EV CHARGING: New York agencies go all in with incentives to get public transit fleets electrified

Take a drive through Midtown Manhattan and you might cross paths with towering, futuristic structures that look very much like next-century streetlights. But those modernistic, clunky pillars are actually high-speed, on-street charging systems called pantographs that can charge electric buses in just three to six minutes.

The charging systems are part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) initial 2019 electric fleet rollout under NYC Transit’s Fast Forward Plan to electrify the City's public transit system. And soon, these charging systems could crop up across the Empire State as part of a statewide climate initiative to electrify thousands of public transit and school buses.

The new program, launched by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and the New York Power Authority (NYPA), will help the five large upstate and suburban public transit authorities transition to all-electric transit buses by 2035. To support the transition, the agencies are exploring transit-operated facilities and parking lots that could be transformed into large-scale charging hubs, on-street charging, utility upgrades, and backup power solutions.

The effort will be funded by USD 16.4m in Volkswagen settlement funds via the New York Truck Voucher Incentive Program (NYTVIP) program, while another USD 2.5m will go to school bus operators statewide to help cover up to 100 percent of incremental costs for electric school buses operating near disadvantaged communities. The program reduces the cost to purchase new electric or alternative-fueled buses through point of sale rebates offered through a qualified vendor.

“What's notable is that these buses are operated in very high population areas, so it's pretty significant, not just from a greenhouse gas emissions point of view, but also all the other human health issues like particulate matter emissions,” John Markowitz, Director of EV Technology and Engineering at NYPA, told NPM. “It's common to have 200 buses in a single bus depot. They're all starting up at the same time in the morning for rush hour, and there are people who live near these bus depots or near the bus routes, so it’s a huge environmental issue. Electrifying could make a huge difference.”

The transportation sector makes up nearly 40 percent of New York State’s greenhouse gas emissions, with diesel-powered, heavy-duty vehicles like trucks and buses comprising nearly half of these emissions.

The state's USD 1bn investment in electrifying its transportation sector has already made significant inroads in slashing these emissions. Under a range of initiatives, including EV Make Ready, EVolve NY, and Charge NY, the state is rapidly multiplying the number of charging stations to have at least 10,000 charging ports across New York by the end of the year. In addition, more than 33,000 Drive Clean Rebates have helped state residents purchase EVs, contributing to more than 73,000 sold statewide since 2010.

But despite these successes, New York still has a long way to go to meet the challenges of electrifying thousands of buses across the state.

“Transit buses are very concentrated in certain locations, so it makes the problem of getting the infrastructure upgraded to charge all the buses complicated," Markowitz said. "But it’s actually less complicated than it would be for the school buses. Some of these transit agencies have just one or two depots, with 200 buses at each depot. The electrical upgrades are a complicated process, but at least it’s all in one place. But if you look at school buses, they might have several yards with 20 buses in each yard, so it becomes a much more scattered problem to address.”

There are approximately 8,000 transit buses currently operating across the state, 5,700 of which are part of the NYC Transit system. The remaining 1,300 buses fall under the state's suburban and upstate fleets. Electrical upgrades on these buses can get complicated, given that major federal funding goes towards their purchase. That federal funding, says Markowitz, comes with stipulations.

“There’s a strict schedule on how you retire the buses; those are the strings that come with that federal money," he said. "The buses have to last 12 years, so you're basically rotating out the whole fleet out over 12 to 15 years. A transit agency is gradually rotating out its diesel buses and replacing them with electric in a very scheduled manner, so that's why you have these goals that the Governor’s office has, which is fully electrified fleets by 2035. It sort of works with their normal process of retiring out buses.”

Utilities will also need to make some major infrastructure decisions, like whether to upgrade transformers on a more incremental scale to accommodate small fleets of new electric buses coming online, or go all in and future-proof bus depots by installing huge transformers that can last through the 2035 target year.

“That’s also a policy issue,” Markowitz said. “It’s not like the utility is the one that makes that call, because they're going to be worried about what happens if all of this doesn't happen and you don't have 200 buses in that bus yard that are electric. What if you only have 50, and everybody runs out of money and we don't do this? So then you have this huge transformer and nobody to bill for all that. I think there are some state policies that need to address that whole issue.”

To address backup power, the state's transit agencies are considering on-street charging using pantograph systems, which can offer benefits well beyond their use during bus depot power outages.

“It's very high speed charging, and it basically occurs while the driver is taking their break at the end of their routes,” Markowitz said. “The times of the year when electric buses are a challenge are when it's really cold, and most of the energy that the bus is using isn't actually for driving the bus--it's for heating the bus. So you may struggle to keep those electric buses running their full shift. But if you have these on-street chargers, then every time the driver gets to the end of the route it's doing a rapid charge. It’s a win-win because you're constantly getting the bus up to a higher state of charge, running the route again, and this just cycles all day, so the battery never gets down near empty.”

Creating large-scale charging hubs is also under consideration, which could service electric buses, as well as electrified garbage trucks, delivery trucks, and even light-duty vehicles.

"I think longer term if you can make the logistic works, like in a parking lot where the drivers all tend to take breaks and it tends to be near the end of a bunch of routes, you could in theory have one of these big charging hubs," Markowitz said. "The tricky part is finding a place where all the logistics work, and then it becomes an engineering issue of getting the grid power to that location."