Curious how it’ll perform in real world conditions. Sodium batteries are supposed to have much better charging times and don’t degrade the way lithium batteries do, both of which would be huge. Fingers crossed they live up to expectations.
(Also obligatory “expand and improve public transit damnit!”)
As some used to “gotchas” and things aren’t free, I’m wondering what kind of shortcomings[1] these batteries have that others do not.
[1] for example acid batteries can push a lot of power, but they are heavy and contain lead and well… acid. The nickel cadmium doesn’t contain lead and acid, but has memory so you should follow discharge them before charging again. They are lighter, but still not light. Lithium ion are light, don’t have memory, but can explode, also lose life if they are kept fully discharged or charged for long periods of time. They also slowly discharge when not in use, mainly due to protective circuit needing electricity to run.
Their only downside is having a little less energy density than lithium ion ones. You need a larger battery for the same capacity basically. Everything else is a positive - they are even non-flammable and the materials to make them are abundant and easy to obtain.
Where I live they recently bought a bunch of electric and hybrid public buses.
Hope they simply bought trolley buses and didn’t waste money on battery buses
It’s such a waste to put batteries in inner city buses
Trolley buses are a weird niche. They require permanent overhead cable infrastructure like trams do but don’t have the other benefits of trams - higher capacity, greater speed, better ride and no tyre pollution. I figure if you’re going to install a trolley bus route you probably might as well install rails at the same time and get the benefits of trams. (Aka streetcars for the North Americans out there)
The City of London did assessments on trolley buses and found that the added capacity of trams made them the better choice pretty much anywhere trolley buses were proposed, despite the slightly higher install cost.
Actually electric buses make a lot more sense, as the utilisation and environmental impact would be much greater compared to normal EV cars.
Plus you are conveniently omitted mentioning the energy losses of the cables, the maintenance cost, the installation cost, etc.
expand and improve public transit dammit!
Currently living in Shenzhen and you’d be surprised that you can actually have it both ways. You can get around via transit quite easily, but also driving isn’t too difficult. The problem with US cities is mostly just single family homes, which waste a bunch of space. If everything is less dense, you have to drive further to get to where you want to go, and building public transit makes less sense since it needs to service more areas to reach the same amount of people
