Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumElectric Buses Will Save The World
Michael Ballaban
Yesterday 10:20am
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3rd Gear: Electric Buses Will Save The World
Everyone thought that it would be electric cars that saved the world, but no. Its going to be electric buses instead. The things are becoming so popular, in fact, that theyre beginning to put a small-but-significant dent in global oil consumption. And its in large part due to China, naturally. From Bloomberg:
The numbers are staggering. China had about 99 percent of the 385,000 electric buses on the roads worldwide in 2017, accounting for 17 percent of the countrys entire fleet. Every five weeks, Chinese cities add 9,500 of the zero-emissions transportersthe equivalent of Londons entire working fleet, according Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
All this is starting to make an observable reduction in fuel demand. And because they consume 30 times more fuel than average sized cars, their impact on energy use so far has become much greater than the than the passenger sedans produced companies from Tesla Inc. to Toyota Motor Corp.
Electric motors make a huge amount of sense for city buses. Not only do city buses constantly start and stop, which is ideal for the way electric motors work, but theyre also silent and dont emit any noxious fumes in confined city quarters like diesels normally do. Electricity is also a hell of a lot cheaper than diesel, making them a smart investment for budget-conscious municipalities. And since buses spend a lot of time sitting in yards overnight when theres less demand, theres plenty of time to charge. Plus, buses dont normally drive thousands of miles a day, so range is less of a concern. But even if range was a concern, a bus is sort of the ideal vehicle to mollify the problem. Most vehicles designed for electric propulsion from the ground up line their floors with batteries. More floor equals more batteries, and buses that are huge and long have tons of space for energy storage.
In short, what was once a silly idea is instead extremely brilliant, and will save us all.
Maybe all of the out-of-work oil workers can become bus drivers.
msongs
(67,478 posts)NNadir
(33,582 posts)Hyperbole has saved the world a few million times in my lifetime, except, well, maybe, all the times it, um, didn't.
In China, because the bulk of its electricity still comes from coal, electric vehicles can, and under the right circumstances, do lead to more deaths than gasoline powered vehicles:
Environ. Sci. Technol., 2012, 46 (4), pp 20182024
One can only believe that electric vehicles are magically wonderful if one is entirely unfamiliar with how the bulk of the world's electricity is generated and further, if one is totally unfamiliar with the second law of thermodynamics.
Just a little critical thinking might raise the question of whether electric buses can save the world by asking if buses are the cause of the decline of the world.