“Our lives need to change,” says Josipa Petrunic, president and CEO of the Canadian Urban Transit Research & Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC), a Canadian technology consortium launched in 2015 to design, deploy and advance zero-carbon and smart-enabled transportation and mobility solutions.
“There’s no way to get to our COP26 promises – or anything near those promises – without charging people for every kilometre of roadway used in personal cars and trucks, and mostly getting rid of cars for the majority of regular commutes,” says Petrunic. That means people driving less, even if they have an electric car, and taking rapid and frequent public transit in the form of electrified and hydrogen-powered buses, streetcars, subways, trains and more.
As a non-profit, CUTRIC supports municipalities, transit agencies and other organizations through the complex task of making the change to zero-emission buses (ZEBs), with an eye to social accountability. “My team is not paid to make sales,” Petrunic says. “We’re paid to design and deploy complex green-technology projects that no single transit agency or manufacturer can do on their own.”
Collaboration is key because complicated technologies require innovative solution-building across competitors in an industry. “Working with municipalities, we understand they know their fleet and their community best,” says Parvathy Pillai, program manager with CUTRIC’s ZEB Non-Profit Consulting Services. “They know what their needs are, and CUTRIC guides them to make neutral and scientific decisions about electric fleets to reduce costs and to get to zero faster.”
The future of ZEBs (zero emission buses)
To get to zero emissions, transit agencies need to reframe how they organize routes to enable recharging – buses need to recharge regularly, and they’ll often do it right on the road, with overhead chargers. “It blows up transit schedules, and it’s a complete system overhaul,” Petrunic says.
The electrification-system overhaul Petrunic describes is also expensive. An electric bus can cost more than $1-million, around double the cost of a regular diesel bus. Chargers cost millions of dollars too. And agencies need new staff – electricians, electrical engineers, new project managers, and new trainers and maintenance officers. The plus side is that ZEBs are less expensive to run over the long term, and will increasingly become cheaper as renewable electricity drops in price with volume, and diesel increases in cost with carbon pricing.
Much-needed support
CUTRIC’S ZEB Consulting Services help communities assess the feasibility of transitioning their transit systems, calculate costs, understand the products on the market and fine-tune implementation from pilots to full rollouts.
Pivotal to this work is CUTRIC’s specially developed simulation tool, RoutΣ.i (which is pronounced Route I – the sigma symbol stands for aggregation and summation of energy production, and the “i” for artificial intelligence). It was developed by the organization’s in-house economists, mathematicians and physicists, and refined using real-world data from customers – such as the Toronto Transit Commission, Brampton Transit and Orange County Transportation Authority in Southern California, among others.
“We improve the tool and we share it back,” Pillai says. RoutΣ.i allows municipalities to predict the performance of ZEBs on their routes with a variety of charging strategies, which highlight a system’s energy needs and challenges.