"Many of the 843,000 buses registered in the US (including most of the 63,000 transit buses and 480,000 school buses) travel less than 100 miles per day."

"Most types of batteries today come with a trade-off between power and energy storage."

Those are two key points that says this has potential.

The bus situation is already being handled by natural gas. I doubt any battery/ electric system is going to be as economical. I could see using a Bloom energy fuel cell to power an electric bus. Still using natural gas though. I keep waiting for the big trucks to get onto natural gas.

Perhaps the recent breakthrough in graphene supercapacitors will make electrical storage more reasonable for all transportation applications.

ai vin: What a concept! I wonder why no one ever thought of that before?

The other aspect of buses energy use is that it is intermittent. A bus travels for 1 to 2 hours at relatively low average speed, around 20 mph, which means total energy needed is relatively low. Then it parks at its destination for 10-20 minutes, changes the driver and then starts another trip on its route. Wouldn't that 10-20 minute wait give the bus to substantially recharge its battery, i.e. the battery would drain from its 100 mile range to 60 miles in a 2 hour circuit, then it would recharge to 80 miles, next circuit would draw it down to 40 miles, you recharge it longer over lunch to get it back to its full range, repeat as needed...
Just because a bus has just a 100 mile range it doesn't necessarily follow that the bus can only do 2 or 3 routes in a regular day, even if you mandate a 40 mile minimum reserve.

Anne:

A pure electric, very heavy, standard city bus does not currently make technology nor economic sense because:

- vehicle is too heavy. A very light weight model would help reduce the e-energy consumption but would currently cost even more.

- current batteries are too heavy and do not have enough e-storage for such heavy vehicles + cooling-heating-lighting in traffic jams.

- very limited endurance-range, specially under heavy cold winter traffic conditions. Similar (but smaller) Quebec City e-buses do not operate during very cold months (December to end of March) for that reason. (N.B- I have used those made in Italy small city e-buses this summer - grossly under powered - no A/C, too slow and noisy e-motors)

- currently too expensive (2x to 2.5x) the cost of equivalent diesel buses and even more than hybrid (more usable) city buses. Adding a $20K genset on a $800K large bus is transparent because you can reduce batteries cost by same amount and more.

A compromise is the use of overhead quick charge spots along the e-bus routes to pick-up a boost on the way and extend e-range with less batteries. That system is used in Switzerland for their city Trams and e-Buses.

With time, as batteries/super-caps technology improves (2x to 4x) and their cost comes down, lighter pure electric (limited range) city buses will make sense. That may be by 2020 or so? The same applies to highway e-cars. The technology has to evolve more.... before it becomes more competitive and usable.

Good questions:

Total life time cost of e-buses versus NG buses or diesel buses or Hybrids? GHG + initial cost + on-going maintenance cost etc would have to be factored in. A price of $50/tonne for CO2 could be used + $/Km for other pollutants including noise.

Depending of factors used, one could make a case for any of the above energy sources.

In the longer term (2020+) when longer lasting, improved performance, lower cost, super caps and batteries are mass produced, e-buses and e-cabs etc may become the only technology to meet public acceptance. With well located overhead bus bars, those vehicles could run 24/7 for years.

Treehugger:

Compare: $3.40/gallon gasoline or $.80-1.10 for electric energy?? And gasoline will get more expensive as demand drops - because oilco's expect escalating revenue.

DaveD

You are right often result don't follow prediction because prediction were silly in the first place. You are absolutely right on this, and precisely in the case of electric car my point is that predicting that electric car will become main stream 10 years from now is just silly to start with. Even doubling the energy density of today batteries won't make the case for EV to become mainstream, 1st of all the price is still way to high so increasing the energy density by a factor 2 is not enough by a fair amount, where we need a breakthough is how to divide the price of the battery by a factor 2 or 3. Li-ion battery industry has already a significant history so if the drop in price was so easy it would happen faster.
I don't think that the Moore law that so far applied for the micro-electronic industry is in any way applicable for the energy industry. What happened this 40 past years in the micro-electronic industry is a very isolated case in the industry. Look at your lap top computer the CPU and Memory have followed the Moore law, but the batteries progresses can't keep up with that because they are not following that law. That doesn't mean there is no progress, there is indeed progress but not as fast as people think. Sure every day you can read discovery of new cathode or anode or electrolyte material that have the potential to improve the batteries performances, but the natural selection process is just so hard that most of these discoveries don't make it through. Breakthrough will happen for sure but they are not predictable, and to make a breakthrough a product requires a decade or two. Asides all the performances that Nissan or Tesla claim are for 25C temperature, at 40C or 0C these batteries will loose half of their power, not mentioning that if you have to Air condition the car you'll need more energy just when the batteries are already struggling.

Tree:

"sides all the performances that Nissan or Tesla claim are for 25C temperature, at 40C or 0C these batteries will loose half of their power..."

Ranting is no substitute for doing the homework. You apparently only want to rant.

Improved lower cost batteries will be mass produced by 2015 or shortly thereafter. Those 300+ Wh/Kg units will come out of large factories at around $200/Kwh.

By 2020 or shortly thereafter performance could double and price could be down another 50%. That would make affordable highway capable BEVs a possibility.

Post 2020 should see a progressive decline in pure ICE vehicle production in favor of PHEVs and BEVs. The transition will not take place overnight but may be faster than many are ready to admit, specially if Oil/Ethanol Lobbies and the Flower Parties they finance can be overwhelmed or rendered harmless. If not, transition may take many more years in USA. However, it may not be the case in other countries such as China, Japan, Korea, India, etc where does lobbies are not as powerful.

Tree..Secretary Chu predicted yesterday that in about 5 years, BEVs will cost about the same as equivalent ICE, that batteries will have much higher performances (2x to 3x) and their price will be down more than 50%. He should know better than us?