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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

#451

Post by cogman10 »

RhysU wrote: post #447
cogman10 wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fire trucks 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…

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.

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

#452

Post by cypress66 »

acchow wrote: post #442

I'm ok with removing 98% of dead dinosaur burning but keeping a few use cases (I wouldn't want to be trapped in a city with the power grid downed from a snowstorm and the city being unable to charge its industrial vehicles)

Megawatt diesel generators are reasonably sized and could work as a backup for critical infrastructure. There's also things like the Tesla Megapack.

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

#453

Post by cogman10 »

cypress66 wrote: post #449
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…

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.

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

#454

Post by RhysU »

cogman10 wrote: post #451
RhysU wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Shouldn't" and "can't" are different things.

I can power a couple of radios with far less than a full generator.

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

#455

Post by GalenErso »

acchow wrote: post #442

I'm ok with removing 98% of dead dinosaur burning but keeping a few use cases (I wouldn't want to be trapped in a city with the power grid downed from a snowstorm and the city being unable to charge its industrial vehicles)

I agree. The problem is the infrastructure to extract, refine, transport, and distribute oil. Does removing 98% of internal combustion engine vehicles on the road mean removing 98% of gas stations, 98% of oil platforms, 98% of drilling wells, 98% of tank trucks? I'm not sure that two or three gas stations for a city of two million people can survive in business, unless they charge premium prices for the 2% of use cases that will still use them. And it's not just gas stations, it's everything that becomes before, up to the drill that extracts oil from the ground. Can the oil business survive when scaled down to, like, 10% of what it is now? It could be an industry that can't survive below a critical threshold.

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

#456

Post by [deleted] »

russdill wrote: post #412
wolverine876 wrote: post #164

It's discussed elsewhere in the thread, but overehead wires seem appealing: * They solve the power availability problem * They reduce the need for batteries, reducing cost and waste from manufacturing and disposal. * They could be used for electrifying other vehicles like buses * Their ROI seems especially high in dense cities, especially NY: One overhead wire serves all the traffic on the road below. Plus, dense cit…

Plows running on overhead lines makes for very bad failure cases. Power outages are common in heavy snow storms. Emergency services and repair crews usually need to reach areas without power urgently. With plows run by overhead lines, these would be the areas not plowed. Even if you kept a percentage of plows gas, you'd be risking the scale of power outages not overcoming your back up capacity

[deleted]

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

#457

Post by rad_gruchalski »

cogman10 wrote: post #443
mike_d wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> fire trucks 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…

> you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.

> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.

So … you do have to worry?

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

#458

Post by acchow »

GalenErso wrote: post #455
acchow wrote: post #442

I'm ok with removing 98% of dead dinosaur burning but keeping a few use cases (I wouldn't want to be trapped in a city with the power grid downed from a snowstorm and the city being unable to charge its industrial vehicles)

I agree. The problem is the infrastructure to extract, refine, transport, and distribute oil. Does removing 98% of internal combustion engine vehicles on the road mean removing 98% of gas stations, 98% of oil platforms, 98% of drilling wells, 98% of tank trucks? I'm not sure that two or three gas stations for a city of two million people can survive in business, unless they charge premium prices for the 2% of use cas…

> Can the oil business survive when scaled down to, like, 10% of what it is now?

How much gasoline was distributed back in 1930? 10% of today? 2%? Seems they did fine?

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

#459

Post by cypress66 »

cogman10 wrote: post #453
cypress66 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not just the chemistry, but the pack and cable cooling.

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

#460

Post by CPLX »

cogman10 wrote: post #445
CPLX wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the drivers. 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.

You don't need more drivers, just more trucks. A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy. There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.

Right because the one thing you associate with New York City is surplus sparking spaces.

And of course the only time you need snow plows is when every available place to put a motor vehicle has just become unsuitable for that purpose.

Seems like a lot of hand waving going on.

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