Electric bus’s success comes at a high cost
Daniel Girard pulled his $1.2-million fully electric city bus into the parking lane under the recharging dock at Square Victoria during Friday morning rush hour, and waited for the two metal arms to descend and give him a quick charge. Nothing happened. Girard has been driving a bus for the Société de transport de Montreal (STM) for 39 years, so he knows a thing or two about parking. But the system is finicky, so he reversed and lined up the bus again as a photographer snapped shots of the rare green breed: one of only three fully electric buses in the city’s fleet of 1,800. They run on the No. 36 line connecting downtown Montreal to the Angrignon métro station in the west, a distance of 11 kilometres. The buses have a range of only 37 kilometres. Girard gets it right, and the arms connect with the bus and send 350kW of juice surging into the bus’s batteries. “Isn’t it the coolest thing?” said a young woman passing by. The scene encapsulates Montreal’s and much of the world’s efforts at incorporating electric buses into public transit fleets — exhilaratingly cool but also frustratingly slow and replete with opportunities for economic and political disaster. Although electric cars have been around for years and proved their worth, the technology to run heavy electric buses is relatively new, extremely expensive, and untested on a mass scale. (The exception is China, which has been adopting them on a very large scale to battle air pollution through national programs). “People worry about being an early adopter,” Chris Stoddart, an executive at Canadian bus maker New Flyer Industries, told Reuters News. “Remember, 20 years ago someone paid $20,000 for a plasma TV and then 10 years later it was $900 at Best Buy. People just don’t want a science project.”
Public transit authorities and cities are treading carefully, testing out models with the idea of slowly going fully electric by 2040 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet Montreal’s first foray, using a quick-charging system already tested in Europe and deemed suitable for harsh winter climes, is already being criticized as a failed multimillion-dollar science experiment. A Reuters survey found that only 300 out of 65,000 city buses in the U.S. were fully electric in 2017. A Toronto Transit Commission report from the same year said only 10 were running in all of Canada. Three of those were in Montreal. Eighteen months after the first fully electric buses took to Montreal’s roads on May 24, 2017, the experiment has been deemed “very successful, even beyond our expectations,” said François Chamberland, the STM’s director of engineering, infrastructure and major projects. “It was a North American first, to use rapid-charging technology.” Of seven buses on the No. 36 route, three are all-electric quick-charging models. The STM is buying another four and putting them in service in 2019 to make the route fully electric. The buses have been recharged a total of 13,000 times, with an average recharging time of three minutes, less than the anticipated five. (On Friday, recharging took seven minutes, which the agency blamed on winter conditions and busier rush-hour driving.) Drivers and passengers like them because they’re quiet, smooth and environmentally friendly. “It drives just like a regular bus, except its more powerful,” said driver Girard, who took a one-day training course to be certified. “They’re very good buses.” The buses have covered 135,000 kilometres with few problems, Chamberland said. The batteries are kept at a constant temperature, so Montreal’s climate hasn’t been a factor, although the buses use more energy in winter to battle through snow and defrost the windows. Diesel is used to run the heating system. The buses save 40 per cent on energy costs, Chamberland said. Hydro-Québec charges are high due to the large amount of power the buses ingest each time they get to the end of their route, but costs are expected to drop. At $800,000 apiece, the initial recharging stations were exorbitantly expensive because they were prototypes, but Chamberland said the price will come down now that more companies are producing them. It took the STM four years to get their electric buses. At their first call for tenders in 2013, nobody bid. Only one company bid on the second attempt, then went bankrupt. So the STM and the city of Montreal partnered with longtime diesel and diesel-hybrid bus provider Nova Bus in St-Eustache, a division of Volvo Group, to develop an electric bus under a $17-million project dubbed City Mobility, funded largely by Quebec. They created an electric version of their diesel bus, inserting batteries and replacing the diesel engine with an electric one. Although the buses are more expensive than the standard $900,000 diesel hybrids used by the STM, savings on fuel and maintenance are expected to even out prices, and costs are expected to drop as battery technology evolves. Some, however, say the STM chose the wrong technology. “The STM jumped the gun a bit by purchasing its first three electric buses, expecting that the Quebec government would keep protecting Nova Bus with clearly preferential treatment,” said Pierre Ducharme, president of the MARCON management consulting firm and founder of the Transportation Evolution Institute. Ducharme said several studies, including one conducted by MARCON for the Edmonton Transit System, have concluded overnight (or slow) charging systems that take three to four hours to charge buses “will be the best solution for the very vast majority of the needs of Quebec transit systems.” Despite that “wrong choice,” the STM’s experiment has proved electric buses can do the job reliably, Ducharme said. Chamberland disagrees that it was a failed experiment. In 2013 there were few alternatives, he said. Slow-charging buses had a range of only 200 kilometres, less than half what a typical Montreal bus runs in a day, and were already being tested in places like Laval. “We chose to do a test of the quick-charge system, and share the results with all our partners, to be able to make a balanced choice in the future,” he said. Montreal has contracted to buy 30 slow-charging buses, built by Canada’s New Flyer Industries, at a cost of $1.2 million each, and hope to put some into service by the end of 2019. Since they won’t complete a full route before requiring a recharge, it makes sense to have a mix of quick-charging and slow-charging buses, Chamberland said. The considerable challenge of incorporating sufficient charging stations and installing the large electric substations that will have to be connected to bus garages to handle the increase in voltage is another reason to act slowly and with prudence, Chamberland said. Toronto recently placed orders for 30 electric buses from three suppliers — China’s BYD; Proterra of the U.S. and Winnipeg’s New Flyer — the first of which are supposed to arrive in December. Montreal has pledged to buy only electric buses starting in 2025. But it has given itself a long exit ramp by contracting to buy 929 hybrid-diesel buses between now and 2024. Since the buses last 16 years, some of them will still be in service in 2040.
We chose to do a test of the quick-charge system, and share the results with all our partners, to be able to make a balanced choice in the future.