EPA Objects To USPS Plan To Buy a New Gas-Powered Delivery Fleet (engadget.com) 184
According to The Washington Post, the EPA and White House Council on Environmental Quality have objected to the US Postal Service's proposal to mostly buy gas-powered next-gen delivery trucks in a project worth up to $11.3 billion. "The current strategy is a 'lost opportunity' to more drastically reduce the carbon footprint of one of the world's largest government fleets," reports Engadget, citing EPA associate policy administrator Vicki Arroyo. From the report: Only 10 percent of the USPS' new trucks would be electric under the existing proposal, and the overall effort would only improve the fleet's fuel economy by 0.4MPG. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy previously claimed the Postal Service couldn't afford more electric mail vehicles, and has argued his agency needs to focus on basic infrastructure improvements over technology. The USPS is required by law to be self-sufficient, and can't simply request government funds.
There may be an uphill battle to make any changes. DeJoy has staunchly refused to alter the purchasing plan, and the USPS rejected California officials' January 28th request for a public hearing on the plans. The service also largely ignored EPA advice when it created the analysis guiding its plan. The environmental regulator accused the USPS of using "biased" estimates that preferred gas-based trucks. The mail institution reportedly assumed battery and gas prices would remain static even decades later, and that the existing charging infrastructure wouldn't grow. It further overestimated the emissions from plug-in vehicles, according to the EPA.
The Postal Service might be forced to change regardless. The EPA has the option of referring its disagreements to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which can mediate disputes like this. The letters gave the USPS a last chance to voluntarily rethink its proposal before the Council stepped in, sources for The Post claimed. Environmental groups are also likely to sue if the gas-centric plan moves ahead, and the law firm Earthjustice told The Post the USPS might lose when its proposal often lacks supporting evidence. You may well see a transition toward mail-carrying EVs, even if the transition is particularly messy.
There may be an uphill battle to make any changes. DeJoy has staunchly refused to alter the purchasing plan, and the USPS rejected California officials' January 28th request for a public hearing on the plans. The service also largely ignored EPA advice when it created the analysis guiding its plan. The environmental regulator accused the USPS of using "biased" estimates that preferred gas-based trucks. The mail institution reportedly assumed battery and gas prices would remain static even decades later, and that the existing charging infrastructure wouldn't grow. It further overestimated the emissions from plug-in vehicles, according to the EPA.
The Postal Service might be forced to change regardless. The EPA has the option of referring its disagreements to the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which can mediate disputes like this. The letters gave the USPS a last chance to voluntarily rethink its proposal before the Council stepped in, sources for The Post claimed. Environmental groups are also likely to sue if the gas-centric plan moves ahead, and the law firm Earthjustice told The Post the USPS might lose when its proposal often lacks supporting evidence. You may well see a transition toward mail-carrying EVs, even if the transition is particularly messy.
We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:4, Insightful)
What the hell happened? Why do we let him continue to sabotage the post office?
Re:We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:4, Informative)
Posting anonymously to preserve moderation: https://slate.com/news-and-pol... [slate.com]
Biden's hands are tied, he can't fire DeJoy. This goes back to attempts by congress to regulate the spoils system, which is how the federal government was run for most of our history. Basically, every new president would fire the entire federal government and hire "his people." Congress was attempting to protect the postmaster position from such politics. That law still stands, so Biden's only option would be trying to impeach DeJoy, which might backfire.
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the spoils system, which is how the federal government was run for most of our history.
As the Pendleton Act was signed into law in 1883 you could argue that it was just under half of our history. The man signing the bill into law... Chester A. Arthur, a huge beneficiary pf the spoils system himself.
Re:We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:4, Interesting)
Biden's hands are tied, he can't fire DeJoy.
