Time to plug in the bus.
It’s great to see Sydney on the ball with
offering Australia’s first public on-street electric vehicle charging station
in Derby Place, Glebe. What a great
advancement. And I’m sure that this will
be the first of many you’ll find around Australia in years to come. The idea of cheap transport and no emissions
has to be a good one. Any new car buyers
in Sydney now have an opportunity to look at making use of this charging
station. One way of doing this might be
by buying a new electric powered vehicle or hybrid. Certainly, the electric cars are becoming more
populous amongst the new car lists at the back of good car mags. We really are entering a whole new world of
transportation.
On the topic of electric transportation,
electric trains and electric buses have been around for a little while now, and
I notice that General Motors has found a viable option for plug-in public
transport buses. Investments into this
form of electric transport have already been made – approximately $30 million
US. The EcoRide BE-35 battery electric bus,
made by Proterra, needs as little as 10 minutes to charge. I wish my AAA battery recharger was as
efficient as this! With a 65-kilometre
range for the fast charge option, this is a bus that could easily replace
diesel powered buses for any typical transit and shuttle services around a city.
The bonus of running public electric transport
and private electric transport, particularly in a city environment, is that would
be a very big reduction in smog, greenhouse gas pollution, congestion and noise
inside the city boundaries. As long as
the production of the electricity at the primary stage is clean, then we’re in
a win-win situation. It’s not so cool if
the production of the electricity for running the electric vehicles has been
performed by employing belching coal stations or nuclear reactors! If this was the case, then the electric form
of transport isn’t so clean – and definitely not such a hot trend, after
all.
A greater demand for electricity would
create greater emissions from a coal powered station. If your source of power is coming from
hydro-power stations or wind or solar energy, then the greater demand for
electricity has nil effect on the environment – in fact, it would be better
because you’re reducing emissions into the atmosphere by taking the petrol and
diesel powered options off the road as people turn to electric vehicles for
getting from A to B.
With Sydney now getting in on the
charging stations, they have joined other cities such as Amsterdam, San
Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Vancouver and London who have
installed a charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
Do you think it’s timely to buy an
electric vehicle, yet? Or do you think
we should hold fire and see if time will tell whether electricity will continue
to be a feasible means of clean green transport?
Level 2, 9 Help Street