WINNIPEG, MB – The 2019 preliminary budgets allow the next step to be taken in the future electrification of the City of Winnipeg’s transit fleet by proposing a $1 million investment to study how best to facilitate its implementation including a budget estimate for the purchase of 12 to 20 battery-electric buses.
The City of Winnipeg, in partnership with the Province of Manitoba, Manitoba Hydro, New Flyer Industries, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Red River College, and Sustainable Development Technology Canada, initiated an electric bus demonstration project in 2014.
This project introduced electric buses into daily operation on the number 20 Academy-Watt bus route, a two-hour route starting at Winnipeg Richardson International Airport and running through the city centre to East Kildonan before returning to the airport.
In November 2015, based on the success of the demonstration project, the Manitoba government and the City of Winnipeg announced the formation of a joint task force to investigate the potential of implementing electric transit buses beyond those used during the demonstration project.
The task force completed their report in July 2016. The task force outlined multiple benefits of the new electric technology. These included reduced fuel costs, reduced maintenance costs, reduced greenhouse gas, and reduced noise. It also outlined that electric buses are most beneficial when they can be applied to high-use routes on a dedicated basis thereby reducing the use of diesel fuel as much as possible.
Its analysis concluded that while electrification of the bus fleet was, at the time of the report, somewhat more costly overall than diesel buses, the gap was neither overwhelming nor insurmountable with the longer-term cost advantage trending toward electric buses.
A significant challenge, however, of introducing electric buses identified by the task force was that the current transit system’s overall design is based on characteristics of diesel buses which are very different than electric buses.
These differences include diesel buses’ ability to operate for extended periods of time untethered to refueling. This operational characteristic permits diesel buses to be available whenever and wherever they are needed, operating upwards of 22 hours daily or across an entire urban area when and where required.
Electrification of the city’s bus fleet would require additional study on how best to transform an old system, designed around diesel, to a new system of planning, operation, and maintenance based on new electric bus and charging technologies.
The task force outlined how this feature is a cornerstone of the existing transit system planning and operation, and must be assessed in greater detail to better understand the implications of using electric buses which have fundamentally different operating characteristics than diesel buses.
The task force also said an important next step to address integration challenges is to deploy a sufficient number of electric buses to confirm they can operate in the real world on a larger scale, citing the need for at least 12 and as many as 20 electric buses representing approximately two to three percent of the current bus fleet.
The funding support proposed in the 2019 preliminary budgets is to study precisely these aspects of bus electrification within the context of the Transit Master Plan currently being finalized.
The July 2016 task force report can be reviewed in full here: https://winnipegtransit.com/assets/2162/Transit_Electrification_Taskforce_2016.FINAL.PDF.