President Biden does not need to fire DeJoy, even if he could. Either DeJoy conspired and attempted to disrupt a national election or he is incompetent; it is either/or, and it can not be any other way. If you were the President and you knew this, would you seek to impeach? DeJoy admitting incompetence by claiming to Congress he was not trying to disrupt a national election makes a pretty tight case for impeachment. But you think that "it might backfire," is the reason the articles have not been delivered? He's under federal investigation. They're going to find something, either evidence supporting the employee campaign reimbursements, or about actively attempting to derail a national election, or some deeper conspiracy, or malfeasance in office, all of the above, or something else. The FBI probably already has delivered the evidence to the AG. They're not going to impeach when they can prosecute instead, or... use the certainty of a successful prosecution as leverage against Republicans to get something else done, because no one really gives a shit about DeJoy. He's just the Postmaster General. The world is falling apart, and though this thing is related, it's really minuscule in relation. DeJoy may be entirely guilty of everything he's been accused of, and more, get away with it because he just isn't worth prosecuting or removing from office. He's a nobody. Yes, there was massive conspiracy to defraud American voters and keep Trump in Office, I think by now most Americans realize this, but it didn't work the second time around, and Trump lost, and President Biden probably wants to move on and is desperately trying to get something done and this is just more bullshit. I'll bet you he's personally used that word to describe this.
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Re:We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:5, Informative)
What happened to the new Board members?
As noted by another user in Why Biden Can’t Fire Postmaster General Louis DeJoy [slate.com] (and other places) there are 9 members on the Postal Board (only 5 can be from the same political party) and Trump put 5 in place (4 Republicans and 1 Democrat). There are currently 2 Democrats and 2 empty positions that Biden is trying to fill. Biden can only terminate current Postal Governors "for cause". All of Trump's appointees apparently back DeJoy -- and all the current board members just re-elected DeJoy as Chairman, see: Postal Board Elects DeJoy Ally as New Chairman [govexec.com]
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There are currently 2 Democrats and 2 empty positions that Biden is trying to fill.
Meant, "currently 2 other Democrats ..."
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Re:We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:5, Informative)
He was one of the most corrupt people in my state ...
May still be...
-- DeJoy maintains financial ties to former company as USPS awards it new $120 million contract [washingtonpost.com]
-- Postal Service Has Paid DeJoy’s Former Company $286 Million Since 2013 [nytimes.com]
[WP article]: But DeJoy’s family businesses continue to lease four North Carolina office buildings to XPO, according to his financial disclosures and state property records. The leases could generate up to $23.7 million in rent payments for the DeJoy businesses over the next decade, ...
[NYT article]: The United States Postal Service has paid about $286 million over the past seven years to XPO Logistics, the former employer of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. He still holds at least a $30 million stake in the company, which has ramped up its business with the Postal Service since he took the helm at the agency.
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Well, see this: "New USPS board chairman supports DeJoy, ‘self-sustaining’ operating model.":
https://federalnewsnetwork.com... [federalnewsnetwork.com]
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Self-sustaining is Federal law. The board has to support it because that's the Post Office's mandate from Congress.
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And this pisses off a lot of people who want to dismantle government. The feel that anything self sustaining is a slap in the face of their "government is always inefficient and private industry is always optimized" propaganda. This is why USPS has been in the crosshairs for years, and DeJoy was the guy intended to follow the script and make things inefficient.
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Eh? I don't understand how being held to a tight budget has anything to do with sabotaging the post office?
I mean EPA is trying to strong arm him to spend ~ twice as much but he's legally forced to stay inside a budget.
Even without fast chargers they would still need to upgrade the electrical to handle the fleet and how many years of skipping standard ICE maintenance will it take to pay for that?
This action isn't a party trying to ruin USPS, but the standard do the best with $x money.
Re:We were supposed to fire DeJoy last year (Score:5, Informative)
Mod points be damned the problem with your statement is that the EVs, especially for postal operations, are cheaper. They rigged the RFP to favor Oshkosh, which can’t provide EVs as economically as their main competitor.
For any vehicle that starts and stops constantly you can’t pretend that a gas engine (not even hybrid) makes more sense. Given the extremely low median daily mileage driven by the vehicles, battery should be the clear winner. The game played to make a challenge for BEVs was claiming major infrastructure upgrades would be required. A vehicle using ~10kWh/day can easily be charged even with a Level 1 charger over night. Opportunistic charging along the route is also pretty easy— a Level 2 charger could add 4-5kWh in a half-hour, typical of many park-to-foot distribution points.
