http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/03/greener-delivery/
Greener delivery?
March 16, 2015 | By Alvin Powell
[image / Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
http://media.news.harvard.edu/gazette/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/031315_mail_truck_022_605.jpg
(old usps ice) With the U.S. Postal Service poised to replace its mail
trucks, which get 9 mpg, with more fuel-efficient models, the options
can
get complicated. For the biggest impact, improving the efficiency of
truck
engines, particularly small trucks, is the answer, contends Henry Lee,
an
authority on electric cars and the Jassim M. Jaidah Family Director of
the
Environment and Natural Resources Program at the Belfer Center
]
Wider opportunities seen as Postal Service looks to improve on 9 miles
per
gallon
The boxy mail truck familiar on American roads for more than two
decades
soon may be a thing of the past. The Postal Service is beginning the
process
of replacing some 180,000 of the trucks, a significant portion of its
total
fleet.
The request for proposals sent to automakers in January carried
several
design considerations, including enhanced fuel efficiency, lower
emissions,
and enough space to allow workers to stand up in the back as they grab
letters and boxes for delivery.
The Gazette asked Henry Lee, an authority on electric cars and the
Jassim M.
Jaidah Family Director of the Environment and Natural Resources
Program
at
the Belfer Center, about the opportunity for the Postal Service to
improve
its environmental footprint — and perhaps spark broader automotive
changes —
through a more fuel-efficient replacement for the current model, which
gets
roughly 9 miles per gallon.
GAZETTE: How important should fuel efficiency be to the Postal
Service’s
consideration of a new vehicle?
LEE: That’s a tough question to answer. From the perspective of
someone
concerned about the environment, they should be quite concerned. But
if
I
was [head] of the Postal Service, I might say, “If society cares about
this
issue, they’ll put a price on carbon and that will change my thinking
about
what I’m going to buy. But if they won’t do it, why should the people
who
buy mail services and a company that’s multiple billions of dollars in
the
red pay more for something that government hasn’t told us it cares
about?”
GAZETTE: Would that higher initial cost be offset by lower operating
cost?
You take something that gets nine miles a gallon and get something
that
gets
25?
LEE: I haven’t done the numbers, but you have to ask how many miles
postal
workers travel in a day. Not many, though they travel a long time and
they
keep the engine idling. They probably travel more in a day than they
would
be able to if this was an electric car. They’d probably run out of
electricity. I haven’t done the analysis, but what if you went to
natural
gas? Or hydrogen? Certainly natural gas would be an option.
GAZETTE: Not electricity, though, because of the number of hours
they’re on
the road?
LEE: Well, you have to have a lot of batteries to move something that
heavy.
So if you need 30 to 34 batteries — lithium batteries — the cost of
the
vehicle would be $20,000 more, times 180,000, which is a pretty big
number.
The good news for electric vehicles is that they would all go back to
the
same garage in the evening, and you could put charging facilities in
the
garage quite easily. So charging won’t be a problem, which it might be
if
you or I bought the car. But you’d have to figure that it needs more
batteries than a normal car. You really don’t want the vehicle to have
to
come back at noon to be recharged.
So you’re going to need more batteries in each vehicle so you have
longer
range. A Tesla has a phenomenal number of batteries. But it can go for
240
miles.
GAZETTE: Do you have a sense of what an ideal mail vehicle would look
like?
LEE: No. It’s an interesting problem. If I had two weeks free, I bet I
could
come up with some ideas. I can tell you what won’t work, but I can’t
tell
you what the answer is. I can certainly beat 9 miles per gallon,
though. The
question is: Do I want to beat it by a factor of two or a factor of
three?
GAZETTE: If the media coverage is correct and the Postal Service is
going to
replace 180,000 vehicles, is that big enough to make an impact on the
tailpipe pollution that the country emits?
LEE: Yes and no. The no is because you have these vehicles dispersed
across
the entire country, so that’s not going to make a big dent [in local
air
quality]. Where it can make a dent is if you are now manufacturing
engines
that are a lot more efficient for midsize and small-size trucks —
small
trucks and SUVs are what Americans buy these days. And if you can
improve
the efficiency of truck engines, particularly small trucks, that would
have
a major impact.
If I build an engine that is more efficient and I have to buy
equipment
and
parts, somebody has to manufacture all those parts. They would
probably
like
to sell some parts to customers beyond the U.S. Postal Service, so the
impact of the improvement becomes wider. It’s like when an elite car
model
has some [advanced] device, and the next two years more cars have it
and,
after 10 years, all cars have it. So the more we can build more
efficient
vehicles, the better off we’re going to be and the better off the
world’s
going to be.
GAZETTE: Where do vehicle emissions rank in the list of climate change
challenges?
LEE: Again, a simple answer is hard here. If you forget climate for
one
second, smog is a huge problem in cities like New Delhi and many
others
in
China. Smog is a chemical soup that consists of a number of chemicals,
including small particles. A lot of these particles and a lot of the
NOX
[nitrogen oxides] are emitted by vehicles, particularly older trucks.
So if I can either substitute much more efficient models or get those
trucks
off the road, I’m going to make a dent in conventional pollution. I
was
just
amazed at the number of trucks I’ve seen in China. I haven’t spent
time
in
India, but I would suspect it’s not much different.
Second, as I ratchet down emissions of power plants — there’s the new
Obama
[power plant] rule and I suspect the Chinese are going to do the same
thing
when they come up with their cap-and-trade program — then those
sources
I’m
not ratcheting down will contribute a higher percentage of the total
CO2
emissions. People may say that we can get everything we need [in
emissions
reductions] now from power plants, but that’s not going to be the case
10
years from now, or 20 years from now, or 30 years from now. So if you
want
to make a difference in the out years, if you want to meet the 50
percent,
60 percent, 70-80 percent goals that the politicians are talking
about,
you
have to address transportation.
I’ve done a lot of work on electric cars, and I’ve done some work on
Chinese
electric cars and at first blush they look like a monumental failure.
They
were trying to build cars to compete with Toyota and Tesla, but there
are a
couple of small, private entrepreneurs who are saying, “We have a
pretty
good monopoly on electric bikes, why don’t we produce small electric
cars
that cost $5,000 and go 35 miles an hour and maybe can’t even be used
on the
highway?”
So they started making them and, lo and behold, they sold 400,000 of
them
last year. In fact, they sold 200,000 in one province. That’s five
times
what they sold in (larger) electric cars, so maybe they’re onto
something
here. These cars’ costs are at most $5,000 to $10,000. And somebody’s
going
to come along and say maybe there’s a niche here at $20,000 or $15,000
or
$18,000 for a better electric car. That doesn’t solve the
transportation
emission problem, but with 800 million households in China, it can
really
make a dent. And these cheap electric vehicles might just be what
India
needs.
Our focus is on the Tesla and these fancy $75,000-$80,000 cars, which
are
great cars. But maybe the answer for the world is these small and slow
electric vehicles.
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