481–490 of 579 posts
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> 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.
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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.
Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?
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Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.
Why does critical infrastructure need to be among the first to “go green?”
We can't afford to make things "go green" serially, we need to move on all fronts at once.
First, the climate change models are imperfect. In the worst case we're already out of time, in the best case we have a lot. A lot of people stopped believing in Climage Change when Al Gore's chosen predictions did not come true on the timeline he suggested in "An Inconvenient Truth". Being overly alarmist can cost credibility, which leads to my next point: there is only so far people are willing to go voluntarily to fight climate change. At some point they will say the expenses are not justified, especially when aggressive predictions do not come true. "Prediction is hard, especially about the future" as Robert Oppenheimer said.
How much is the average American, let alone the average global citizen willing to spend, willing to lower their quality of life to protect the climate? This isn't a theoretical matter of eating a few less hamburgers, it's about spending weeks in a cold house in Winter instead of a toasty, comfy one. "I'll just put on a sweater", doesn't work for everyone. In fact there is a huge racial equity issue involved with telling people to turn down their thermostat: darker skinned people are genetically tuned for warmer climates. It's a lot more painful for a Somalian immigrant in Minneapolis to be forced to run their thermostat at 58 degrees Fahrenheit in the midst of a sub-zero Winter than, say, someone of Swedish heritage.
Once people reach their voluntary limits of sacrifice for the climate change cause, things get a lot more difficult. Do you simply force them to comply? How? What kind of force do you use? What sort of dystopian methods must be employed to force people to make sacrifices they don't want to make?
My point is this: a measured, careful, response to Climate Change will likely yield better long term results than a panic driven response based on the most aggressive climate models. Just as in a fire drill people are encouraged to act in an orderly manner to avoid the suboptimal outcome of mayhem, a measured, thoughtful response, that balances costs will lead to a better outcome. We only have one chance to do this, let's do it right.
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> 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.
This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning.
Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is getting enough of it out to keep multiple trucks going.
I'm surprised, I thought the electric engines would supply more torque. Thereby making it easier to plow snow.
The author of the article doesn't know what they're talking about. The issue in question is concerned with energy density, not break power of the motors. Electric motors are capable of delivering far greater torque than a similarly sized (weight/volume) diesel engine. Electric batteries on the other hand have far less energy desnity compared to an equivalent volume/mass of diesel fuel.
They aren’t looking hard at all. If you just had a super capacitor bank to capture regen, all the energy from the stop and go could be retained and they could probably run the truck on the batteries that they are currently saying last only 4 hours.
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…
Can't you find some way to sling a few more batteries into the back to extend the range?
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Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta. Its much smaller population and area-wise, focusing on just their metro areas. Denser for sure, but not larger.
> Staten Island isn't as big as Raleigh or Atlanta Staten Island (~475k) has the same population as Raleigh (~470k) and is a hair smaller than Atlanta (~500k). This isn’t a density argument. It’s an illustration of New York City’s scale. The forgotten borough is larger than most of our cities.
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what if i told you, you still need to charge ur fire truck
Alternators won't do it?
When sitting in a truck bay, there’s a shore line providing mains power to keep everything charged — we’re generally talking a 10-16A draw.
That’s easily met with a small generator, as opposed to the insane power draw a full EV battery would require.