I can appreciate that there is a bigger challenge for the top 30th percentile of requirements, and especially so for the top 10th percentile, but they all should still be viable with minimal infrastructure. Only *maybe* the top 1 percentile of routes is really a problem that cannot economically be solved (by 2020 standards) with a BEV.
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This bid was only their small local delivery trucks, which had a fleet average daily mileage of 50. Getting 250Wh/mile for a vehicle of that size at low speeds is completely reasonable 230Wh/mile is possible. That gives you 12.5kWh to satisfy the average; double it to allow for greater flexibility and you are still just at 25kWh(B).
Your logic on starting/stopping is wrong; idle fuel consumption is your minimum and starting requries a higher HP to deliver the torque on a gas engine than electric, and the s
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I can assure you that he does know the secret handshake, and he gets invited to all the best cocktail parties.
Sockpuppets need not apply.
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A gas powered fleet can be converted to properly sourced ethanol with little to no investment, depending on how the vehicles are produced.
That is the point, we shouldn't have to convert anything. With the possible exception of rural mail carriers most postal deliveries could be done on a a segway. I watched one mail carrier pull that little van into the neighborhood. He basically sat in it and drove it from one mailbox to the next. Each one was only 10 feet apart. I also believe since this are government vehicles they are exempt from any environmental regulations.
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Also, "small things" are easier to understand. They're much easier as well if the small things are painted in broad strokes. Thus, campaign finance is hard, it has nuances, it has constitutional issues, it has no easy solutions, and politicians are going to have to work against their own self interests as well as cooperate with those from different parties. So that's big, it gets ignored. Critical race theory is simple, most don't understand what it is so it's describe in simplistic terms with lies atta
Can't imagine (Score:2)
We have go to be realistic about green transition (Score:2, Insightful)
It is madness to expect the postal service can replace an entire fleet with all electric vehicles.
Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office.
A green transition makes sense but we simply cannot expect a mass switch that is desired to be in any way practical, especially in a world where the economy worldwide is tanking and inflation had finally arrived to show us what happens when we just print infinite money to handle costs.
A 10
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Well, it's better than paying for the costs of breathing in all the byproducts of gasoline combustion. Not to mention sustaining the gasoline powered automobile industry.
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ICE vehicles are not going any where for quite some time. It's just not possible to wave a wand and make them disappear. At some point, you need to shift from an ideology of utopia and realize reality. Then fit your beliefs in to practical. It does not mean you shouldn't advocate for pushing the limits of practical, but you also can't demand rainbows and unicorns and stomp your feet when that's not what you get.
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For the long haul USPS semi trucks, that would apply. It might also apply to a few very specific rural post offices, and to a few post offices that serve urban zones that require a large number of vehicles but a very small daily mileage each. But, for both of these cases there is an easy way to solve the problem if you want to with BEVs. The work rules might need to change to accommodate it in places though- many postal workers would not get a dedicated truck and instead be dropped off with a load and sh
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Yeah the central power plant should be nuclear or solar. That can and should be done too. Switching vehicles out of fossil fuels is much harder though.
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WTF?! Even an inefficient coal plant has lower emissions per unit energy consumed than an IEC vehicle especially one that idles much of the day!
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Burning coal or gas in a power plant is still better than burning diesel or gasoline in a truck.
Power plant -> 45% efficiency in generating electricity, 5% grid loss, 99% efficient in charging and car engine -> ~39% of the "fuel" ends as power on the road. Gas produces nearly no emissions besides CO2, and coal plants are heavily scrubbed.
Gas engine: < 20% efficient. Besides catalysator and diesel filters, extreme amounts of pollution right on your head and breathing level.
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Power plant -> 45% efficiency in generating electricity, 5% grid loss, 99% efficient in charging and car engine ~39% of the "fuel" ends as power on the road
From the wall plug to the wheels there is a 85% or so efficiency when you add losses from charger, batteries, inverter and motor.
There are additional practical losses that are difference from ICE. Heating and electronics can significantly affect range. There are losses from a car just sitting parked losing several kWh per day on battery compartment conditioning, electronics and self discharge.
