To get more electric buses, we don’t just need a better battery – we need a better grid.
A ground breaking new technology may soon help U.S. transit agencies overcome perhaps the single largest barrier to electrifying bus fleets: creating on-route electric charging stations capable of affordably and quickly fuelling up buses as soon they run out of power.
As bus manufacturers rush to invent an affordable lithium ion battery that can hold a charge long enough to cover long routes in sprawling U.S. cities without a trip back to the depot, Northern California-based startup, Apparent, is urging agencies to take a more proactive approach: by installing ultra-efficient miniature power stations along bus routes — equipped (of course) with the company’s energy optimization technology.
These mini-hubs, called “distributed energy resources” by the energy industry, certainly aren’t new; any bus stop with a solar panel on its roof to help riders charge their cell phones qualifies as one. But most distributed energy resources have struggled to meet the massive energy needs of the largest electric vehicles on the road — or to do it cheaply enough that agencies can afford to make use of them.
Apparent’s tech helps solves that problem by, essentially, using a complex algorithm to dynamically tell its distributed energy resources exactly when to pull power from the micro-grid, or from storage, when the local power source is low on juice — and it uses artificial intelligence to do so in a sophisticated way that minimizes energy loss so much that even huge buses can charge up relatively cheaply, and with zero carbon output.
And if the company’s product is as effective as it says, installing these networks of micro-power plants could help get more electric buses on America’s streets — something that we’ve so far utterly failed to do.
The U.S. has just 650 e-buses in service nationwide — a pitifully small number that experts say has more to do with the logistical and financial challenges of charging e-buses than most Americans realize. China, by contrast, has 421,000 electric buses in operation right now — in large part because the country started its quest to become the undisputed electric buses capital of the world by optimizing the electric grid to charge its fleet.
Why it’s so hard to charge an e-bus…