India has seen some 600+ e-Buses pilot deployment in last 2 years with another 5,000+ expected in next 2-3 years. These first deployments in many of the STUs are helping establish some performance benchmarks to evaluate e-Buses further scale-up. The fuel cost opex reduction from e-Buses by approx. 70% is getting appreciated, but still there remains many other hurdles to overcome to fully establish lower TCO advantage of e-Buses and hassle-free operations. One strong most area of improvement is Operations and Monitoring of e-Buses, which is daily lifeline for maintaining healthy and viable fleet, post the procurement and Charging infrastructure setup is completed.
Most Depots having e-Bus fleet today are also having much bigger ICE bus fleet with established legacy systems and processes.e-Buses systematic planning, daily scheduling and charging operations are not well coordinated for efficient operations. The selected routes for e-Buses are not checked for energy kWh consumption in different hours of the day under different city loading conditions and showing huge variations. The schedules are not prepared keeping in mind these SOC/range variations in one full-charge and need for intermittent charging time (with given chargers’ locations and availability). This is resulting into high number of stand-by e-Buses at Depot to service schedules while returning e-Buses are put on-charge, leading to lower kms/day utilization of e-Buses relative to ICEs.
Most monitoring is done through manual logs and there is not strong data analytics and control to improve overall performance, utilization and costs. The multi-charger operations throughout the day are not auto monitored and controlled for optimal peak power management and overall cost of electricity.
There is strong need for Operators and STUs to improve Monitoring and Controls of e-Bus daily Operations for deriving best performance possible with already procured costly assets, and fully realise e-Bus advantages.
The 3rd Webinar under the e-Mobilogues series brings global practitioners, who will share their experiences and best practices around improving e-Bus Operations and Monitoring, with special focus on Planning, Scheduling and Charging. This Webinar will help understand and answer following top questions:
- What key differences in Planning and Scheduling of e-Buses compared to conventionalICE buses, and how best to undertake it?
- Once e-Buses procurement and charging infrastructure setup completed, what set of analysis and inputs to be used for routes selection and developing daily schedules for achieving higher kms per day e-Bus utilization?
- What smart monitoring and charging elements can bring useful control for overall healthy and optimal e-Bus, batteries and charging performance?
- What learnings to draw from current pilot deployments to 1) improve current e-Bus operations and ROI and 2) improved next planning and procurement of e-Buses?