Gas engine:
In terms of human health PM 2.5 pollution from non-combustion sources (e.g. brakes and tires) is by far the largest factor. BEVs tend to be twice as heavy as similar ICE cars resulting in more PM 2.5 pollution from tires offset by somewhat less from brakes due to regen depending on conditions and operator preferences.
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Burning coal in a power plant and charging an EV is actually on par with running a modern Diesel engine.
No it is not. Should I make the math again? Using an EV produces half the CO2 than burning diesel, less even.
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Modern coal power plants are on average 33%, the best plants around 45%.
Source GE: https://www.ge.com/power/trans... [ge.com]
Natural gas is slightly better, between 45 and 57%:
source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Modern gasoline engines 30-35, source: https://www.aaa.com/autorepair... [aaa.com]
Modern diesel engines: 43-44, source: https://theicct.org/the-ever-i... [theicct.org]
Average transmission line loss: 8-15%, source: https://chintglobal.com/blog/h... [chintglobal.com]
There will also be losses from the charging, from the motors etc as none of these
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A Tesla model S gets 310 miles on a 75 KWh charge. There are about 33.6 KWh in a gasoline gallon equivalent. So that 75 KWh is the equivalent of about 2.23 gallons of gasoline. So that would be about 139 miles to a gallon. The average car in the US gets 25 miles per gallon. The weight difference in the cars is and efficiency of the electric motors is already factored into those numbers, Charging and transmission losses are very low. So, unless the centralized power station is somehow miraculously inefficien
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Another bad Troll mod IMO. I believe the above is correct, but, if not, the better response would have been to refute with facts, not to mod down.
I believe hybrids and fully electric vehicles are the way forward, but their full environmental benefits will only be realized once the grid is based primarily on renewables (or nuclear). And also once they are cheap enough, without subsidies, to displace ICE-based vehicles. I believe that will happen, eventually, but we're not quite there yet in the general ca
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Coal: 21%
Nuclear: 20%
Non-hydro Renewables: 15%
Hydro: 7%
So, we have 56% being FF, and 44% being clean. More importantly, nighttime electricity in America, is roughly 50% clean. And all of this will continue to clean up, while LICE cars can not/will not get cleaner.
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Until the power grid moves away from burning fossil fuels, all you're achieving with an electric vehicle is moving where the byproducts are being produced. More electric vehicles is going to mean more coal and gas being burned in power stations for the foreseeable future.
Even if we accept your premise, you're completely ignoring two important details. Electric vehicles use less power than ICEs to travel the same distance. Also, big combustion engines (whether they're internal combustion or external combustion) are a lot more efficient than small ones. They can also be a lot cleaner burning. So, even if all you were doing was moving the burning of fossil fuels from many mobile engines to a much smaller number of much larger engines, you're still reducing the amount of fossil
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Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office
They can use all the money they saved from not buying gasoline. Plus all the additional maintenance that comes with maintaining a gasoline fleet.
Re:We have go to be realistic about green transiti (Score:5, Informative)
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In some places, milk used to be delivered to peoples homes early every morning using electric vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Where are you getting those figures from?
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No way are electrics only 0.001%. I can hardly walk out of the office to get lunch without passing a Tesla or five on the way to the local cafes and takeout places. Get out onto the road, and they're all over the place there too. Maybe only 0.001% of all automobiles worldwide are electrics. But there are plenty of them here, and you see more and more every year.
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Closer to .6%
(2 million of 290 million in my quick search).
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Bragging? No. I drive a 9-year-old Subaru that I plan to drive until it's ready to be buried, just like I did with my last car... also a Subaru... that lasted me 14 years. All I'm doing is reporting what I see with my own eyes when I leave the house.
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And why exactly would prices for deliveries go up, when the price for maintaining and fueling the fleet goes down?
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And these super efficient private sector companies do not deliver for 80% of the area of USA.
Compared to UPS and Fedex USPS is a paragon of efficiency.
If USPS takes advantage of the infrastructure it has and moves into digital document escrow services and identity authentication services, it could rake in enough cash to deliver all mail for fre
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Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office.
I'm sure some sort of standardized, pre-fab units could be devised. Container size with a few dozen charging plugs on either side. Switchgear and a diesel genset inside. Just drop them as needed in the postal service parking lots.
