| Electric Bus Fleets to Recharge at Bus Stops |
| 23 October 2009 |
|
Shanghai Pioneering a New Technology
Municipal transport companies have been trying to reduce the carbon footprint of their bus fleets using a range of options over the years, from biofuels and hydrogen to batteries and hybrid-electric diesel. Now a Chinese company and its U.S. partner say that ultracapacitors could offer the greenest and most economical way of powering city buses. Ultracapacitors are batteries able to charge and discharge very rapidly. On the other hand, they can store only about 5% of the energy held by conventional lithium-ion batteries. For this reason they are not suitable for electric cars, but could be mounted buses, which have to stop regularly. The quite simple solution is therefore to turn some bus stops along the route into charge stations. Instead of continually taking energy by overhead power lines, the new buses recharge in a couple of minutes at every designated charging station, that serves also as a passengers’ stop. Buses also recover energy from braking and as a whole consume one tenth of the energy of a conventional diesel bus. The US company Sinautec Automobile Technologies and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, spent the past three years testing this new kind of buses in the suburbs of Shanghai. The special vehicles are made by Foton America Bus Co (Germantown, Tennessee, USA) while ultracapacitors are manufactured by Shanghai Aowei. Further research is currently ongoing in cooperation with MIT in order to increase the energy storage ability of the ultracapacitors. At the moment buses can go as far as 5 miles per charge (3 miles if air conditioning in on). Researchers mean to double or even quadruple the current mileage and thus increase the distance between stations. Should this become possible, many more cities will for sure be willing to adopt the new technology in order to sensibly reduce their traffic CO2 emissions." |
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