8 ms·

There's a lot of discussion here, but I haven't seen anyone link this slide deck which (albeit a couple of years old) does a great job describing DSNY's efforts

There's a lot of discussion here, but I haven't seen anyone link this slide deck which (albeit a couple of years old) does a great job describing DSNY's efforts to electrify and some of their results with pilot programs: https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSNY_N.C.-SFT-Series-Webinar_2021_final1.pdf https://dsny.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSN... A lot of the things being proposed as solutions by posters here are already being tried in the real world. They're not running long-distance routes to the dump, they use a network of transfer stations around the boroughs. They're using DC fast charging. They're exploring other hybrid options. NYC isn't always great at avoiding its own special breed of "NYC exceptionalism", but in this case it sure looks like they're doing everything reasonably. The electric trucks are seemingly working well for garbage collection. They just can't take the whole fleet electric (yet) for double-duty as snow plows.

cogman10 4y ago
> We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, so probably needs more time" current level 3 chargers can kick out 350kW of power. Yet this report talks about putting in 50 and 150kw chargers. The mac trucks they are referencing have 350kWh battery packs in them. The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.
- dizzystar 4y ago
  The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day. NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
  - CPLX 4y ago
    Plus the drivers. Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
    - cogman10 4y ago
      You don't need more drivers, just more trucks. A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy. There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.
      - CPLX 4y ago
        Right because the one thing you associate with New York City is surplus sparking spaces. And of course the only time you need snow plows is when every available place to put a motor vehicle has just become unsuitable for that purpose. Seems like a lot of hand waving going on.
      - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
        But those drivers still have to drive to the charging station and then back with the second truck... through new york traffic... on a snowy day. Good luck with that.
      - kennend3 4y ago
        > A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy. Tell us you have no idea how much a garbage truck costs without telling us. Must be nice to have a few million dollars in "spare" trucks lying around. Garbage trucks can run up to $400,000 EACH. This is how you propose to waste taxpayer money, by replacing perfectly working trucks with EV's where you need to buy "spare" ones as well?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. Probably because they have to use regular dollars to buy one or the other: cost-effectiveness cannot be ignored.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    EVs will have a longer service life, less maintenance, and MUCH lower fuel costs. EVs are cost effective (but not immediately so).
    - fasthands9 4y ago
      Its doesnt seem realistic to say this as if it must always be true. As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service. Be an EV fanboi all you want. There are practical tasks that must be accomplished, and if one option achieves those tasks while another doesn't then the one that couldn't needs to either meet the competition or drop out.
  - andkenneth 4y ago
    That's garbage. We have a lot of things that work worse now because of health or environmental concerns. Leaded fuel gives way better performance but makes you dumb. CFCs are better and cheaper than the refrigerants we use now but put a hole in the ozone layer. Aluminium in underarm deodorant may give you cancer but it is pretty good at stopping underarm stink. Technology choice is full of tradeoffs. Now EVs might not be there yet for this use case, but it doesn't have to be a 100% replacement off the rip.
    - cwillu 4y ago
      Service degradation is one thing, but a high profile failure can outright kill the adoption of something that would have been feasible with a bit more time in the techno-oven.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    While I agree waiting to electrify is the correct choice here (for so many reasons), this statement: > If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service. Is just false. The same logic would have prevented cars from displacing horses because cars aren't drop-in replacements for horses either. There are almost always tradeoffs for adopting new technologies, and demanding that EVs be strictly superior to ICE vehicles is absurd.
  - canadianfella 4y ago
    [dead]
  - JeremyBanks 4y ago
    [dead]
- ilyt 4y ago
  Right but you need more parking and more capital investment, all to do stuff needed for month or two a year. The "wait till the trucks are better" is perfectly fine choice here. They also work when something fucked up your electric infrastructure...
- cypress66 4y ago
  Tesla semi is almost triple that (around 900kWh) and charges to 70% in 30 minutes with their megawatt charger. So it should be able to easily handle that use case.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    The 1 hour charge rate is a function of the battery chemistry ultimately. Whether the battery is 10kWh or 1000kWh, you can do the 0->70% in 30 minutes so long as you have enough power.
    - cypress66 4y ago
      It's not just the chemistry, but the pack and cable cooling.
  - fwungy 4y ago
    Firetruck battery >>> Tesla battery Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.
- b112 4y ago
  The solution is really quiet simple Yes, H2, with instant refuel time. The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars). And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.
- jameshart 4y ago
  It's also a garbage truck that's presumably, when on plowing duty, empty. Can't you find some way to sling a few more batteries into the back to extend the range?
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
  Can't charge your truck if the local hookup is buried under 5 feet of snow.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  This sounds like basic math. The Tesla semi has allegedly 900 kW hour batteries and they needed to go three times longer than a 350 kwhr. So how about you get a Mack truck with a 900 kilowatt hour battery or bigger?
- Closi 4y ago
  > The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. "The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest to recruit period of the year!"
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Not to mention, source real estate to park extra vehicles in the most expensive real estate market in the country.
  - Lutger 4y ago
    "The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."
    - Closi 4y ago
      Sure, you can operate at a significantly higher cost base with more people and more equipment traveling more miles to achieve the same outcome with less emissions, but that's a bit weak. Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues. Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      Does the garbage truck fleet cause massive emissions? I feel like this is a strawman argument. Global warming is real and as a society, we need to change our ways, but I'm not sure that things like municipal utility vehicles are going to be the difference between us making it as a society and not. And if we were to have to choose between which vehicles should be electric vs ICE, it's clear that there is a greater societal benefit to the municipal vehicles. If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.
- danielfoster 4y ago
  This is a good idea. I wonder what the carbon footprint of the additional trucks plus storage would be? There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.
- kennend3 4y ago
  > The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. I had to re-read this twice to make sure i wasnt misreading something. The "simple" solution is to redesign the entire system, buy more vehicles, hire more drivers, etc because you are "pro electric" and electric vehicles cant perform the job? Here's an idea.. Diesel vehicles are built to run 24 hours a day, and this is why they have large fuel tanks and heavy duty engines. Perhaps EV should be built to run 12 hours a day as well? if the EV cant compete, then don't use it for this use case. why should they "stop trying to run your trucks 12 hours a day" when they have done this for DECADES? you make it sound like this 12 hour day is the problem, it is not, it is the EV's failure to keep up that is the issue.