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and you want to go "green" by dropping in a bunch of smelly diesel generators
Don't 'want to'. The local distribution grid simply doesn't have the capacity to charge a bunch of EVs concentrated in one place. One level 2 charger plug requires about twice the design capacity of a typical household. If you are the only one on the block with a Tesla, you will be OK. If everyone has one, 'pop' goes your distribution transformer fuse in the middle of the night.
Re:We have go to be realistic about green transiti (Score:5, Insightful)
That is disingenuous.
The idea is not to replace every vehicle with an electric vehicle all at once, right now.
Most of the postal vehicles should be replaced with electric versions, as they reach end-of-life, and as electric alternatives become available. That is to say: over time make a transition to appropriate electric vehicles.
The spending plan under discussion is a 10+ year purchase order contract. Limiting the postal service to purchasing only 10% electric vehicles over the next decade plus is what is written in the plan. That is a bad way to make a transition.
A limit of 10% is destined to fail. If you can only buy 10% of the fleet as electric vehicles, you cannot justify installing charging infrastructure at every post office. Any post office without charging infrastructure cannot reasonably expect to use the electric postal vehicles... so they won't order any. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
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A limit of 10% is destined to fail. If you can only buy 10% of the fleet as electric vehicles, you cannot justify installing charging infrastructure at every post office. Any post office without charging infrastructure cannot reasonably expect to use the electric postal vehicles... so they won't order any. It creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
No, they can have 10% of post offices which can install charging infrastructure be 100% electric. Those will likely have shorter routes too as those are more easily served by EVs.
Forcing the USPS to be fully electric is asking them to fail to compete against UPS and FedEx, both of which are still using gas trucks.
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Forcing the USPS to be fully electric is asking them to fail to compete against UPS and FedEx, both of which are still using gas trucks.
That is nonsense, as electric trucks are cheaper to run than gas trucks.
Here in Germany most UPS trucks are electric: since a decade - or more!
New trucks bought by FedEX or "Deutsche Post" are all electric.
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The practicality of EV delivery vehicles depends on the nature of the delivery area.
The problem the USPS faces is that they think they should buy one type of vehicle for residential delivery over all 9,833,520 km^2 of the nation. They sign decades long contracts on those vehicles and the last batch [wikipedia.org] has been really problematic with strange steering geometry and reliability issues. And yes, you've read that right, the current design has been in service for 35 years.
So there are really two choices obvious choi
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you cannot justify installing charging infrastructure at every post office.
LOL. Uh no. It will cost only about $1K to add L2 charging / EV.
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Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office.
Compared to the cost of building a charging infrastructure for businesses or private citizens, the specific use cases for the USPS may actually be favorable to building out an initial infrastructure. The USPS vehicles generally don't travel many miles each day, as they operate in a small area. That means that instead of requiring Level 3 superchargers, the vehicles could use Level 2 that requires minimal electrical upgrades or even Level 1 that requires potentially no upgrades at all (i.e., just plug into
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A short haul cargo vehicle with extremely frequent stops and starts is kind of the textbook use case for EV vehicles, and with almost the entire postal fleet aging out and needing replacement it seems kind of ludicrous to only convert 10% and commit to gasoline for the other 90% of a fleet the majority of which has been on the road for over 27 years. Do we need to commit to another 120,000+ idling gasoline engines for the next 27 years or so?
How about instead, we funnel air quality grants that groups like b
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It is madness to expect the postal service can replace an entire fleet with all electric vehicles.
Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office.
Isn't such "massive spending" exactly the point? Military spending isn't the only way for pork to come through.
Perhaps one can also check the stock portfolios of the relevant officials to see how much they were invested into EV vs gas-powered companies for some insights into this decision.
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Re:We have go to be realistic about green transiti (Score:4, Insightful)
But this usage pattern is perfect for electric vehicles, because 1) electric motors run with little maintenance practically forever, and 2) most of the stopping is regenerative braking, meaning the (mechanical) brakes last longer and you aren’t turning kinetic energy of the moving vehicle into waste heat. On a per-mile basis, electricity is 1/2-1/3 the cost of gasoline.
