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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

#471

Post by catiopatio »

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…

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 huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.

> 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.

There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.

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

Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.

> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.

Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.

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

#472

Post by twblalock »

legitster wrote: post #11

> “ With current technology, full electrification isn’t possible now for some parts of our fleet, but we are monitoring closely and really hope it will be,” Gragnani said. We are really letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. At this moment in time, Plug-in hybrids are the superior technology for nearly every application. I don't understand why they get so overlooked by consumers and manufacturers alike.

For a commuter car, a plug-in hybrid is great if its all-electric range fits within your commute distance. Otherwise it's just a more expensive hybrid.

For a snow plow that needs to run for hours at a time, I suspect that the additional cost of the batteries of a plug-in hybrid isn't worth it over a normal hybrid, or just a diesel-powered engine.

We don't need to electrify everything, and even if that will happen in the long run, we don't need to rush to do it now. What percentage of total NYC emissions come from these trucks? Probably a pretty small portion.

It's not politically correct for NYC to buy more diesel trucks, but it is probably what they should do.

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

#473

Post by fwungy »

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.

Firetruck battery >>> Tesla battery

Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.

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

#476

Post by b112 »

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…

The solution is really quiet simple

Yes, H2, with instant refuel time.

The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars).

And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.

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

#477

Post by the_mar »

RhysU wrote: post #454
cogman10 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

what if i told you, you still need to charge ur fire truck

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

#478

Post by SllX »

heavyset_go wrote: post #361
SllX wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power lines that trolleybuses use don’t cover an entire city. They’re only installed on the routes the buses are scheduled to run on, and only for the parts of the streets buses will use. They’re like train tracks in that way, but hanging in the air instead of embedded in the ground. Garbage truck fleets are expected to cover every street and every block in their service area which adds up to more of a city than…

In 1875, Philadelphia had electric street car lines going through every numbered street in the city, and through every cross street in central Philly[1]. [1] https://i.redd.it/zidqa2mbmav31.png

That's neat. Thanks for sharing!

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

#479

Post by josephcsible »

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.

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?

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

#480

Post by mojomark »

mrmckizzle wrote: post #56

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.
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