cogman10 4y ago

> We found that they could not plow the snow effectively – they basically conked out after four hours. We need them to go 12 hours This doesn't sound like they are trying to do short routes or fast charging stations. Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. The majority of LI batteries can be recharged in 1 hour with enough juice. Even if you say "well, it's a truck, so probably needs more time" current level 3 chargers can kick out 350kW of power. Yet this report talks about putting in 50 and 150kw chargers. The mac trucks they are referencing have 350kWh battery packs in them. The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight.

dizzystar 4y ago
The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day. NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
- CPLX 4y ago
  Plus the drivers. Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
  - cogman10 4y ago
    You don't need more drivers, just more trucks. A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy. There's no reason to have drivers wait for the trucks to fully charge.
    - CPLX 4y ago
      Right because the one thing you associate with New York City is surplus sparking spaces. And of course the only time you need snow plows is when every available place to put a motor vehicle has just become unsuitable for that purpose. Seems like a lot of hand waving going on.
    - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
      But those drivers still have to drive to the charging station and then back with the second truck... through new york traffic... on a snowy day. Good luck with that.
    - kennend3 4y ago
      > A driver brings a truck to a charge location, grabs a truck that's been charging. Easy peasy. Tell us you have no idea how much a garbage truck costs without telling us. Must be nice to have a few million dollars in "spare" trucks lying around. Garbage trucks can run up to $400,000 EACH. This is how you propose to waste taxpayer money, by replacing perfectly working trucks with EV's where you need to buy "spare" ones as well?
- lamontcg 4y ago
  What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.
sangnoir 4y ago
> Rather, it sounds like they want to run their EV plows like they run their regular plows. Probably because they have to use regular dollars to buy one or the other: cost-effectiveness cannot be ignored.
- cogman10 4y ago
  EVs will have a longer service life, less maintenance, and MUCH lower fuel costs. EVs are cost effective (but not immediately so).
  - fasthands9 4y ago
    Its doesnt seem realistic to say this as if it must always be true. As others have pointed out - to get the same quality of service you'd probably need extra trucks stored somewhere in NYC (also expensive) so that there's no downtime in coverage. Are we really supposed to believe they are currently 50% the lifelong cost of ICE vehicles?
Dalewyn 4y ago
If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service. Be an EV fanboi all you want. There are practical tasks that must be accomplished, and if one option achieves those tasks while another doesn't then the one that couldn't needs to either meet the competition or drop out.
- andkenneth 4y ago
  That's garbage. We have a lot of things that work worse now because of health or environmental concerns. Leaded fuel gives way better performance but makes you dumb. CFCs are better and cheaper than the refrigerants we use now but put a hole in the ozone layer. Aluminium in underarm deodorant may give you cancer but it is pretty good at stopping underarm stink. Technology choice is full of tradeoffs. Now EVs might not be there yet for this use case, but it doesn't have to be a 100% replacement off the rip.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    Service degradation is one thing, but a high profile failure can outright kill the adoption of something that would have been feasible with a bit more time in the techno-oven.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  While I agree waiting to electrify is the correct choice here (for so many reasons), this statement: > If the EV plows aren't drop-in replacements for ICE plows, then they are not fit for service. Is just false. The same logic would have prevented cars from displacing horses because cars aren't drop-in replacements for horses either. There are almost always tradeoffs for adopting new technologies, and demanding that EVs be strictly superior to ICE vehicles is absurd.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- JeremyBanks 4y ago
  [dead]
ilyt 4y ago
Right but you need more parking and more capital investment, all to do stuff needed for month or two a year. The "wait till the trucks are better" is perfectly fine choice here. They also work when something fucked up your electric infrastructure...
cypress66 4y ago
Tesla semi is almost triple that (around 900kWh) and charges to 70% in 30 minutes with their megawatt charger. So it should be able to easily handle that use case.
- cogman10 4y ago
