Electric bus pilot - first for Ontario

NRU
April 18, 2018
By Maryam Mirza

Ontario's first electric buses will be hitting the roads in the GTHA as early as 2019, to test the practicality of electric battery-powered buses in real life conditions.

Monday the province announced it will be investing up to $13-million from available cap-and-trade funds into a two-year pilot program to test electric battery-powered buses. The funds will enable Brampton and York Region to purchase 14 buses and four charging stations. The Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium, a green transportation group, is coordinating the projects and gathering information on costs related to charging, maintaining and operating the buses. The buses are expected to begin service in 2019.

York Region transit director Ann-Marie Carroll told NRU that Newmarket was selected to participate in the pilot program based on a specific criteria identified by the consortium, such as route length, proximity to a facility for the charging station, and a fairly level landscape. The town will be replacing six conventional buses with six electric buses, and will install one charging station.

"The main objective is to see how this technology works in our environment," she said.

According to Carroll, each bus and the charging station cost about $1-million, but the region will be paying $450,000-what it would have paid for a conventional bus-and the province will be funding the remaining costs.

The consortium will release the data it collects over the twoyear period to council. Part of the analysis it will undertake with the data is to assess energy efficiency.

Carroll explained that to ensure the buses are charged efficiently, electricity will be collected stored during off-peak hours.

"If we find efficient ways to pull energy off the grid and store it, that's probably going to be a lot cheaper than purchasing diesel fuel in the future," she said.

CUTRIC CEO Josipa Petrunic told NRU that the pilot is unique in Canada because the busses and charging systems used in the pilot are compatible with any electric bus infrastructure. A number of municipalities had expressed concerns about purchasing a system that is not compatible with other bus manufacturers.

The pilot has brought together New Flyer and Nova Bus-bus manufacturers-and ABB and Siemens-making the chargers-to ensure the systems are compatible.

"They redesigned their systems so that the charges and the buses could plug and play into one and another," Petrunic added.