Daily Exasperation #6
Proterra's Amateur Hour // Electricity For All
Depending on your perspective, whether you read more news or editorial, and how bullish you are on the future of electric mobility, Proterra’s “Strategic Initiatives to Strengthen Financial Position and Sharpen Technology Focus,” or the most PR’d way to file for bankruptcy a few days ago was some combination of expected, concerning, and forethoughtful. Replacing entire fleets of diesel buses with battery-electric powered ones is hard enough:
First: scale. Conservatively there are tens of thousands1 of buses in operation in the US; a tiny portion of which are already battery-electric; a huge portion of which need to be battery-electric in the next 10-20 years. Proterra is/was the United States’ largest EV bus manufacturer and even still only delivered 1,300 buses between 2004 and 2023. It would seem that sheer capacity has made us insatiably hungry for this equipment.
Second: policy. For better or worse, we’re bound by strict rules that compel agencies to buy American-made buses and corresponding parts. I’m not sure that Proterra would exit the market—and even still it’s not like the processes and PP&E they’ve built would just disappear—but unless we obviously loosen Buy America or incentivize a massive chassis/OEM manufacturing boon in this country through policy, we’re nowhere.
Third: funding. The United States has or can generate enough purchasing power to buy the buses we need. Individual agencies, bleeding uncontrollably, cannot—even the big ones. Related to policy, and inextricably tied together, there’s a sense of putting one’s money where one’s mouth is or might be. If we really want to hit our climate goals—or others’—we just have to pay for it or signal that we will.
Fourth: complicated Catch-22 systems are really head-scratching. Beyond the buses themselves, we have to make sure the following also happens:
We have to make sure that we have operational buses during the transition. In operations and inventory management, we might look to first-in/first-out or last-in/first-out scenarios, but really it’s way more complicated than this. The average “lifespan” for a new diesel bus is about twelve years, and each bus is fully dismembered and restituted about halfway through its life. Transit agencies still run buses from brand new through waaaay past a bus’s expected revenue-life for reasons first, second, and third. It’s not going to be a one-to-one replacement of old vs. new.
EVEN IF it were a one-to-one replacement, there are a handful of logistical challenges that are going to take a long time to solve. The number one of which is range. Where a bus could make a journey of x miles before, now it can make something like x-10? miles or x-20? miles. This alters not only the populations a single bus can serve, but also how bus routes interact with one another, and where and how often the buses have to recharge and redeploy (where do they do that?). How do hiring patterns change? Are any of these buses going to also be autonomous or semi-autonomous?
EVEN IF these logistics have been worked out—and they will be by some our finest minds in partnershp—we still have to figure out the ancillary charging infrastructure and where we’re sourcing the energy from. If we’re burning coal or oil STILL to power the generators or to fill the batteries that will run our buses, we’re making no progress at all.
Okay that’s enough food for thought for today. Happy Wednesday!
I actually don’t have a sense of how many transit buses there are, holistically, in service and maintenance in the US. Tens of thousands seem somehow both too low and too high.
Food for thought, indeed.