LA purchased 130 electric buses - the largest order in the US. The city's chief of transit reveals the challenges ahead in electrifying the country's 2nd-largest city.
- In November, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) ordered 130 electric buses from the Chinese company BYD. It's believed to be the largest order of e-buses in US history.
- The buses are part of the LADOT's plan to make its entire fleet electric by 2030, with a total of about 511 e-buses.
- Business Insider talked with the transportation department's chief of transit, Corinne Ralph, about what it will take to transition the fleet, which services the second-largest city in the US - in just 10 years.
- She said the two biggest challenges are power and cost. Utilities will have to meet a huge surge in demand, and the price for buses and the infrastructure to support them amounts to tens of millions of dollars.
- Do you have a tip or story idea about the business of energy? Contact this reporter at bjones@businessinsider.com or through the encrypted messenger app Signal at 646-768-1657.
- Click here for more BI Prime articles.
Los Angeles is best known for beautiful celebrities, sandy beaches and, of course, traffic. So it might come as a surprise that in just 10 years, a portion of the city's entire public transportation fleet - buses that service downtown LA and 27 neighborhoods - will be 100% electric.
The city has just four electric buses today. By 2030, it's planning to have about 511, officials said. That set the stage for a historic purchase the city made last month: The transportation department ordered 130 e-buses from the Chinese company BYD, which is considered the largest sale of electric buses in the nation's history.
Affording those buses is just one challenge that Corrine Ralph, LA's chief of transit programs, faces in this transition. In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, she explains what it will take for a city of roughly 4 million to go all-electric.
"Buses play a major role [in greenhouse gas emissions], partly because we are on the streets for much longer," Ralph said, signaling that electric buses are an essential part of the city's zero-emissions strategy. "It's no longer a choice. This is going to be something that we all have to do."
What it costs to reach zero emissions
Buses are not cheap. And electric buses are as expensive as they come. The 130 e-buses that the city of Los Angeles bought are roughly $650,000 each, Ralph says - or about $175,000 to $225,000 more expensive than the gas-powered buses in the city's fleet. Multiply that by 511 and you're staring at more than a third of a billion dollars.
That price tag doesn't take into consideration the cost of training or the charging infrastructure. For LA County, infrastructure could cost up to $1 billion, according to notes from a 2019 committee meeting.
"Agencies do not anticipate the amount of dollars it's going to take for you to install the necessary infrastructure," Ralph said. "I think the costs of the buses and the cost of infrastructure hours I need are the two biggest challenges that we have."
Ralph says the sheer cost of electrifying public transit has generated "a certain amount of concern in terms of the dollar figures." No doubt, other cities, especially those with much smaller budgets, will have trouble footing the bill.
"A lot of agencies are not able to find that additional funding to be able to do that," she said.
But here's the thing: Electric buses have been shown to save money in the long-run.
Transit officials in Chicago, for example, say that just two e-buses save the city $24,000 in fuel costs and $30,000 in maintenance costs each year, not to mention the benefits linked to improved air quality.
Cities can apply for federal and state grants to help cover the costs. In 2019, the Federal Transit Administration announced that it awarded nearly $85 million in grants through its Low or No Emissions Grant program.
"We have been budgeting and going after grants aggressively in order to be able to bind down the cost, at least of the buses," Ralph said.
Aggressive is right. In 2018, LADOT received a grant from the California Transit and Intercity Rail Capital Program, a government grantmaking agency, to purchase 112 e-buses.
The next challenge: Power. What happens when you plug in hundreds of buses?
The 130 electric buses will start to arrive in early 2021, Ralph says. And one of her big concerns, leading up to that day, is how the city will provide enough electricity to charge them. Each BYD bus has a battery capacity of 215 kWh, which is roughly equivalent to the daily power consumption of 7 American households.
"The power need is a fairly significant challenge to overcome," she said. "There is a lot of demand that's going to be required of the utilities. It's a lot of pressure on their own equipment as well."
Utilities might need to put more power on the grid, she says, not to mention new infrastructure to support the buses.
But there's a simple way to confront the challenge of demand: talk to the utility in the months or even years leading up to the transition. She, for one, attends weekly meetings, where the city and its utility, the Department of Water and Power, discuss how much power they'll need, and when.
There are also a few ways to reduce demand, Ralph says. Public buses can charge in the middle of the night, for example, when there's less stress on the grid and the cost of electricity is cheaper.
"The fact that we're operating during off-peak where there's no demand really puts a handle around our costs," she said.
And what about onsite storage? Or the ability to plug buses back into the grid when power usage is peaking? Ralph says the city's transportation department is currently looking into it, but there are no concrete plans yet.
LA's e-bus purchase is impressive. Until you look at what China is doing.
There were nearly 425,000 electric buses globally at the end of 2018. And 99% of them were in China. In fact, some cities in China have more e-buses than the entire US.
The southeastern Chinese city of Shenzen with its 12 million people, makes Los Angeles, with its roughly 4 million people, look like a quaint college town. Shenzen's public bus fleet - consisting of a staggering 16,359 buses - is 100% electric.
But that's not to say that introducing 130 new electric buses in LA won't make a difference.
According to the LADOT, the addition will offset the city's carbon footprint by 233,450 metric tons over 12 years, which is equivalent to taking more than 4,000 gas cars off the road over the same period.
