We have declared our support for the pursuit of sustainable technology that can meet the energy hunger of a growing nation while playing our albeit tiny role in trying to rolling back the Doomsday clock on climate change and global warming.
Barbados has been a world leader for such sustainable solutions as the solar water heater. Next we have plunged into grid-tied and off-grid photovoltaic electric cell generation. Now we are embarking on a future world of Transport, dominated all-electric and hybrid petrol-electric vehicles.
The Government has announced that it wants its fleet to be all-electric at the beginning of the 30s.
Abrahams outlined that such a move would result in a significant reduction in our oil import bill: “Currently one-third of Barbados’ fuel imports go towards transportation, which translates to approximately 3,500 barrels of oil every day. Using a conservative cost of US$50 per barrel, this costs US$64 million per year, but with oil prices now projected to rise closer to US$100, this could increase to as much as US$120 million.”
Already, there are more than 300 electric vehicles on the road. This number has increased with Government as well as private companies adding more EVs to their fleets in recent months.
“These vehicles can save us 2,390 barrels of oil per year,” the minister declared. “It doesn’t sound like much, but with the international price of oil at US$65 per barrel, we could save US$155,000 per year.”
We are keen to see what incentives will be rolled out to encourage Barbadians to buy electric cars, as there have been for the ubiquitous solar water heater. In the United States, car buyers receive tax credits when they trade in a petrol car for an electric one, specifically one which can be charged from an external source and has a battery pack with a capacity of 4 kilowatt hours or greater. The amount of subsidy varies from state to state, but the rebates do not cover used cars or older cars retrofitted with electric power.
Back home, the Transport Board plans to import 20 new all-electric buses and retrofit some older units. Here again, the examples of other countries are useful, and perhaps may point the way toward research here at home. In London, the transport authorities began evaluating prototypes of hybrid and all electric buses in 1998/99, with the first set of hybrids going into service in 2005. But March 2018, of the 9,396 buses in the fleet, roughly one-third were 3,240 hybrid (diesel-electric) powered buses, with 96 all-electric, and ten hydrogen-powered buses. Experiences in other major cities around the world seem to point to a news for a mixed fleet.
President of the Association of Public Transport Operators, Morris Lee, said APTO had evaluated three electric buses in 2013, and discovered that they performed well on the lucrative short, flat routes. When it came to higher elevations, such as the Scotland District, Horse Hill, St Andrew, and even Codrington Hill in St. Michael, they did not fare so well.
Codrington is especially tricky as it comes barely two miles into a journey from the capital that leads to numerous - and hilly -destinations in the interior - Holders Hill, Jackson, Hillaby, St. Andrew’s Church, Rock Hall/Rock Dundo, Sturges and Shorey Village.
Given the experience of the private operators, we hope the Government will consider giving five buses with different configurations a trial run - an extended test drive covering short and long routes with full loads of passengers, with no commitments on either side until we determine the vehicle mix that is best suited to our purposes. In some cases, it may be that a parallel hybrid, where the electric motor runs it at lower speeds but reverts to its conventional diesel engine at higher speeds or on inclines, might prove a wiser choice than all-electric power.
But fuel and foreign exchange savings aside, reducing greenhouse gases caused primarily by emissions from factories and vehicles remains high on the world’s agenda for many years, but has become more urgent as the problem has grown worse.
Yet we are bound to ask why the urgency to meet a deadline that’s a decade away when we have barely started preparing for it? How big is our contribution to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions? It would most likely be negligible given our small size. What is our carbon footprint and what tools or human resources exist here to measure it? Exhaust emissions testing does not form part of the vehicle inspection procedures at the Barbados Licensing Authority, and if it did, whose standards will we use - US or European Union or will we develop our own CARICOM standards?
Yes, going green will reduce our fuel import bill to some extent, but the majority of the power stations that generate the electricity to run the chargers still operate on conventional Bunker C crude oil. So what progress are we making with the wind and polarisers electricity generating plants? to all the petrol and diesel powered state-owned vehicles in the current fleet when Government decides to go “all-electric” by 2030. We are curious about what will become of the original stock of government vehicles; will they be scrapped ‘en masse’ or shipped out to developing as “foreign used” cars and trucks?
We champion any effort to preserve the environment and save foreign exchange, but we also need answers to still many unanswered questions to ascertain the nation’s needs for sustainable energy.
The post #BTEditorial – Electric dreams – pursued with caution appeared first on Barbados Today.
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