The postal trucks will need to be replaced eventually anyway. Replacing them with vehicles that may cost a bit more upfront (I expect price parity within a decade), but are vastly cheaper to operate, is the smart move to make.
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On a per-mile basis, electricity is 1/2-1/3 the cost of gasoline.
Depending on country it is 1/10th or less.
Germany has high gasoline taxes - and also high CO2 taxes etc. on electricity - still charging during daytime is not even 10% of the costs of gasoline. If you charge during night time - requires a special meter - it is even less.
Madness is them buying any more gas vans. (Score:2)
The idea that they will be burning gas in 30 years is madness. So they need to stop buying gas vans now.
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With just 15A, 120V outlets they could easily accommodate ~30% of the routes. For essentially the same cost, going 20A, 208V, that number easily jumps to ~60% of routes. The gas savings should pay for the installation cost within 3 months, worst-case.
Some locations would need service upgrades beyond 60% of vehicles in a worst-case scenario. Opportunistic charging should be able to address some of that, as well as EV-Charging electrical service provisions at a few post offices.
Bottom line is that this isn
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It is madness to expect the postal service can replace an entire fleet with all electric vehicles.
No it is no.
They are not supposed to replace the old fleet in one big bang. Just buy new trucks and phase out old ones.
And buying new gasoline trucks is madness.
especially in a world where the economy worldwide is tanking and inflation had finally arrived
And what exactly has that to do with the engine technology driving a postal truck?
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Government for some reason always wants a long term plan; maybe it's regulations, or needing to get stuff past oversight committees and boards all at once, or wanting to approve it all at once rather than spread out the pain over many years. No one would blink an eye if they said "next year's budget includes a line item to replace approximately 5% of the vehicles as they reach end of life". So they make a long term plan instead, replacing the "fleet", even though partway through that plan the variables wil
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It is madness to expect the postal service can replace an entire fleet with all electric vehicles.
It is madness for ANY delivery company, or postal service to NOT go all EV. Why? Because fuel and maintenance represent a HUGE portion of their spending.
Beyond just the vehicles, think of the massive spending that would entail to build charging facilities at every post office.
Next to none. Why? Because USPO have already brought large electric lines in-house to handle their sorting machines, HVAC, lighting, etc. What charging facilities would be used? Nothing more than L2s, charging at nighttime, which is cheap electricity, and when the grid is way underutilized.
Oh, if they have 20 cars to charge at night, it would be less th
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Textbook use case for EV (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have a better case for switching to electric than this. The routes are always fixed with countless stops and starts. Oh hold on I hear the replies coming. What about the rural delivery routes that haul 38 tons of mail 100 miles uphill every day? Well in some cases yes gasoline vehicles would be a better option.
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You can't have a better case for switching to electric than this. The routes are always fixed with countless stops and starts. Oh hold on I hear the replies coming. What about the rural delivery routes that haul 38 tons of mail 100 miles uphill every day? Well in some cases yes gasoline vehicles would be a better option.
You are 100% right.
Yet, from what I understand. The problem is not "Which technology is better?"
But rather: We need certain number of trucks. There is not enough budget to buy all of them as electrics, because electrics are more expensive than ICE.
Therefore, the USPS needs to mix electric with ICE to achieve the desired number of units.
I guess the USPS would be DELIGHTED to transition to 99% electric.
My sugestion: Use electric + Natural Gas instead of Electric + Gasoline. At least, those pollute much less
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I'd suggest electric + dual LPG/gasoline, for ultimate flexibility, as a dual LPG/gasoline motor can be switched back and forth as needed. So, they can run them on existing gasoline infrastructure where needed while getting LPG infrastructure (which is mostly just a big tank and training someone on how to fill LPG tanks) set up.
Compared to LNG, LPG is super easy from an infrastructure perspective. LNG infra is relatively scary, even as someone who likes to play with electricity and flammables.
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Not just the cost of the vehicles, but also the cost of upgrading power supplies at various locations to support charging a significant number of electric vehicles.
A small post office with a single vehicle might be able to charge it overnight from their existing supply, but a depot with 50 delivery vehicles all needing to be charged every day would require some significant upgrade work.
