Q&A: CUTRIC Technical Director Mohammad Kharouf on the importance of futureproofing for bus fleet electrification

As governments around the world work towards their emission reduction and climate change goals, many are looking to their transit operations to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, pushing a transition to zero-emission technologies. Many transit agencies have already begun testing hybrid, battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses to see what will best serve their needs. As these agencies conclude their testing and narrow in on a propulsion method, they must grapple with the challenge of fueling their fleet, often requiring the renovation of their existing depots and maintenance facilities.

Mass Transit magazine sat down with Mohammad Kharouf, the technical director at the Canadian Urban Transportation Research and Innovation Consortium (CUTRIC) leading the charge behind the consulting firm’s zero-emission infrastructure planning services. Kharouf explained what CUTRIC has learned while helping agencies plan for these zero-emission transitions, what they’re still working out and how the quick evolution of technology can occasionally muddy the waters.

When transit agencies begin planning for these new zero-emission facilities, what are the biggest early challenges or misconceptions that you’ve seen that may have led to adjustments?

If you talked to me even two years before, I’d tell you the challenge was agencies thinking that “I can just replace my diesel with a battery-electric bus,” just like it’s a purchase—it’s a different purchase price, different tech. Now, today, agencies are more well-informed with the conferences held by CUTRIC, [the Canadian Urban Transportation Association], by [the Ontario Public Transportation Association] in Ontario that this is not the case. It’s more than that. You need to change not only your bus, but the infrastructure that you have in the building, and on top of that, most importantly, your workforce development should be adapting to those changes. When I say workforce, it’s from the driver of the bus up to the operations and the maintenance in the garage.

Agencies are seeing this as something they have to address and are coming to us or to other consultants to see how they can make this change smoother. The technology is evolving rapidly, so the feasibility study we’re doing today might not be applicable one year down the road—I won’t say even two years down the road now. We’re now calling it, instead of a plan, we call it a playbook for anything beyond five years. I can’t tell you that this is going to happen, but we have to make a best guess based on technology today on how the cost will look like, how the cash flow will look for the agency—but that’s not fully guaranteed. 

We try to set in stone the five years...[but] you cannot build a facility in five years. Even retrofitting a facility in five years is something that we learned is not easy to do. Transforming your facility, you need to start planning and starting design—you need at least three years to do so and prepare for the funding and go to the council—that might add one year more.

How do you help agencies figure out how large their facility upgrades need to be, whether that’s in their charging capacity, their vehicle storage capacity or in their power needs?

As I said, we try to do the short-term plan and the long-term playbook. You have the specifications of the vehicles that are on the ground right now and offered, you have the service schedule that is [in place] right now and then the agency might have an idea of how the growth would look like in the coming years, so we bake that in. Now, for an electrified bus, you have this strange issue, right? For the diesel bus, you don’t even think about it, you just buy it and run it. But for the battery-electric bus or a fuel-cell electric bus, you want to know if your service throughout the day can be performed by that bus or if you have to do something else. To do that, we start with analyzing the energy demand through the current service routes using the current technology we have right now and then we estimate whether they need on-route charging to make things more feasible. 

Many agencies in Canada...the service is just one bus serving one route back and forth. They don’t have that recovery time baked in. That’s another challenge where, okay, maybe opportunity charging is not applicable, so you will have to re-block your system… or you might have to go bring the bus back to the depot and get another bus onto the road to continue the service. That could be possible sometimes because even though the bus might continue the service for 12, 13, 14 hours, the shift of the driver is typically not more than eight hours. It might be a good chance to do the re-blocking when the driver goes back to the facility and another driver comes in with a bus that is fully charged or fully fueled.

How do you plan for the significant differences that weather can have on range?

We assume that variance by applying different duty cycles from worst case scenario to best case scenario. The worst case scenario in Canada is the winter period. In other parts of the world, it could be the summer period because of the air conditioning. With that said, in Canada it’s not the same. Here in Vancouver, it’s going to be totally different than in Alberta, for example, where the temperatures are going to be -40, -50 [degrees Celsius]. 

The good thing is that we do have a solution that is not very favored because it’s [seen as] counterintuitive. When you talk about diesel heaters on board, you’re electrifying your bus but are having a diesel heater. It might sound like a bad alternative, but it’s not as bad because of two reasons. One is that using diesel for heating is efficient. It has more than 90% efficiency. So, the fuel you get in there for heat, you get most of it as heat into the bus while the diesel combustion in the bus is not as efficient... The second thing is that you don’t need to use that diesel heater all the time. It’s just [used] when you set a certain temperature—typically agencies use between zero and -10 degrees [Celsius] as a set temperature to kick on that diesel heater… If we talk about Ontario, you might say “okay, maybe I’m going to kick in the diesel heater for two or three months in the year when the temperature drops below -10. Other than that, I’m just going to use my electric heater.”

