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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

#531

Post by Gordonjcp »

catiopatio wrote: post #471
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…

Fire trucks would be terrible EVs: - Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge. - The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck. - The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a hug…

We have a couple. They're pretty good.

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

#532

Post by Gordonjcp »

Why are they using bin lorries for snow ploughs, instead of using tipper trucks that can have a gritter mounted on the back?

Something like this:

https://www.glasgow.gov.uk/media/image/8/h/gritter1.jpg

That's one of the smaller ones, which Glasgow City Council ordered up with a hydrogen-powered engine. Most are still diesel but there are some diesel/propane dual-fuel ones too.

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

#533

Post by johnwalkr »

tee_0 wrote: post #487
mojomark wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s brake, not break. As in the amount of HP available at the brakes after all transmission/diff/etc losses are taken into account which doesn’t even really apply to electric vehicles. 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…

Brake horsepower is the power at the output of the engine. It's called that because it is measured with a brake dynamometer. Wheel horsepower or wheel brake horsepower (same thing) is measured after mechanical losses (at the wheels).

But "they aren't looking, why don't they just.." really rubs me the wrong way. Surely these people are experts in their own field and know what's available. After all, they are ordering trucks from a vendor, not designing trucks to their own unique requirements. Plus these Mack trucks indeed already have regenerative braking.

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

#534

Post by 988747 »

spott wrote: post #499
XorNot wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 gett…

Fuel in ground tanks can be pumped out by manually pumping enough to power a generator to power the regular pumps... which is pretty trivial to set up.

Or you can just keep the generator fueled (they tend to come with built-in fuel tanks), and have a spare 50-gallon barrel of fuel stashed somewhere.

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

#535

Post by cjrp »

mywittyname wrote: post #383
treis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they need both an ICE and battery powered engine it's a more complex & expensive solution than picking one or the other. Not only expensive in dollars but car weight, storage room, maintenance, and so on. It's okay as an intermediate step but all electric is much better long term.

There are cases where hybrids remove complexity because they can be designed to operate either without transmissions, or with substantially more simple transmissions. Hybrids are cheaper than EVs since a good chunk of expensive batteries can be off-set by an ICE. Hybrids are probably the end-game for any forms of transportation that require operation for a long period of time. A dump truck, for example, could have it…

> There are cases where hybrids remove complexity because they can be designed to operate either without transmissions, or with substantially more simple transmissions.

This is how the LEVC taxis work in London; a 30kWh battery, charged by a 1.5L 3cyl petrol engine. Although in this case the kerb weight is about 200-300kg more than the previous (diesel) black cabs.

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

#536

Post by bayindirh »

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…

> ambulances [are] Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.

Because they are neither low mileage and the medical equipment behind needs power. You never want your battery to go flat in an ambulance and lose the mobility and life support at the same time. Also, they're used the way EVs hate most. Accelerate and decelerate constantly while trying to plow through traffic in city centers and rush hours.

> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage...

I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?

> power company trucks [are] Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment

I don't know how yours operate but the power company trucks I see carry a whole workshop behind, and some of them carries enough spare parts to build a sizeable transformer from scratch. If we are talking about cranes, their hydraulics will consume enough energy to affect their mileage considerably.

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

You'd need a couple of 1.2MVA generators to charge these vehicles if you want to do it quickly, with redundancy. And these things are neither small, nor silent or can be deployed anywhere you like. We have a couple of them outside, and boy, they're literally shipping container sized things. This excludes the fuel tanks and other infrastructure they need to be able to generate electricity.

> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?

Uh, just pour fuel to the tanks or pump with a manual pump?

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

#537

Post by sandos »

andbberger wrote: post #310
tapoxi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Massachusetts we just removed our streetcar power lines (MBTA 71 and 73 trolleybus) because the wires needed to be removed during construction. This might be a logistical issue for NYC. https://www.mbta.com/news/2022-01-27/beginning-march-2022-mb...

one of the worst decisions the MBTA has ever made. battery buses are inferior to trolleybuses in pretty much every scenario, but especially winter. the battery buses they're replacing the trolleybuses with have diesel heaters to keep the batteries warm.

Wow, why not ethanol heaters or something similar? Volvo did that several years ago in one of their first EV buses.

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

#538

Post by danielfoster »

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…

This is a good idea. I wonder what the carbon footprint of the additional trucks plus storage would be?

There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.

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

#539

Post by postalrat »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #341
akira2501 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As an industrial EE dealing with hydraulics of much larger scales than those on a garbage truck, those other functions do not require significant power to operate when compared to actually accelerating the vehicle and cargo up to speed (and then slamming on the brakes/regen again for the next stop). The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential…

How about compacting the trash in the truck?

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

#540

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chitowneats wrote: post #483
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Have anything to say about Tokyo, Paris, or Seoul? Your silence in that part of the thread is conspicuous. I'm forced to consider the likelihood that you are a typically provincial New Yorker with no real perspective on global megacities.

I’ve never heard New Yorkers call New York the greatest city on earth in earnest. It’s a great city in a way no other city in America truly is. In a league with Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, Paris or London. Density and cosmopolitanism bring a unique combination of economic and cultural gifts that set these cities apart, and have for similar cities across history. New Yorkers also tend to be well travelled to those cities, because that’s how cosmopolitan culture works.
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