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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

#401

Post by rootusrootus »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #81
legitster wrote: post #11

> “ With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be,” Gragnani said. We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.

I don't understand it either. People seem to fanatically pursue and defend purity. Gas or electric. Hybrid is too complicated.

You want to see purity? Look at any thread talking about PHEVs. Owners are like vegans... you know how someone owns a PHEV? They'll tell you.

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

#402

Post by rootusrootus »

heavyset_go wrote: post #351

EVs in a place as dense as NYC seems like a risk. Battery fires can burn for hours and entire blocks might need to be closed off and evacuated due to the risk of battery explosions. It gets even more complicated when EV fires happen in places like garages under buildings, because that makes it hard for fire fighters to dump the 40,000+ gallons of water needed to keep battery fires cool enough that they don't explode.

EV fires are just an artifact of the first generation battery chemistry. Within a few years EVs will largely have switched to LFP and nobody will worry about it any more. I mean, car fires still happen, ICE vehicles are much more prone to fire than EVs for example, but LFP has a much less flammable electrolyte.

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

#403

Post by jcrawfordor »

wolverine876 wrote: post #177
Manuel_D wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They work for buses because buses follow set routes. There aren't overhead lines running through every single street. By comparison, garbage trucks do have to patrol essentially every street. Putting overhead lines through every street may be more expensive than batteries.

What do you think of my last point (in the GP)?

An additional problem, in addition to the major one that trash trucks don't spend any significant period of time on major streets or consolidated routes, is that there is no readily available product for dynamic rewiring of trolley poles. The operator would have to come to a complete stop, exit the vehicle, and align the poles each time they turned onto an electrified street. This would add considerable time to the route and create a traffic disruption and safety problem for the operators. This could probably be addressed with some robotics and machine vision, but that's a whole new technology to develop that would still require years to be ready for use at city scale.

Overhead charging systems with automatic connection for buses have been developed by a couple of vendors (e.g. OppCharge) but are only used while stationary and have not achieved wide deployment. Wireless charging via pavement-embedded coils is actually a much better established technology and is in reasonably wide use for electric buses, but also hasn't been demonstrated in motion and is even more expensive to install than overhead catenaries.

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

#404

Post by spiznnx »

mabbo wrote: post #123
legitster wrote: post #11

> “ With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be,” Gragnani said. We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.

Plugin hybrids have the worst of both options as well as the best. They have to carry with them an entire gas engine, plus large electric motors, plus a huge battery. That's a lot of mass. This makes them inefficient as gas vehicles, and less efficient as EVs. Take a look at the Toyota Prius Prime, considered a great PHEV. It's got almost the same gas milage in combined city/highway driving as my 2012 Honda Civic (ar…

I have a Chevy Volt, with smaller gas tank size (9 gal) and highway fuel economy (40mpg highway real-world). I fill gas every 6 hours of highway driving after the battery dies.

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

#405

Post by rootusrootus »

quantified wrote: post #297
LarryMullins wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Critical infrastructure" is critical because it has some job more important than being a billboard for a cause. If you can make it a billboard without compromising it's primary function, then great, but obviously EV garbage trucks isn't such a case.

EV snowplows isn't a case. I'd be interested if any discussion of electrifying included plowing. One thing that's clear: until battery-powered EVs are able to handle real muscular work (snow removal, hauling, plowing, etc.), diesel engines will be purchased, maintained and fueled by all levels of authority. Exactly how will roads be maintained without graders, pavers, etc.?

It's not about muscle. Electric absolutely mops the floor with diesels. It's simple battery capacity.

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

#406

Post by rootusrootus »

ilamont wrote: post #155

I was thinking about vehicles that can't switch to electric power. The tech's not there yet, and may never be. Cargo ships. Jumbo jets. Military aircraft. Specialized industrial vehicles, such as those used for mines. Unless these use cases are made obsolete (possible, such as military) society will depend on fossil fuels for many decades to come.

> such as those used for mines

Like the ones that generate more power than they use?

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

#407

Post by iancmceachern »

simmonmt wrote: post #267
iancmceachern wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's brilliant. They need to do both: Drive a big truck around the city streets pushing a plow to clear them of snow and ice And Drive a big truck around to collect garbage It's much more efficient to do both at the same time, use the same trucks and skilled labor to run them. It's a classic two birds one stone situation

Nit: They don't do both at the same time. The trucks are either plowing snow or they're picking up trash. That's why the trash piles up until the snow is cleared. After big storms you can end up with pretty epic piles of garbage collecting on sidewalks.

Thanks, true.

Still get the economy of not having to buy twice as many big trucks

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

#408

Post by iancmceachern »

moffkalast wrote: post #254
iancmceachern wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's brilliant. They need to do both: Drive a big truck around the city streets pushing a plow to clear them of snow and ice And Drive a big truck around to collect garbage It's much more efficient to do both at the same time, use the same trucks and skilled labor to run them. It's a classic two birds one stone situation

Actually hold on, we can also put people on these trucks. They can also serve as busses! And wait, attach a trailer and they can also replace semi trucks! Just use one truck to do all city related things, how neat is that? /s You can just go on, making it less and less efficient each step.

You literally just described a pickup truck, the highest selling car/truck in America. They're used as busses, all kinds of repair trucks, they can go in railroad tracks, etc.

Point is, a truck that plows snow and a truck that is a trash truck are mostly the same thing. You take a diesel cab truck chassis, and add either a plow or a trash compactor to it. It's also easy to add both.

It's not as if the trash trucks in cities that don't use them to plow are some highly specialized thing. They're the same trucks as new york has, just no plow. A plow bolts on.

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

#409

Post by jeffbee »

chimeracoder wrote: post #311
apendleton wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roosevelt Island (which is a part of the Manhattan borough) actually has an underground, pneumatic trash collection system: https://untappedcities.com/2020/04/09/inside-roosevelt-islan... . I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though.

> I think it would be hard to retrofit such a thing onto the already-built-up parts of the city though. It would be prohibitively expensive, because there's no master record of which pipes/wires/cables/etc. exist in any given location. It's very expensive to dig in Manhattan[0], because you basically have to dig carefully and see what's actually there, rather than having some knowledge of "the gas pipes are in this s…

Many cities face the same problem and this is how they fix it: they make a plan to rework every pipe and wire in their city in a finite amount of time. They go block by block and tear it all up at once. They bring a shitload of guys and equipment instead of two idiots with jackhammers, so the whole thing is ripped out and replaced in a week instead of in 5 years.

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

#410

Post by asdff »

ff317 wrote: post #143
asdff wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a sweet spot for city size and how many people are using EVs for apartment EV users now. Your city needs to be large enough to draw investment for this infrastructure, but it can't be so large that each and every charger in town has someone already parked there, which is what seemingly happens when I see the few dozen chargers installed around my neighborhood. You also don't want most people to be dr…

A decent L2 charger should be installable at scale for ~$1K per unit IMHO. I'm basing this on the fact that a singular L2 home charger can be installed for about that. Figure the industrial variant costs a little more, but you get savings from the mass scale of deployment. They probably cost more now, but competition will bring it down as we scale. Also, not everyone will even need L2 everywhere all the time, because…

I'd be curious to see where the money ends up coming from long term. Hopefully it doesn't mean shifting money that could have gone towards mass transit into subsidizing private ownership of single occupant vehicles.
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