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posted by janrinok on Friday December 09 2016, @09:54AM   Printer-friendly
from the wheels-on-the-bus-go-round-and-round dept.

All 43 public buses in the Dutch cities of Eindhoven and Helmond will be electrically powered, starting the 11th of December. Together they form the largest zero-emission bus fleet in public transport in Europe.

It's the first public transport concession in Europe to deploy that many fully electric buses. London, for example, has 51 electric buses, but these are standard buses. The extra-long articulated buses in Dutch province Brabant can carry more passengers.

Transdev, first mover in zero emission public transport, commences operating the fleet on December 11th. One of the biggest problems the company had to solve was the limited operational radius of the buses. Transdev tackles this problem through a combination of ultra-fast charging technology and an innovative rotation system.

Buses that run out during the day, can be charged within half an hour. The bus terminus in Eindhoven has been converted from a single diesel garage into a charging garage, containing 43 charging points. The buses are equipped with a type of pantograph - known for trams and trolleybuses - which can make contact with the charging point. This construction was never used at this scale in The Netherlands.

Aren't buses always electric? [Eds Comment: Nope, probably a few tens of thousands of these around the UK. London Bus Image ]


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  • (Score: 2) by ledow on Friday December 09 2016, @12:34PM

    by ledow (5567) on Friday December 09 2016, @12:34PM (#439125) Homepage

    I don't mind the green-credentials, but it gets me that someone calls these zero-emission transport.

    The individual vehicles - yes, zero emission.

    But to claim there are no emissions CAUSED by their usage is wrong.

    It's like my car being called a "zero-fracking car". Sure, the car does no fracking at all. But who knows where the oil came from to make the fuel for it...

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by requerdanos on Friday December 09 2016, @01:34PM

    by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Friday December 09 2016, @01:34PM (#439143) Journal

    it gets me that someone calls these zero-emission transport.

    Fair enough. However, the important detail they're spotting is as follows:

    Diesel buses: Require hydrocarbon emissions as a fundamental component of their being. Not zero-emission.

    Petrol/Gas buses: Require hydrocarbon emissions as a fundamental component of their being. Not zero-emission.

    Propane/Natural Gas buses: Require hydrocarbon emissions as a fundamental component of their being. Not zero-emission.

    Wood-burning buses: Require hydrocarbon emissions as a fundamental component of their being. Not zero-emission.

    Electric buses: Do not require hydrocarbon emissions as any component of their being. Zero-emission.

    Yes, with the electric buses, emissions can optionally (or not) happen elsewhere as one way to provide charging energy, but that isn't the buses' fault--they would be perfectly happy if everything else was zero-emissions too.

    Whereas with the burning-hydrocarbons buses, emissions must happen, or they aren't really buses; they are more like small, limited utility non-mobile shelters (not all that great for transportation).

    But to claim there are no emissions CAUSED by their usage is wrong.

    Respectfully, this is nonsense. There are no emissions caused by operating a device which emits nothing. Axiom 1 [friesian.com]. If you choose to charge them using some dirty power source--easy to do since there are lots of dirty power sources--then that choice causes emissions to happen, but saying "the bus made me do it" is evasion on your part. Again, using zero-emissions doesn't emit anything, even if your other choices might.

    Ideally, you would choose to charge them using some clean power source. Their being emission-free makes this entire equation able to be emission-free. If the buses weren't emission-free, it wouldn't matter if you were powering the refineries with unicorn wishes; the system still couldn't ever be emission free.

    But, because the buses are zero-emissions, this makes it possible to combine them with clean energy and build a zero-emissions system from end-to-end.

    Then you'd be able to tackle the systems of building, repairing, and maintaining the buses and make *them* clean in terms of emissions, and then perhaps tackle the systems of building, maintaining, etc. the roads, and on and on, making more and more systems emission-free as you go and making the world a cleaner place.

    With a bus that emits hydrocarbon pollutants you can't do all this because even if you did all you could, you would still be stuck with a support system for a bus that belches pollution as a function of its operation. But if your bus emits zero pollution, then...

    It's like my car being called a "zero-fracking car"

    Respectfully, it isn't very much like that at all, unless most cars where you live can ONLY be powered by special fuels only obtainable by fracking and no other means.

    Basically, like this:

    Cars that require fuel from fracking: Requires fracking as a fundamental component of their being. Not zero-fracking.
    Your magic car that can run on many fuels: Does not require fracking as a fundamental component of its being. Zero-fracking.

    Though, for what it's worth, I have never seen a car that was not a zero-fracking model.

    I have, on the other hand, send lots of emission-free vehicles. They make it possible to even think about making major systems into non-polluting ones.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday December 09 2016, @06:01PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday December 09 2016, @06:01PM (#439275)

    In the context of recent pollution reports in many major metro areas, zero local emissions of diesel exhaust is pretty good news.
    Coupled with the Dutch having a pretty good number of windmills (or the German with their solar panels, or the Norwegians Hydro, or the French nukes), it's definitely an interesting full-scale experiment.