Article: Arctic Whisperer, World’s First Quick-Charge Hybrid Bus

[ozbob]

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Arctic Whisperer, World's First Quick-Charge Hybrid Bus


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Arctic Whisperer, World's First Quick-Charge Hybrid Bus

    By Jason Kambitsis Email Author
    April 25, 2011  |

Electric buses are awesome. They don't belch exhaust, they're super-quiet and they're a relatively easy way to get around town. But unless you're stringing overhead lines all over the place, the range sucks.

A Spanish firm has found a clever solution to that problem and is testing it in Umeå, Sweden.

Opbrid tweaked a Volvo 7700 bus to create the world's first fast-charging serial hybrid bus, "Arctic Whisper." It can be recharged in minutes at the end of each route, letting the fleet operator run it 18 hours a day.

The bus features a 100 kilowatt-hour Altairnano Valence lithium-ion battery that keeps the e-Traction hub motors turning for up to three hours. When the batteries run down, a diesel generator keeps juice flowing. Opbrid's clever range-extender works like this:

At the end of each route the driver pulls under a long metal bar called, appropriately, a Bůsbaar. The driver flips a lever, raising a pantograph that contacts the bar and charges the bus in 5 to 10 minutes, providing enough juice to to 10 or 15 kilometers. At the end of the day, the bus is plugged in at the bus barn. If anything goes sideways, the bus still has the diesel generator to provide power.

It took about six weeks to build the bus, which is called Arctic Whisperer because it's said to be so quiet passengers can hear each other even when whispering. The conversion was relatively straightforward. It required installing some batteries to operate the pantograph, rewriting the software and beefing up the charging system to handle the quick charge.

Umeå was a natural to test the technology because it is a university town with a lot of students who ride the bus. Diesel fuel and alt fuels like ethanol are expensive in Sweden, but the city gets a lot of electricity from hydro and wind. The city hopes to have several Arctic Whisperers on the streets by 2014, when it will be the Cultural Capital of Europe.

[#Metro]

Not long now until we see the electric car go mainstream.

[ozbob]

Electric only cars are only a minor part solution.  It has been roughly calculated that to replace the 'petrol addiction' with electric cars we would need to increase electricity production 8 to 10 times for a start.  There is also the cost of production and so forth.  Electric vehicles will certainly have a role as local delivery and even taxi vehicles, but will be more limited as personal transport vehicles compared to the 'success' of the petrol car.  As electric vehicles come on line, there is a problem for Treasury in that fuel excise begins to go out the window.  This means a couple of things, electricty costs will go up and/or congestion tolling or distance tolling to replace the fuel excise. What appears to be a favourable cost comparison rapidly disappears.

Electric buses and electric rail vehicles are far more efficient than electric cars.  Electric cars are still as relatively inefficient as petrol cars.

Hybrids are only a part solution, they are useful in certain applications but not the overall answer by any means (disclaimer I have had a hybrid for four years).

The key is establishing renewable electricity generation and then moving forward with electric buses and rail.  What is left over can be used for personal transport machines at a cost.

[shiftyphil]

Electric only cars are only a minor part solution.  It has been roughly calculated that to replace the 'petrol addiction' with electric cars we would need to increase electricity production 8 to 10 times for a start. 

That seems too high, at least for Qld passenger vehicles.

There's about 2.5 million passenger vehicles in Qld, and they're driven somewhere around 15,000 km a year (we'll say 80km a day which is double that).
Replace them all with a Renault Fluence ZE (22kWh battery, 160km range), and they'll need 11kWh a day each.
If they're all recharged in the 8 hour overnight 'Super Economy' rate slot, they need 3.44GW of capacity.

At the moment, we have over 12GW of dispatchable power, plus 574MW of intermittent. Demand for most of the day looks to be around 6.3GW (excluding the 6PM spike). Off peak, it drops to around 4.4GW.

If everyone wants a 30 minute fast charge in the middle of the day, peak demand would be much higher - but because overnight charging is the cheapest way it would be expected to be preferred whenever possible. A <5 minute battery swap would also be preferable to a fast charge in a lot of cases (and the swapped out battery then charged in off peak).

The capacity, at least for passenger cars, is mostly already there. Certainly doesn't need to be octupled.

[ozbob]

The estimate of 8 times was for England.  I think there will be the same issues here, the freight task alone will drain more than what we produce.  What is left for cars?  In any case I cannot see Treasury missing out.  Still have the same problems with safety and relative inefficiency.

[#Metro]

Electric cars will be part of the solution, but only part. We are never going to get rid of individual transport, it is not going to happen. In places with world class public transport people still drive cars, but many people also walk, bike and take PT. However much power comes from coal fired power stations- so a carbon price will be needed to take care of the environmental side of that.

I'm starting to think road user charges need to come about, along with decongestion charging and removal of backdoor subsidies for car (fringe benefits etc). Do that and more people will catch PT and it might not have to be so dependent on subsidies as well.

[shiftyphil]

Given Britain's problems with TV pickup, I would have expected them to have a lot of idle generating capacity most of the time.

Obviously switching to electric won't do anything for congestion (except in the driveways of petrol stations), but it can certainly help with air-quality and oil dependence.

[ozbob]

A quick search on the web will find a wide range of viewpoints on how electricity grids will cope. 

There is a study underway at Melbourne Uni --> http://energy.unimelb.edu.au/index.php?page=alias-8

Impact of the mass-adoption of electric cars on the Australian electricity grid. 

There is much to work out before electric cars become mainstream ...