The 400 kWh a day city electric buses. ⚡

The new all electric city buses (well excluding the seasonally uses diesel cabin heaters) that CDTA has bought use 488 KWh battery packs to provide roughly 200 miles of range in city traffic for a 10 or 12 hours of operating service. City buses are heavy, they do a lot of stop and go driving, they burn a lot of energy. Diesel buses get 3.5 mpg or burn roughly 55 gallons of diesel for a 200 mile day.

The thing about it is that 400 kWh a day (save 88 kWh to avoid over depletion) or two megawatt hours worth of electricity for a five day service week is an incredible amount of energy when you’re trying to get it from any renewable source. A week operating a single bus is equivalent to burning one ton of coal or the output of 9,000 250 watt solar panels operating for one hour, assuming a real world output of 200 watts on the panels. The energy math of powering a whole urban fleet of buses on solar power or even wind is pretty insane when you think of all the other energy demands of the economy.

I do think electrifying the bus fleet makes environmental sense and provides long term cost savings and flexibility. It is more energy efficient to use electric motors and batteries in city buses as diesel motors pale in efficiency to large power plants and energy efficient electric motors. But the idea that electric buses are going to be powered by renewable anytime soon is pretty silly in my book.