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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

#511

Post by wolverine876 »

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

Very good point! Maybe not unsolvable, but a real issue.

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

#512

Post by beambot »

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.

It's entirely feasible to do battery swapping if high uptime is a requirement -- e.g. see Monarch Tractors.

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

#513

Post by lazide »

the-rc wrote: post #430
lamontcg wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 da…

Uh, those bike racks have nowhere near the infrastructure required to charge huge truck battery packs.

You can’t be serious?

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

#514

Post by wolverine876 »

Manuel_D wrote: post #359
wolverine876 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not the situation that 20% of streets generate 80% of garbage that needs to be picked up Not that number exactly, but many streets or blocks have no trash - office buidings, the highrise apts you mention, parks, highways, etc. And it's time, not distance that matters - you can charge the trucks where they spend the most time. My point is that you don't need 100% coverage or likely near that. A drawback is that…

Sure, much of Midtown doesn't have street trash pickup because skyscrapers have alternative garbage disposal infrastructure. The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution. There's no stretches of road where garbage trucks are spending significantly more time than others. The fact that it's time, not distance, that matt…

> The fact that 20% of streets don't produce trash doesn't alter the fact that the remaining 80% of streets have largely uniform trash distribution.

What makes you say it's uniform? Skyscapers, businesses, and others not using public trash services aren't clustered on one street; you find them all over town. The number of stops per street can vary considerably.

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

#515

Post by fencepost »

to11mtm wrote: post #329
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…

Around here, a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant [1]. Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3]. [1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.) [2]…

a notable number of Garbage trucks are LPG or some variant

Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.

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

#516

Post by jacquesm »

Robotbeat wrote: post #395
jacquesm wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been reading a bit more about it in the meantime: so, the trolley network in Arnhem is slowly diminishing in size, but it's still there and it will likely be there for quite a while to come. They are looking at ways to use a combination BEV / trolley system to allow the buses to recharge when they're on the line so they can depart from the route for longer stretches. The maneuvering in case of trouble situation…

I think that battery vehicles with substantial batteries (and so could be run on lines without ANY overhead infrastructure in a pinch) but that usually charge via overhead lines on a portion of the route is the ideal option. No charging time, no massive new infrastructure (the catenary only needed on a small fraction of total served lines) but also full flexibility. Actually better than fossil fuel variants which nee…

Yes, it certainly looks like a very clever solution. I know they tried the same thing with a flywheel based bus but that ultimately did not work out. Let's see how this works in practice.

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

#518

Post by _huayra_ »

I really wonder which of the following will win:

* a brand-new battery chemistry based on cheap and readily-available elements that avoids the issues related to existing lithium-based cells for vehicle applications (e.g. cost, cold, low power density, towing, large vehicles, etc)

* a way to synthesize fuel via CO2 capture from the air, perhaps in a fluctuating demand way to soak up solar from solar-rich regions (to make it net neutral-ish for CO2 capture) or if we finally get it together and build a bunch of nuclear reactors, which become net negative for CO2 emissions (from building the plant) in a matter of weeks

I would love to not have to deal with tedious car maintenance. I wish my car was as reliable as my phone, which never needs any sort of ongoing maintenance other than charging!

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

#519

Post by lelanthran »

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.

> 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.

Okay, work out the size of a generator needed to power one truck vs the dispatch offices. Now tell us how many generators you need.

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

#520

Post by fencepost »

solotronics wrote: post #517

How hard would it be to make an EV garbage truck that turns some of the garbage into electricity?

Entirely impractical. The Back To The Future car-mounted fusion plant isn't going to be a thing, sorry.

You might be able to capture methane produced at a dump and use it to drive generators, but that's effectively waiting for large scale decomposition to happen.

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