  The 1 hour charge rate is a function of the battery chemistry ultimately. Whether the battery is 10kWh or 1000kWh, you can do the 0->70% in 30 minutes so long as you have enough power.
  - cypress66 4y ago
    It's not just the chemistry, but the pack and cable cooling.
- fwungy 4y ago
  Firetruck battery >>> Tesla battery Even if you could run Level 3 charging to the station it would still take a couple of hours to charge the huge batteries you need for a fire truck. Level 2 charging would take about 12 hours. Adding a Level 3 charging ability is non-trivial and doesn't make economic sense with low volume usage.
b112 4y ago
The solution is really quiet simple Yes, H2, with instant refuel time. The road to environmental bliss is not paved with one stone. We need h2 for cerrain things (and have it, with 3 car companies selling excellent cars). And having h2 doesn't hurt battery powered deployment. We need to encourage research, we need to not get fixated on one solution, and we need to stop trying to force one solution.
jameshart 4y ago
It's also a garbage truck that's presumably, when on plowing duty, empty. Can't you find some way to sling a few more batteries into the back to extend the range?
TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
Can't charge your truck if the local hookup is buried under 5 feet of snow.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
This sounds like basic math. The Tesla semi has allegedly 900 kW hour batteries and they needed to go three times longer than a 350 kwhr. So how about you get a Mack truck with a 900 kilowatt hour battery or bigger?
Closi 4y ago
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. "The solution is simple - purchase extra fleet just to support a snow-ploughing operation that then sits idle for most of the year, and then hire extra people to drive less efficient routes in the hardest to recruit period of the year!"
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Not to mention, source real estate to park extra vehicles in the most expensive real estate market in the country.
- Lutger 4y ago
  "The solution is simple - keep using old gasoline vehicles to save a few dollars, which cause massive emissions even while the country suffers megadroughts, winterstorms, wildfires, coastal homes are being flooded and hurricanes grow more intense every year. We pay more in the future, but at least this years budget looks good. If anybody complains, point the finger to China and India."
  - Closi 4y ago
    Sure, you can operate at a significantly higher cost base with more people and more equipment traveling more miles to achieve the same outcome with less emissions, but that's a bit weak. Best way to get much broader adoption of EV's in transport is to use them where they will work best, rather than burn peoples fingers with projects that introduce huge operational issues. Remember, one of the key rules of transport management is "reduce idle fleet", so telling a transport manager to save emissions by having loads of fleet idle is a bit like telling a CIO to reduce energy use by giving their developers smaller monitors and taking the graphics cards out of their computers.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    Does the garbage truck fleet cause massive emissions? I feel like this is a strawman argument. Global warming is real and as a society, we need to change our ways, but I'm not sure that things like municipal utility vehicles are going to be the difference between us making it as a society and not. And if we were to have to choose between which vehicles should be electric vs ICE, it's clear that there is a greater societal benefit to the municipal vehicles. If Americans were to make a slight change in their meat eating habits, I'd imagine the effect would be orders of magnitude greater than all the garbage trucks in the US, let alone just NYC.
danielfoster 4y ago
This is a good idea. I wonder what the carbon footprint of the additional trucks plus storage would be? There is a popular electric airplane that has exhangeable battery packs. The ability to swap out the batteries would be ideal, though possibly not practical during a blizzard.
kennend3 4y ago
> The solution is really quiet simple, recharge the trucks and buy a few more to account for the fact that you have to recharge an hour for every 4 in operation. Stop trying to run your trucks for 12 hours straight. I had to re-read this twice to make sure i wasnt misreading something. The "simple" solution is to redesign the entire system, buy more vehicles, hire more drivers, etc because you are "pro electric" and electric vehicles cant perform the job? Here's an idea.. Diesel vehicles are built to run 24 hours a day, and this is why they have large fuel tanks and heavy duty engines. Perhaps EV should be built to run 12 hours a day as well? if the EV cant compete, then don't use it for this use case. why should they "stop trying to run your trucks 12 hours a day" when they have done this for DECADES? you make it sound like this 12 hour day is the problem, it is not, it is the EV's failure to keep up that is the issue.