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Don't forget that their truck yards will also have to be upgraded to have the capacity for EVERY vehicle so it can charge overnight. That's another major cost.
Also, there's a range problem: metro drivers may only need to cover 10 or 20 miles per day, so an EV is fine. Rural mail routes can easily be over 300 miles per day. How does that work against EV range, especially when that range is reduced by deep winter cold, as affects much of the areas where rural routes exist?
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So the correct question is how many routes are less than 80% of vehicle range under winter conditions, which around here means with tire chains. And you would have a minimum of 12 hours to charge them overnight so you wouldn't need superchargers. So a 30 amp 240 V circuit for each charger?
Most country post offices have a mixture of shorter and longer routes, or at least they could be configured to be so. So 10% electric seems way low to me too.
If it's purely cost this is the time to go to Congress from spec
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It's not just vans. It's infrastructure as well. That's the heavy cost. The vans would cost more AND you'd have to turn every postal service yard into a mass EV charging cluster. The USPS is insufficiently funded to get the EV vans let alone the infrastructure to support them.
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Yeah, Rural routes will go upwards of 50 miles/day, but that is not that much.
There really is little need for LICE. Instead, get a minivan with 200 mpc battery and that will solve the few rural routes that go a disatance.
Irresponsible all around (Score:3)
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Current battery technology will not support the number of charging cycles required for 20 years on vehicles that use their full range daily. You also need to account for the cost of replacing battery packs a couple times in that span. Considering how much R&D is going in to batteries, there's not even a guarantee that there will be replacements available for vehicles sold today in ten years.
Hopefully that will improve in the not too distant future (both battery technology providing better longevity an
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Considering how much R&D is going in to batteries, there's not even a guarantee that there will be replacements available for vehicles sold today in ten years.
Get real. I can buy new manufactured parts for a century old Ford model T. If there's a market someone will fill it.
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But that isn’t reality. The vehicle would have a minimum of (say) 80 miles of range, with most of the routes being under 40 miles per day. 5-6,000 cycles gives you nearly 30 years on a single pack.
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Suppose the USPS is focused only on having a working fleet at the lowest cost. That makes this wrong, as gas will continue to become more expensive while alternatives will increase in cost less quickly or decrease.
People have been saying this same thing about gas prices for decades and they've been continuously proven wrong. Cost of electricity is also likely to increase in the medium term with adoption of EVs and everything must be electric legislation pushing up demand while little is done to bring new supply online.
USPS vehicles are used for 20 years or more, so the overall cost depends more on operating expenses than initial purchase price.
The equation is a little different for large fleets with their own maintenance staff. In the long term BEV will win easily. In the short to medium term it is unclear.
politics over practicality (Score:2, Insightful)
And, where exactly would an entity with the size of fleet of the USPS go for EVs? Production of key components is not high enough to replace their fleet. Any components that would be used for a USPS fleet would be components not used elsewhere. Electrifying the USPS fleet would mean ICE vehicles elsewhere would remain (batteries for instance are a limited supply and will remain so for some time). It would be zero sum in the electrification of all vehicles nationwide.
You could argue that the USPS fleet p
FUD (Score:3)
While cold weather is a concern, the 40% figure you quote is wrong. It's 20%. https://www.wired.com/story/el... [wired.com]
Also this sounds like a problem best solved by capitalism. Have the USPS put out a list of requirements and see what each manufacturer comes up with. Winner gets the bid. People are employed and everyone is happy.
Re:politics over practicality (Score:5, Insightful)
There's also an assumption being made that the USPS is going to transition to ONE vehicle type, and that one vehicle can't possibly work in all cases. Of course there's no such thing, which is why we have different kinds of vehicles on the road. The majority of *vehicles* the USPS uses are in urban areas, where it's entirely practical for an modern EV to handle the driving loads. And if they can't, there's always charging during lunch.... Rural areas where a huge number of miles happen each day account for significantly fewer total vehicles, and unfortunately will probably be gas-powered for many decades to come.
Re: (Score:2)
The post-person in our area sits in the middle of her front seat and works the controls with her left hand and foot.
