Amsterdam’s city officials announced their super ambitious plan to replace all public diesel buses with electric ones by 2025.
In addition, the city officials commit to having all electricity that powers the system coming from renewable sources.
Dutch cities are iconic symbols of sustainability. The extensive network of bike lanes, coupled with high tech traffic systems that give priority to everyone pedaling a two-wheeler, allow easy, fast, green and very convenient way to reach virtually any location within any city.
The city officials of the capital city Amsterdam, however, are far from feeling relaxed about the situation. Their ambitions go way beyond many other places in the world can even begin to imagine, and the best part of it all is that in Amsterdam they can really make it all happen.
Of course, there is no better place to start from when you want to green up a city than its public transport an traffic system. Adding to the bikes and electric trams, here come the electric buses. The latest plan is to replace all diesel buses with all-electric ones that will be fully powered with renewable energy by 2025. The phasing out begins in two years time, when the first 40 electric buses will hit the road.
The officials are not planning any experiments or pilot projects. They are simply going all in, wasting no time or money on testing a system that will surely work.
Electrifying the public bus network, however, is not the only initiative on the agenda for improving Amsterdam’s sustainability. Last month, the Mayor’s office outlined key improvements that have to be introduced as part of the city council’s Sustainability Agenda.
These include an increase of at least 92,000 households that use locally-generated sustainable electricity by 2020. In addition, there are plans for energy saving and connecting existing houses to district heating systems. Other initiatives address integration of greener technologies, improvement of air quality, and defining greater number of low emission zones throughout the city, among others.
Thumbs up, Amsterdam. Go ahead, and set the example- others will follow shortly, there is no doubt about it.
Image (c) Bart
All-electric buses ? This is interesting but here is a tough issue, how do you recharge them ?
The way I see it there is only two ways you’re gonna do that: at night or at bus stops.
Given the size and mass of such vehicles, it would certainly take many hours to recharge it and the night may not be enough, and thanks to Peukert law, fast charging is not an option because it would reduce the capacity to half of it or even less depending on how fast you charge. And the night is not really conducive to renewable energy except maybe wind but this one has highly variable output.
So it seems the best way is to recharge at bus stops, but buses stop here for seconds and I’m not sure if it is possible to recharge enough to cover the trip to the next stop. Of course, there is regenerative braking but they recover at most 50% of the energy of braking so you still have to compensate.
Also, one need to take into account the mass of the batteries themselves because you don’t want to reduce the number of persons inside by adding more heavy batteries.
The point being that this project is more difficult than it sounds and that 10 years are not a luxury to develop it, we’ll have to wait to see if this finally works.
Still, I’d recommend a hybrid bus with either a fuel cell or a conventional engine, there are many buses like this around the world and they are working perfectly, also they can be “recharged” quasi-instantly and requires no expensive induction-charging station around the city.
The U.S. could be every bit as forward looking if it were not controlled by the hydrocarbon industries. In fact, we live with a whole lot of pollution because oil companies and their Republicans politicians have been able to dictate the energy agendas.