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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

#421

Post by ilyt »

cogman10 wrote: post #382
sethhochberg wrote: post #336

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-dis…

> 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, s…

Right but you need more parking and more capital investment, all to do stuff needed for month or two a year.

The "wait till the trucks are better" is perfectly fine choice here.

They also work when something fucked up your electric infrastructure...

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

#422

Post by ilyt »

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…

Wouldn't hybrid make a lot of sense here? Engine working at max efficiency for most time or turned off completely.

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

#424

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

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.

As to your last point, designers of range extenders are obviously aware of this and handle it automatically. It'll chose to kick on occasionally even if the batter is nearly full.

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

#425

Post by lamontcg »

dizzystar wrote: post #399
cogman10 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, s…

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.

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.

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

#427

Post by ClumsyPilot »

wolverine876 wrote: post #210
jacquesm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugly, expensive, maintenance headache. What's not to like... They are however more environmentally friendly than diesel engines and it works well if you only have a few well trafficked routes. But you can't do this for a whole city, and garbage trucks and snowplows need to go into every street, not just the main boulevards.

Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything (not a criticism - I have no idea myself). However, you don't need availability on every street, just enough to charge the vehicles sufficiently for the smaller streets.

> Agreed on all points, though I notice everyone says they are so expensive and hard to maintain, but nobody cites anything

Because it's a complete fabrication -> every ton of conducting wire could replace 100 tons of battery in busses and trucks. It is also over 10 times cheaper per ton, so in material costs it is less than 1/1000th of the cost.

The only issue is that the city needs to pay for the wire, but it does not know how to charge a large array of private companies that might want to use the wires, there is lack of standardisation and metering.

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

#428

Post by mike_d »

lamontcg wrote: post #425
dizzystar wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 solu…

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.

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

#429

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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 or third rails for every lane of every roadway?

Do you think adding hundreds of KG of batteries to two billion cars is more reasonable?

We produce enough conductors to wire every street in America in a couple years. At the current rate of battery production, replacing all cars in the world will take over 100 years.

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

#430

Post by the-rc »

lamontcg wrote: post #425
dizzystar wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 solu…

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.
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