It's an emergency (Score:4, Insightful)
So... we're fine with dealing with one emergency, a viral pandemic, with money, man power & resources. We've changed the ways we do things, disrupted our societies considerably & at great cost. As a result, we've already advanced vaccine technologies by decades & saved millions of lives. Looks like we're gonna get over this one.
We've had another emergency for much longer but we're not changing the ways we do things, disrupting our societies in ways that would actually mean more jobs & economic growth rather than great cost. As a result, it's likely that millions more are going to die than is necessary. In fact, many of us & our descendants may not survive this one.
Sorry kids. The world's turning to shit because the USPS, among others, isn't allowed to change the ways it does things. This is just insane bureaucratic conservatism.
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You gonna pay for it? The EPA sure won't.
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Do you mail letters? If not, then you directly caused this issue to be. Since the USPS must fund itself with its own revenues, you and only you can make the situation better by buying stamps and mailing things.
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The USPS owns nearly a quarter of a million vehicles—the world's largest civilian motor fleet.
I'm having a bit of trouble reconciling that with "negligible".
The EPA can complain (Score:3, Insightful)
when they offer to foot the bill for the USPS to switch to EVs. Put up or shut up.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you suggesting that we fund and empower the EPA to this level? Hmm.
Natural Gas Powered vehicles (Score:2)
Instead of using Gasolina/Petrol , get a combination of electricals, and ICE trucks that use GNV (Gas Natural Vehicular), or however is called in the USoA.
GNV/Natural Gas is cheaper than Gasoline/Petrol and contaminates less. with GNV you save yourself the sulphur oxide and the non-burned complex hydrocarbons, the nitrous oxide is handled by the CAT. Sadly, the CO2 is unavoidable, either in NGV or in Petro based ICEs.
That ways the USPS can transition to all electric in a rithm more acording to their budget.
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Natural Gas is a poor vehicle fuel as it reamins a gas in pressurised cylindars - so you only get a small ammount of fuel in a heavy cylindar. As a result the engine needs to be dual NatGas/Petrol which makes it sub-optimal at fuel efficency (Natural Gas burns best under quite different compression profiles from petrol.) Where I live we used to have lots of NatGas vehicles (called CNG here) but everything is now LPG (Liquified Petrolium Gas) - just like my barbeque :-) . Because LPG is liquid in compres
Re: (Score:2)
This is also true of a large portion of Uber/Lyft/other rideshare drivers. Hybrids are *so* underrated. Between regenerative braking, ability to go all electric when driving slowly, not burning fuel when idling for long periods and quick refueling (which often gets you 500+ miles per tank), they're the optimal compromise between current technologies. Especially for anything taxi-like.
I wou
Just back up the truck and dump the money (Score:2)
Why not spend that $11.3 billion on helping the few remaining businesses that still send actual letters transition to electronic delivery - and providing some sort of basic terminal (Chromebooks, perhaps) to the people who are low income and can't afford a computer?
USPS doesn't deliver that many packages compared to all the private fleets. Seriously, even 20+ years ago the Postmaster General was complaining they'd lost most of the package business to UPS and FedEx.
It just seems like we're perpetually dumpin
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Even UPS and FedEx use USPS is many rural locations!
Steam (Score:5, Funny)
Unit cost=$ 66,666/ea (Score:2)
Seems within possibility of Arrival, Brightdrop, Alpha, EVAGE, Winnebago,R3E, Shyft, Arcfox, ELMS, FOXCONN/Lordstown, STLA, FISKER, VicinityMtrs, TOY, Nuro, Easymile
Synergy opportunities in partnerships are ripe for legacy OEM and Mfgrs to build new capabilities. This 10yr. build out ramps with technology in BEV sector with a value add bonus of designing a new BEV millionmile platform with reuse a possible takeaway.
Worst times could happen for a $11B lifeline thrown lasting 10 yrs.
Re: (Score:2)
So lemmie get this straight:
You want to lay responsibility for other people's refusal to move away from coal power at the feet of the people who are willing to move away from petroleum power?
Yes, because we can't fix it all at once, we should fix none of it! Furthermore, since it cannot be fixed, then technically nothing is broken. I feel so good about my position now. /S
My individual ability to choose what my car runs on directly, is not the same as my individual ability to choose what my car runs on ind
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