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NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

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Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#331

Post by twobitshifter »

hourago wrote: post #115

The "Elektromote", the world's first trolleybus,[6] in Berlin, Germany, 1882. Maybe New York is lacking the infrastructure, but the technology has existed for a long time. A trolleybus may be expensive to implement in rural areas but in the biggest city in the USA it should be quite cost effective. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybus

I don’t think a street plowing operation would work best on overhead. When you’re plowing the trolley pole would likely dewire.

The answer to me is just living without being able to plow for 12 hours straight charge up in between, and buy some more trucks or battery packs to run shifts. Just ask if diesel plow trucks didn’t exist - what would you do?

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#332

Post by lostlogin »

wolverine876 wrote: post #153
samspenc wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah having street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City, and I'm not surprised that cities that have them are slowly removing them. Don't get me wrong, I think they are a great solution electrically and for efficiency / sustainability, but require an enormous geogra…

> street car power lines can be a nightmare in densely crowded cities with a lot of pedestrian traffic and tightly packed buildings. It would be a nightmare to implement in a place like New York City They've been used in dense cities for generations. How hard can it be? > require an enormous geographic footprint What footprint is needed for additional overhead wires?

I wonder is it is more of less efficient for land use as they don’t need fuelling and the associated land that uses, but do need a pair of lamp posts every 10m.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#333

Post by dragonwriter »

RC_ITR wrote: post #303
ecshafer wrote: post #70

Battery operated garbage trucks don't sound like a great idea, at least for all day use. With the push for EV I am not sure why we aren't seeing a push for the installation of streetcar power lines, these already exist and are used for busses. If we have a garbage truck that has the battery capacity for say 30 minutes, then it could be on the power line for the majority of the time. This would limit battery waste as…

This, This, This. We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight). Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that mode…

> Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved.

So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#334

Post by dendrite9 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #306
happyopossum wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The buses I’m familiar with that use overhead power lines don’t use them exclusively - they have batteries or diesel for when they venture off the powered lines.

I wonder what they do when a bus runs out of power - towtrucks? Charging trucks?

The only ones I have spent a lot of time looking at are in Seattle and at least they used to all be diesel and could hookup to the lines or lower them to run off the lines. For pure electric I assume they must tow them away but I don't know enough about the failure modes.

This is a good chance to share a link to the guy with a Prius modified to run on the bus power in San Francisco: https://thebolditalic.com/hacked-prius-running-on-muni-power...

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#335

Post by RC_ITR »

dragonwriter wrote: post #333
RC_ITR wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, This, This. We think "Well gas cars transport their own energy source, so electric cars must too" and that will probably be one of the things future generations laugh at us for (in the same way older generations thought flapping wing costumes could generate heavier-than-air flight). Hydrocarbons are an extreme outlier in terms of energy density (vs. weight) and the fact that we are trying to replicate that mode…

> Cars travel on roads almost exclusively. In the US, 90%+ passenger miles are on roads that already have some amount of power infrastructure (lightposts) and if we just made it so that our vehicles could plug into electricity at all points of their journey, then EVs are basically solved. So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires or third rails for every lane of every roadway?

>So, your solution for EVs is overheard wires

I think that is a much more solvable problem than charging and batteries yes.

Do I think it will happen in my lifetime? No. But there's a reason that we don't have battery-powered trains, and it's not like in 2022, cars are that much more "off-road" than trains are "off-track"

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#336

Post by sethhochberg »

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.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#337

Post by [deleted] »

makestuff wrote: post #192
fencepost wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garbage trucks are probably one of the best places for it actually, because they stop so frequently. Unfortunately the article is about plow trucks instead which have a very different use case - New York just happens to use the same vehicles for both so they have a smaller fleet that's not as well suited to either task. For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the tr…

Seems like plug in hybrid is the best approach with current tech. Battery in the neighborhoods, and gas powered when you are hauling it back to the landfill.

[deleted]

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#338

Post by toast0 »

xenadu02 wrote: post #37
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying this for years. I just don't understand it. A car that can drive ~40 miles on pure electric that has an ICE for longer trips would satisfy the needs of everyone. For like 90+% of people, it would mean never using gas for their commute while also eliminating range anxiety. I'm especially surprised about the lack of plug-in hybrids for semi trucks. I'd think having a little extra electronic torque woul…

This more than doubles the complexity, increases weight, has much lower battery capacity, and still sticks you with the maintenance work required for the ICE. Plus gas is a very volatile mix that degrades; you must run the ICE regularly to ensure the tank gets cycled.

A Toyota Synergy style hybrid has a more mechanically simple transmission than an ICE plus a traditional transmission. I haven't seen numbers, but I'd be surprised if ICE plus a fuel system weighs more than 300 miles worth of batteries, but you get 600 miles of range with the ICE. You could easily get more, but PHEVs seem to be stuck with a 12 gallon tank.

My PHEV has a two year maintenance cycle, and the ICE portion is changing the oil, mostly. Yes, at some point you'll need to do a timing chain/belt, and there's incidentals; you'll never need to replace emissions equipment on a BEV, and most of the unscheduled maintenance on my ICE equipped cars has been related to emissions: EGR valves, o2 sensors, EVAP canisters, etc.

The engine control system takes care of running the ICE regularly, it's not something you have to worry about. I'd expect it to push you to fill up the tank about twice a year if you're mostly driving electric. I drive my PHEV mostly gas, and not that often anyway, so I just fill up every 500 miles or so.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#339

Post by the-rc »

legitster wrote: post #22
IronWolve wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swappable batteries is how some countries are migrating to ev for motorcycle/scooter taxis, just swap batteries and keep moving passengers. The cost savings seems to be worth it, read that its about 75% savings against fuel costs. The easy solutions will go first, working its way up with better tech and design. I think car/fleet size batteries isn't really feasible with swapping batteries. Small scooter batteries see…

I don't know about this. I don't think battery swapping scales up very well. Firstly, I know someone who works on Daimler's electric trucks and he assures me that their electric powertrains are EXTREMELY dangerous just from the amount of power represented. Union operators have expressed negative interest in connecting/disconnecting the batteries outside of the factory. Secondly, the economics - the battery pack on a…

Citibike wants to connect to the city grid so they don't need to send technicians to every station to swap dead batteries. It's not too much of a stretch to think that, perhaps, the stations could recharge truck batteries, too, at some point. Many fewer residents bike during the winter, let alone during a snow storm, so you could, conceivably, sacrifice a bike space or two or five in December-February (or just when you know snow is coming). Stations are ubiquitous by now: especially in the denser areas, there's one every few blocks.

That's assuming you can deal with safety, theft and other related issues.

Re: NYC officials say they can't find EV garbage trucks powerful enough to plow snow

#340

Post by Symbiote »

akira2501 wrote: post #307
fencepost wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Garbage trucks are probably one of the best places for it actually, because they stop so frequently. Unfortunately the article is about plow trucks instead which have a very different use case - New York just happens to use the same vehicles for both so they have a smaller fleet that's not as well suited to either task. For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the tr…

> so EVs eliminate idling. The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism. Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 t…

In New York City, do the garbage trucks drive a long distance to unload their waste?

In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.

Barge: https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/2019-news/june-2019/thame...

Rail: https://westlondonwaste.gov.uk/where-your-waste-goes

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