South Korea Launches First Electric Bus Fleet 168
An anonymous reader writes "The Seoul Metropolitan Government just rolled out the world's first commercial all-electric bus service. The buses were designed to be as efficient as possible — each bus can run up to about 52 miles on a single charge and they have a maximum speed of about 62 miles per hour. The vehicles' lithium-ion battery packs can be fully charged in less than 30 minutes and they also feature regenerative braking systems that reuse energy from brakes when running downhill."
Seoul (Score:5, Informative)
Its hilly and congested. Many major roads are pretty much gridlocked. Urban speeds are quite slow. Many roads are steep. Motors which don't use energy when stopped are a great idea. Regenerative braking is also worth while.
First? What about Chattanooga TN? (Score:5, Informative)
Chattanooga has had electric bus service for years - http://www.carta-bus.org/routes/elec_shuttle.asp [carta-bus.org]. Granted, these are "shuttles" and not full on bus service, as they are used for short routes in the downtown area.
I feel like they should get credit where due, however.
What about Wellington New Zealand? (Score:5, Informative)
Over here in Wellington New Zealand we have had all electric buses for a really long time, since 1949 in fact.
they aren't 100% always battery powered, but nobody said they had to be. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolleybuses_in_Wellington [wikipedia.org]
we have the dedicated trolly bus fleet, that can switch to running on batteries when there is no power, then back to overhead lines when power is restored,
from what I can see this achieves all the positives of the Korean system and none of the negatives (return times, charge times etc) as they are full time
electric but only require the battery power as a backup.
(ok the lines might be a bit unsightly to some, but my point remains)
so this might be the first electric bus system that requires no on the go charging, but is that necessarily a good thing? they still have to plug in sometime.
Overhead wires (Score:4, Informative)
I have this brilliant idea to solve the battery range problem.
Since buses travel on fixed routes, you could run overhead electric wires to power them, removing the need for expensive and heavy batteries, and increasing speed.
I cannot believe nobody has thought of this before [wikipedia.org], and this is the worlds first electric bus fleet.
The electricity to power them. . . (Score:4, Informative)
Probably a lot of you know this, but for the benefit of those who don't, S. Korea is currently pursuing an aggressive build-out of new nuclear reactors. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration [doe.gov] S. Korea already gets 34% of its power from nuclear, and plans to be generating 50% from nuclear by 2022 (and will likely keep pushing that percentage up to the 60-80% range longer term).
If the electricity to charge the batteries in the buses comes from nuclear, it should be very low-carbon emissions, low air pollution energy. The South Koreans are also building nuclear at something like 1/2 the cost of equivalent nuclear plants constructed in the U.S., so it should be pretty cheap energy too.
S. Korea is even starting to get into the business of exporting nuclear power plants to other countries - they recently inked a deal with the United Arab Emirates to build four 1.4 GW plants in UAE for a total of $20Bn(USD).