundancy. And these things are neither small, nor silent or can be deployed anywhere you like. We have a couple of them outside, and boy, they're literally shipping container sized things. This excludes the fuel tanks and other infrastructure they need to be able to generate electricity.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Uh, just pour fuel to the tanks or pump with a manual pump?
> I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
This.
My brother is a captain for a fire department. I visited the hall many times with him and found the station design odd. He told me it is built that way because there have been cases of fire trucks being too close to major fires, and the truck catching fire back at the station.
The station has "blast doors" that automatically close if the bay is on fire to protect the rest of the station. (sounds funny right.. fire halls catching fire??)
Not sure they would want a "flammable metals" fire in their bay.
And how do they deal with the tank of explosive fluids inside fire trucks today?
Precautions around keeping a fuel tank from catching fire work the same for batteries. Better, because lithium batteries have an ignition temperature at 2000F and gasoline's is 500F and diesel at 410F.
This is a shockingly high amount of FUD but little facts.
Lets start at the top shall we?
Diesel doesn't "burn" like gasoline does.
"If you toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel fuel, it'll go out."
You need to atomize it first, or heat it up a lot so it starts to "flash" or it wont "burn".
So, a firetruck with a large diesel tank is fairly safe because it takes a LOT to get it to start burning. At first all the heat is simply absorbed by the diesel slowing warming it up until it reaches its flash point.
Next, your temperatures are beyond MESSED UP.
Ignition temperature for a lithium battery is just 121 C
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
There is no "/s" so it is hard to tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Assuming you are not... EV's make TERRIBLE fire trucks.
How long does it take to fuel a fire truck? How long to recharge one?
You are blissfully unaware of how fire trucks work. Many are also diesel pumps, they arrive at fires and the truck itself is a massive water pump. Tell us, how many hours can a EV drive the water pump for? The diesel version can probably run for several days if needed.
My brother is a firefighter, they are AFRAID of electric vehicle fires because well.. Something about electricity + water?
If i call 911, i expect a fire truck to arrive, not some BS about how they had a power failure and their rechargeable truck isn't working.
PS - Stagnant fuel isn't a real thing. Fire trucks are generally very well maintained, they are expensive, they are essential life saving machines. They don't just sit somewhere forgotten and have their fuel go "bad".
They are driven almost daily because firefighters are expected to know their area and so they drive around to see where hydrants are, look at new subdivisions and sometimes simply to make sure it runs property.
They also have detailed logbooks and are inspected a LOT.
>Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
First.. Fire stations use batteries then generators.
Second, you point out they have generators.. wouldn't that be used to transfer fuel answering your own question?
What this basically does is (in a grid-down situation) is move the fuel usage from the truck's engine to the station's generator, greatly limiting the vehicles overall mobility precisely when they might be most needed.
There are many stations already, every few blocks. And the company running them, Citibike, already wants to connect them to the grid. Now you have a more tractable problem: when there's snow coming, some of the (many) unused bike racks can be dedicated to recharge truck batteries instead. I don't know what the hydraulics would look like and if that's something that can be installed seasonally or perhaps just a few days in advance.
There are many more bike stations than truck depots. You could conceivably swap batteries multiple times during a 12h shift without having to make detours. And if you know there's going to be a lot of plowing, you could place batteries throughout the city ahead of time. Heavy storms rarely show up without warning signs. Elsewhere I suggested stockpiling batteries from other non-essential vehicles, so you don't need excessive redundant capacity that sits idle 95% of the year. That's why repurposing bike stations could help: you're not stuck with a lot of infrastructure that is needed only 5% of the year.
Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?
I'm not even sure depreciation matters with these anyway! Idk how much of a resale market there is. You might just run it into the ground and then scrap it.
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
"The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest to recruit period of the year!"
"The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."
Sure, you can operate at a significantly higher cost base with more people and more equipment traveling more miles to achieve the same outcome with less emissions, but that's a bit weak.
Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues.
Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.
Does the garbage truck fleet cause massive emissions? I feel like this is a strawman argument. Global warming is real and as a society, we need to change our ways, but I'm not sure that things like municipal utility vehicles are going to be the difference between us making it as a society and not. And if we were to have to choose between which vehicles should be electric vs ICE, it's clear that there is a greater societal benefit to the municipal vehicles.
If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.
If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service.
Be an EV fanboi all you want. There are practical tasks that must be accomplished, and if one option achieves those tasks while another doesn't then the one that couldn't needs to either meet the competition or drop out.
While I agree waiting to electrify is the correct choice here (for so many reasons), this statement:
> If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service.
Is just false. The same logic would have prevented cars from displacing horses because cars aren't drop-in replacements for horses either. There are almost always tradeoffs for adopting new technologies, and demanding that EVs be strictly superior to ICE vehicles is absurd.
That's garbage. We have a lot of things that work worse now because of health or environmental concerns. Leaded fuel gives way better performance but makes you dumb. CFCs are better and cheaper than the refrigerants we use now but put a hole in the ozone layer. Aluminium in underarm deodorant may give you cancer but it is pretty good at stopping underarm stink.
Technology choice is full of tradeoffs. Now EVs might not be there yet for this use case, but it doesn't have to be a 100% replacement off the rip.
Service degradation is one thing, but a high profile failure can outright kill the adoption of something that would have been feasible with a bit more time in the techno-oven.
Its doesnt seem realistic to say this as if it must always be true.
As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
I had to re-read this twice to make sure i wasnt misreading something.
The "simple" solution is to redesign the entire system, buy more vehicles, hire more drivers, etc because you are "pro electric" and electric vehicles cant perform the job?
Here's an idea.. Diesel vehicles are built to run 24 hours a day, and this is why they have large fuel tanks and heavy duty engines. Perhaps EV should be built to run 12 hours a day as well?
if the EV cant compete, then don't use it for this use case.
why should they "stop trying to run your trucks 12 hours a day" when they have done this for DECADES?
you make it sound like this 12 hour day is the problem, it is not, it is the EV's failure to keep up that is the issue.
This is a good idea. I wonder what the carbon footprint of the additional trucks plus storage would be?
There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.
This sounds like basic math. The Tesla semi has allegedly 900 kW hour batteries and they needed to go three times longer than a 350 kwhr. So how about you get a Mack truck with a 900 kilowatt hour battery or bigger?
Tesla semi is almost triple that (around 900kWh) and charges to 70% in 30 minutes with their megawatt charger. So it should be able to easily handle that use case.
The 1 hour charge rate is a function of the battery chemistry ultimately. Whether the battery is 10kWh or 1000kWh, you can do the 0->70% in 30 minutes so long as you have enough power.
Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.
The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars).
And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.
A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options.
NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.