Under New York City's Clean Fleet plan, the Big Apple will have to cut its fleet-vehicle CO2 emissions by 80% by 2035 from a 2005 baseline. It's an aggressive target, but the city has managed to replace 2,200 gas-powered on-road fleet vehicles with plug-in electric models six years ahead of schedule. With that success, the city doubled its goal and now says it will have at least 4,000 on-road electric vehicles in use by 2025, including electric refuse trucks.
Replacing the light-duty and passenger vehicles with plug-in electrics was easy. Doing the same for the city's heavy-duty vehicle fleet, which includes street sweepers, salt trucks, dump trucks, and the city's 2,346 refuse trucks will take a bit more ingenuity.
"The targets we have are very aggressive, and there's no way we could get to 80% by 2035 without [Mack]," said Rocky DiRico, deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY). "Without electric tucks that's not happening."
Speaking at the Mack Customer Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania during a demonstration of the Mack LR Electric, DiRico described some of the challenges facing his department.
"We have done some computer modeling of the truck's performance on simulated collections routes, and what we have seen is very positive but it's not real-world," he told HDT. "When we get it home, we'll start the testing by validating the computer modeling on our Class 8 dynamometer in our lab in Queens. After that, we'll start running it on actual collection routes."
Rocky DiRico, deputy commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation (center) explains to journalists how the LR Electric will have to do double duty as a refuse collector and a snow plow.
Photo: Jim Park
The initial test route will be about 18 miles through a middle-class neighbor hood of single-family homes. He couldn't say how many stops it would make, but the department tends to measure collection routes in the number of stops rather than miles. "We'll see how long it lasts, whether we can finish the route in 8 hours," he said. "If that goes well, we can see how much battery capacity is left and from there we can determine if we can do some plowing with it."
NYC is one of a handful of municipalities in the US that equips its refuse collection trucks with snowplows in winter. That's brings huge efficiencies to fleet operations, where they don't have to call in plows to cover the same streets a collection truck is operating. With the diesel collection trucks, range and capacity are nothing to worry about. It's a new ball game with battery-powered trucks.
"Ultimately, we have to get to plowing," DiRico said. "We have to. We can't have two separate fleets. Battery technology has already improved dramatically from the first time we looked at this and we feel that within the next year, the battery capacity will be 50% better still, and that should take us to plowing. If we can't plow with it yet, that's okay. We'll get there. We have to take baby steps."
DSNY collects 10,500 tons of residential and institutional refuse and 1,700 tons of recyclables each day from the five boroughs that make up "New York City." It's also responsible for snow removal on 6,300 miles of streets.
The LR Electric Mack had at the demonstration event is the first of its kind. There's another one in the works that will be delivered later this year to Republic Services in North Carolina for a similar evaluation.
"The timing is right for this type of truck," says Mack's senior vice president for North American Sales & Marketing, Jonathan Randall. "It's a confluence of ideas whose time has come. We have tried other ideas as they came up, such as electric and hydraulic hybrids, CNG, hydrogen fuel cells, LNG; there's no one solution for everything. We just want to continue to try new things. The battery density is getting to the point where we can move 70,000 plus pounds over time and we can handle all the parasitic loads too."
Randall says as the cost and efficiency of batteries improves, more fleets will start testing and eventually adopt. "It's bringing commercial viability closer and closer, but we need fleets like DSNY and Republic Services to make the investment with the resources they have so that the technology becomes viable and available to fleets across the country."
