Greening the Yellow Takes Assistance
Trish Reed, IC Bus vice president and general manager, joked that one of the only drawbacks may be that electric bus drivers can better hear students talking, whether they want to or not. Tere is significant training involved for drivers, mechanics and other main-
tenance and service staff making the transition to electric buses. But district officials and staff say that employees are usually eager for the shift, because maintaining and driving an electric bus is generally more pleasant and because of the larger career benefits of expertise in
the growing sector of electric vehicles. Manufacturers say their warranties will
provide sufficient coverage to help work out the kinks on new electric buses, and some are providing workshops or training for school district employees. Meanwhile as battery technology continues to improve, electric bus maintenance is also expected to get smoother and easier, not to mention initial purchase costs will decrease.
Along with the headache of stalled buses filled with students, Knight remembers the old days when district workers would have to remove batteries to look for the source of an outage. They also needed to continuously check the water level of lead acid batteries. “Tose packs were 800 pounds apiece,
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there were four packs in there, almost 4,000 pounds worth of batteries,” Knight recalled. “In the old days, you had to blow all the dirt and grime and mud out of the battery packs before you even started to work on them.” Today, exponentially smaller, lighter and more powerful lithium ion or other advanced batteries are in tightly sealed packs that never need to be opened. “It’s quite a difference, no doubt about it,” said Knight. Electric isn’t the only way to green a fleet; many districts have for some years been using cleaner alternative fuels, including propane and CNG. Hydrogen fuel cell buses could also be on the horizon. And the return of gasoline to the Type-C school bus market as well as cleaner diesel are also being touted by OEMs as alternatives. Mark Childers, powertrain and technol- ogy sales manager for Tomas Built Buses, added that people often underestimate the value of clean-diesel buses, which have much lower emissions and better perfor- mance than traditional diesel. He cited Diesel Particulate Filter Temperature Stabi- lization, with which a Cummins engine “as old as 2010 models can be optimized with regenerative parameters that improve engine performance” and reduce maintenance costs and fleet downtime. “For most school districts, clean-diesel is the best and easiest way to grow a clean and green fleet,” Childers added. “Ultra-low sulfur diesel, SCR and EGR technologies have cleaned up diesel considerably, but the
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