That drops the energy consumption between like 25 to 30%. So, economically, it makes much more sense than saying “no, I don’t want it—I want an all-electric bus and don’t want to rely on a diesel heater.” I call it a reasonable middle ground. We shouldn’t be thinking of things as either zero or one… there should be a middle ground.

What obstacles have you seen agencies face, if any, when it comes to securing enough power for chargers at their bus depots? Has utility coordination been much of a problem?

Honestly, utility companies are now very proactively coordinating with the agencies. As part of our feasibility study, we do help agencies talk with the utilities to communicate that demand—how much do you need and when, depending on their timeline for electrification.

So far, the power capacity within the timeline… in the tens of agencies across Canada, I didn’t experience any difficulty from a specific agency with the utility provider [saying] that, “no, we don’t have [enough] power in that year.” You just have to plan. The most important thing is that you cannot tell the utility “Oh, next year, I need 10 megawatts.” It doesn’t work like that. You have to plan ahead and then communicate with the utility you’re planning off [of], and then the utility may make that happen by a certain timeline. Electrification isn’t going to come in a vacuum; it’s going to be a process for 10 to 15 years. As an agency, you have time to do that transformation in terms of your workforce—in terms of your facility itself. At the same time, the utility will have their time to make it possible that the power that you need in the time you need it is there and available.

When people talk about futureproofing a facility, what does that really mean for transit agencies that are just getting started? Does CUTRIC advise agencies of any priorities to plan for earlier to avoid surprises later?

Futureproofing is very, very important, and that’s why it’s important to do a long-term [playbook] and a short-term plan. A short-term plan might not see the full picture of how the facility will look after full electrification, and that might make you invest in assets that you will not use five years down the road—we just want to avoid this.

You want to do a feasibility study—come to a consultant like CUTRIC or someone else—to assess the best infrastructure that fits your demands [in] the longer term and the shorter term. Even if you invest a little bit more money today, but you know that five years down the road, you’re not just going to remove those chargers and put in new ones; in the long term, you’re going to be saving on that part.

The other thing that is very, very, very important [for Canadian agencies] is to keep your eye on the standards that are being developed by the Canadian Standards Association. There is a standard that is related to depot electrification. It is under review right now, so once it’s published, you want to make sure the fire protection requirements and the mechanical requirements in the facility are being met when you do retrofits. Until that is published, you want to make sure to hire consults that already adopt the best practices in the industry because they’re not electrifying a depot for the first time. 

Since funding can be a major hurtle, what does the funding landscape look like for facility upgrades and how do you help agencies navigate federal, provincial, local or even private sources of funding effectively?

That’s very important. The first thing that agencies look at is funding. They know that this is very expensive. You might think about operation and maintenance as being lower in cost, but the main assets, the main infrastructure—the retrofit costs are expensive. 

We do help agencies in filing the documentation needed to apply for funding. Part of the documentation was, for example, if I wanted to talk about the Zero-Emission Transit Fund—which ended—was to do the feasibility study. Because its taxpayer money, you want to make sure [it] is going to the right place… You don’t want to build or invest in something and in two to three years figure out, no, it doesn’t work this way because you didn’t do a feasibility study.

Is there any one key piece of advice you’d give transit agencies based on all the transitions you’ve assisted so far?

Invest more in learning how your transition would look before investing in assets. Focus on feasibility studies. Make sure they adapt to your needs. When we work with agencies, our work doesn’t matter if we don’t learn how the agency operates. It’s not just a one-way dialogue, it’s two way because every agency has a [specific] way to their operations. We learn from them, then we give our output and get their feedback. You want to make sure as an agency that that feasibility study makes sense and can be built upon in the next five years and then in the long term. 

Keep your eye on the technology changes because that’s something you want to adapt to because you might save a lot of money just because of one aspect that changed and you didn’t keep an eye on it. So, don’t take a feasibility study and say “Hey, I’m good for 10 years.”

To my statement of saying “invest more,” I don’t mean invest more money because feasibility studies are not going to be costing more money than buying your infrastructure... focus that investment before doing literally any step because the futureproofing is important. If you’re going to be buying a couple of buses as a pilot, that’s fine, you can do that. But after that, if  you’re an agency with 50 buses and are buying 10 buses, I would say, no, go do a feasibility study first before even buying/electrifying 20% of your fleet.