As bus ridership rises slowly in Connecticut, the state Department of Transportation’s bus transportation arm — known as CTTransit — is making a strong commitment to reducing the agency’s impact on the environment.
Its efforts to improve energy efficiency in its fleet of buses as well as its infrastructure have earned CTTransit the Alternative Energy Award at this year’s Hartford Business Journal Business Energy Summit.
CTTransit has taken big steps toward adapting more environmentally-friendly initiatives to lessen the agency’s carbon footprint. The initiative that’s had one of the biggest impacts involves increasing the number of buses that use alternatives to standard diesel fuel.
“We use five-percent biodiesel fuel in all of our buses,” said Mike Sanders, transit administrator at DOT. “We’re probably one of the largest purchasers of biodiesel in the state.”
CTTransit purchases 4,000,000 gallons of biodiesel per year, about 200,000 gallons of which is pure bio-fuel. Biodiesel is a renewable alternative fuel produced from a wide range of vegetable oils and animal fats. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, using clean-burning biodiesel as a vehicle fuel increases energy security, and improves public health and the environment by reducing emissions of harmful chemicals.
CTTransit began introducing environmentally-friendly initiatives back in 2003, when two hybrid-electric buses were introduced. In 2007, a hydrogen fuel cell bus was put in service. And in this year alone, the agency is adding four more fuel cell buses, developed by Hartford-based United Technologies Corp. Sanders said he expects that all five will be operational by the end of the year.
The hydrogen fuel cell buses are more fuel efficient than traditional diesel buses, Sanders said.
“Fuel cell buses get about double the fuel efficiency versus diesel,” Sanders said. “The fuel cell buses are getting about eight or nine miles to the gallon.”
A regular diesel bus, weighing 28,000 pounds and stopping and starting frequently in city traffic, gets four to five miles per gallon.
While hybrids are an improvement over diesel, they’re not as fuel efficient as fuel-cell buses. Hybrids offer 20 percent improved efficiency, or an increase of one mile per gallon. But they’re beginning to play a much bigger role in CTTransit’s bus fleet.
“We’re buying 50 new buses this year, and about half of them are going to be hybrids,” Sanders said.
Ten of those hybrid articulate buses (60-foot long buses that bend in the middle) are heading to the Hartford area.
Sanders said cost is a major factor in the agency’s decision to increasingly rely on hybrid buses.
“Hybrids cost about $180,000 more than a regular bus, which costs about $400,000,” he said. “With one mile-per-gallon better fuel efficiency, you get about half of that back in fuel costs over the life of the bus.”
Other benefits with using more efficient buses such as hybrids are regenerative braking, which is an energy recovery mechanism, and cooler engine running.
“They’ve been the most reliable buses in the fleet,” Sanders said of the hybrids.
At a cost of $2 million apiece, fuel cell buses represent innovative technology that is the wave of the future. But Sanders said the cost will need to come down before CTTransit puts more into operation.
“While we’re saving on operating dollars, you need to put the capital up front,” he said. “It’s not a payback any private business would accept but we can at least say it’s worth the initial capital investment because we’ll be saving over the 12 years (of the life of a CTTransit bus).”
Sanders said under an agreement with UTC, CTTransit agreed to operate the fuel-cell buses after UTC received a federal grant to build them.
While CTTransit improves the energy efficiency of its bus fleet, the agency is also working to make its workplaces greener. Solar panels were installed at the Hartford bus garage in 2003, and there are plans to install more solar panels at both the Hartford and New Haven garages.
Over the next several months, CTTransit plans to install a hydrogen fueling station so buses can fuel up on-site. In addition, there is an effort to install stationary fuel cell units in two CTTransit sites in the state. The fuel cell units will provide electricity and a hot water source, reducing CTTransit’s reliance on the electric grid.
“We’re part of the leading edge there,” Sanders said.
CTTransit is showing slight year-over-year increases in bus ridership in 2010. With the New Britain-to-Hartford busway set to launch in 2014, CTTransit is looking to the future with a focus on both energy efficiency and good business sense.
“We’re looking for things that can make us good citizens, but it has to have a good payback,” Sanders said. “We have to make sure we have a good business case for things.”
