by Sam Gurwitt | Nov 29, 2019 2:17 pm

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Posted to: Environment, Hamden, Transportation

By the end of 2020, ten CT Transit buses in the New Haven area will no longer cough out plumes of diesel exhaust as they make their daily trips.

At least that’s the plan, as the Connecticut Department of Transportation (DOT) has decided to replace 12 CT Transit buses with battery electric buses.

Ten of the buses will live at the CT Transit facility in Hamden and serve the New Haven-area routes; two will go to Stamford. The DOT is also adding five electric buses to the Greater Bridgeport Transit Agency’s fleet.

Public transit experts discussed the pilot effort Monday afternoon during a panel discussion on electric bus transit at a forum in the Yale School of Forestry’s Kroon Hall. It was part of the Center for Latino Progress’s second annual Multi-Modal Transit Summit.



In total, the 12 new buses and the installation of charging stations will cost about $15 million. Some $4.9 million comes from part of the $55 million the state is supposed to get from Volkswagen through a settlement resulting from the company’s 2015 emission’s scandal. According to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, Volkswagen must contribute $2 billion all-told to zero emission vehicle infrastructure in the U.S.

The remaining $10 million for CT Transit’s new buses will come from the federal government and from the Connecticut’s DOT.

DOT Engineer Richard Hanley said the state has sent out a request for proposals (RFP) for the buses and charging equipment, and that the competition deadline is Dec. 4.

Battery electric buses have a myriad of benefits, said Michael Broe of the planning, engineering, and architecture firm STV: They don’t pollute. They’re quieter. They cut down on maintenance waste because, for example, their oil doesn’t need to be changed. They can have increased maintenance intervals. It’s easier to get external funding for them. Finally, they reduce dependence on foreign oil.

While the buses themselves are expensive, the biggest challenges when it comes to electric vehicles have to do with charging.

“Buying the electric bus is the easy part. The hard part is the charging stations,” said MTA New York City Transit Deputy VP and Chief Environmental Engineer Thomas Abdallah.

CT Transit’s facility on State Street in Hamden is one of the largest DOT facilities in the state, said United Illuminating’s Rick Rosa. The UI substation that feeds the facility currently has enough capacity to supply electricity for all 129 of the buses stored there, he said, if the facility uses “managed charging.”

Still, adding that electrical load comes with its challenges. He said that there are very few sites in the Northeast that have received 10 electric buses at the same time. He said that UI has been “working closely with the DOT to understand what their electric needs are going to be.”



Hanley said that the DOT is exploring options for backup energy storage in case of a power outage. He mentioned a generator, excess battery storage, or even a fuel cell that already exists in Hamden.

Rosa said that in Hamden, it would also be possible to power the facility using transmission lines rather than distribution lines. Transmission lines are the power lines that carry large amounts of electricity from electricity sources to substations. Distribution lines then carry a lower voltage from the substations to buildings. Rosa said that train lines are often connected to the transmission lines, which are not generally affected by outages in the way that distribution lines can be.

Vehicle range also presents a challenge. Hanley said he anticipates only getting a range of about 150 miles per charge in cold weather. Connecticut’s climate makes things more difficult because batteries do not work as well in the cold, and then there are the costs of heating and cooling in the summer.

Hanley said that the Federal Transportation Administration allows buses to have up to nine gallons of diesel for heating and still be considered zero-emission vehicles. As he put it, they don’t produce emissions for locomotion.

“It’s a range increase. It’s a huge range increase. We look at probably another 60 to 80 miles out of that nine gallons of diesel fuel,” he said.

Broe said that carbon dioxide heat pumps might also be an option, and that they can function down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, which would cover most winter days in Connecticut.

Hanley said that the DOT is doing a preliminary design right now at the Hamden facility to figure out how the facility will operate. He said the DOT hopes to have the buses and charging stations up and running by the end of 2020.