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Last Monday I had the opportunity to participate in an interesting round table, organized by several student clubs of IE Business School, with Joaquín Bellido, Director in Spain of BYD , the company that produces more electric buses in the world, to which I dedicated One of my articles a few months ago.

The case of BYD is extremely interesting: founded by a chemist born in a humble family that has now become one of the richest people in China, Wang Chuanfu , in the city of Shenzen, the company also owns lithium mines and other rare earths necessary for the manufacture of batteries. The name of the company is an acronym for Build Your Dreams , and the slogan “The official sponsor of Mother Nature” is registered . Its last battery factory, inaugurated last year, is one of the largest in the world , and is dedicated specifically to the manufacture of lithium-ferrophosphate batteries, less common in the industry but considered very appropriate for buses due to its greater chemical and thermal stability, which increases its safety. The company also has several subsidiaries, which manufacture from batteries for smartphones to cars or monorail trains without a driver.

Electric buses are undoubtedly one of the main transport solutions in cities, although their implementation is relatively slow, and at the current rate, only 60% of the world’s buses will be electric buses around the world. 2050. The resistances to its implementation are mainly due to its cost, which is approximately double that of a conventional bus with a combustion engine, and the need to build power stations for recharging it, which require an important electricity supply infrastructure , but in terms of total cost of ownership, electric buses are significantly better due to the lower maintenance they require and also their lower operating costs. The pioneer city in the world in this sense is Shenzen , in which the headquarters and the main factory of BYD are also located, and which has a fleet of 16,000 fully electric buses. If you do not get the idea of ​​what 16,000 buses are, this video of the delivery of the fleet in 2016 with which Joaquín started his intervention can help you get an idea:

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Shenzen has about 12.5 million inhabitants. In contrast, New York, with 8.4 million, has a fleet of 5,800 buses, and Madrid, with 3.2 million, has 2,050 , of which only 1.76% are electric. Public transport is a fundamental actor in the future of urban transport, and buses are the logical evolution in this sense along with other vehicles such as trains or trams. Some states, such as California, have announced their intention to complete a complete transition of their bus fleet by 2029 . Currently, 17% of the world’s buses, a total of 425,000, are electric, and 99% of them are operating in Chinese cities.

In terms of innovation, it is also interesting to see the development they have just presented in the city of Indianapolis along with the Momentum Dynamics company and the city’s public transport operator, IndyGo: a system of 300kWh inductive charging points that allow the vehicle to be continuously enroute by supplying a point-load impulse every time the bus arrives at one of these loaders, located at the end points of the route. The inductive load is considered as one of the ways to avoid the problems of load cycles and downtime that would supposedly force. A solution certainly interesting when it comes to keeping a vehicle in service on a route as long as possible, considering that currently, the operating range of an electric bus is around 360 kilometers.

Some cities, faced with the need to carry out the transition of their fleet from the very best diesel to cleaner options , have erroneously inclined for natural gas, a strategic error considering the ecological qualification of this fuel , and the evolution of its cost , which makes it less and less competitive compared to clean energy. Cities such as Santiago de Chile, which recently placed an order for one hundred electric buses, they seem to have clear the sign of the times, and the importance of removing from circulation an element like the diesel bus: in an average city, buses usually represent around 5% of the vehicles in circulation, but generate a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted, 40% of the oxides of nitrogen and more than half of the emissions of particles, and they do it precisely in the cities, the places where there is usually a greater concentration of inhabitants. We will see if our cities know how to measure up.

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This post was previously published on www.enriquedans.com and is republished here with permission from the author.

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