Electric Dump Trucks! Electric Cement Mixers! And More at ACT Expo

Don’t call it a garbage truck! The Peterbilt Model 520EV is the Cadillac of electric garbage trucks, er, refuse trucks. With a mighty 400-kWh LFP battery powering all its systems, the 520EV can lift, empty, and replace 1100 garbage cans in a single charge. The tandem Meritor 14Xe motors in back are equipped with regenerative braking for all that stop-and-go driving a refuse hauler faces daily. Even the right-mounted bin lifter is electrically powered, and on top of that it recaptures some of that energy through regen as it sets the can back on the ground.

Peterbilt will lease you one for two to four weeks so you can see if you like it. They’ll even help you apply for government grants that are available to EV buyers. Another Peterbilt partner will help you sort out getting chargers and infrastructure. There’s a calculator on the Peterbilt website that will help determine the time it takes to pay off, given whatever duty cycle you plan to use.

Here’s hoping my local waste management provider will consider one.

How cool would it be to have an electric cement mixer? The Mini Mix is the smallest of the three mixer lines truckmaker Terex offers. They can ride on a number of truck chassis and drivetrains. The show model at ACT Expo rode on an International eMV electric truck, with a 210-kWh battery mounted between the frame rails and a single electric motor powering the rear wheels with up to 335 peak hp. Range is said to be 135 miles. Terex adds its own mixing drum on top of that, with an electric power take-off (EPTO) made by Viatec mounted on top of the frame behind the cab. The EPTO powers a pump that spins the three- or four-yard drum hydraulically. It’s not too soon to start shopping for birthday presents…

Even earth-moving equipment is going all-electric. Volvo showed off its new midsize EC230 electric excavator at ACT Expo, and the 23-ton machine had quite a presence on the show floor there in Anaheim. The tracked vehicle with a swiveling body and a long digging arm can perform all the same tasks as its diesel-powered sibling, while reducing maintenance and operating costs and causing fewer irked neighbors at construction sites. It has been in use in Europe and will begin a testing process at various sites in North America this year before going on sale commercially here in 2024. No prices were released but an executive said to expect initial prices to be “two- to two and a half times as much as a diesel equivalent.” How soon that added upfront cost would be recouped by lower maintenance and operating costs would depend on how much the electric version gets used.

Say you decide to make the jump to cleaner-burning compressed natural gas for your fleet. Sometimes there’s a fueling station you can use that serves up compressed CH4. But depending on your location, you may have to compress it yourself. That’s where this cool-looking Industrial Revolution-style Ariel CNG Compressor comes in. It uses a number of pistons in decreasing-sized cylinders to squeeze the gas down from the 6 or 10 psi it’s pressurized at when it comes out of the pipe in your home down to 4500 psi to get it into a storage tank in your CNG-powered car or truck.

There was a cutaway model of a compressor at the ACT Expo and it looked like an opposed-cylinder engine at first. Then you could see the increasingly smaller pistons and cylinders used as the gas got more and more pressurized. Ariel has more than 4300 compressors in the field working today, in 31 different models. But this cutaway is what I want for my desktop.

For those who complain that all these electric cars are going to crash the grid, consider this: Maybe all these electric cars can be used to prevent the grid from crashing in the first place! Fermata Energy uses bi-directional charging to pump electricity from your electric car back to either your house, your factory, or the electric grid itself, thus preventing brown-outs and even blackouts. Fermata has partnered with medium-duty vehicle maker Phoenix Motor Inc., and has gotten approval from Nissan, to use those two companies’ vehicles for V2X (vehicle-to-everything) applications. Fermata says car owners with vehicles capable of bidirectional charging can get agreements with utilities to send electricity from their cars to the grid when needed—and get paid for doing so.

“Grid-tied electric vehicles are batteries on wheels that can support grid resilience,” Fermata said April 18 when it announced a partnership with a company called EnergyHub to accelerate utilities’ access to EVs as mobile distributed energy resources (DERs). “Forward-looking utilities are leveraging EVs as mobile energy storage assets to support grid resilience.”

If enough electric cars and trucks incorporate bidirectional charging, then peak power demands in summer can be mitigated by using the electric car fleet to buffer peak loads, while earning money for vehicle owners.

There are a few battery recycling entities out there already, most notably Redwood Materials headquartered in Carson City, Nevada. A new company called Li-Cycle is another. Li-Cycle will specialize in recycling Li-ion batteries by shredding them, dropping the shreds in an aqueous solution that allows the heavy metals to sink to the bottom, and then recovering the various minerals. Those minerals include: lithium carbonate, nickel sulphate, cobalt sulphate, manganese carbonate, and copper sulfide, all the materials needed to make, or remake, a battery. Or a healthy breakfast for your robot. Li-Cycle says it can recover up to 95 percent of battery grade materials in its recycling process. The company’s new facility in Rochester, NY will process 35,000 tons of what is known as black mass, the stuff you get after you shred batteries. Materials will be sourced from LiCycle hubs around the country.

There’s natural gas, which is pumped out of the ground, and there’s renewable natural gas, which is harvested from various decaying organic matter. Renewable natural gas is much better.

One criticism of fuel-cell vehicles is that the hydrogen they use, while clean in its finished state, almost always comes from reformation of natural gas, a process that is costly, energy intensive, and which itself releases CO2 into the atmosphere. One way to address that concern is through the use of so-called Renewable Natural Gas, or RNG. The idea is to source natural gas from locations that are currently releasing it into the atmosphere, where it is contributing to global warming.

There are different sources from which to gather RNG, but the richest is good old manure, straight from the dairy farm, the pig farm, or even from sewage treatment plants outside your city. The methane that would otherwise float up from those sources into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming can instead be captured, cleaned, compressed and piped into an internal-combustion engine.

“Methane is 25 times more harmful for greenhouse gas emissions than CO2,” said Eric Bippus, senior VP at Hexagon Agility, during a presentation at ACT Expo. “If you use renewable natural gas instead, a little bit of CO2 comes out at the end, and a very, very low amount of NOx, almost no NOx, which is why we're excited about California because it has a very strict NOx rule for diesel.”

By capturing RNG instead of using fossil fuel-sourced natural gas that is pumped out of the ground, the California Air Resources Board actually rates RNG a negative in terms of environmental damage, since the fossil natural gas would be much more damaging to the atmosphere.

The day before ACT Expo, a company called Anaergia announced it would supply renewable natural gas to make hydrogen for Toyota’s Logistics Services Center at the Port of Long Beach in California, where Toyota processes 200,000 cars, trucks and SUVs a year.

While the sound of screaming kids may stay the same, the throbbing din of a diesel engine is gone from the new Blue Bird Electric school bus. Blue Bird has already put close to 1000 electric school buses on the road today in 36 states and four provinces. Yes, an electric school bus costs more than a diesel—this one’s about $350,000—but the savings in maintenance and fuel costs, combined with numerous government grants available, mean they could pay for themselves and then keep going. The EPA Clean School Bus Program has $5 million to dish out for school districts like yours.

Hyundai showed a fuel cell-powered box truck last year in various markets around the world, but this is its first fuel cell-powered Class 8 tractor to haul trailers. This 6x4 setup is equipped with two 90-kW hydrogen fuel-cell systems for a total 180 kW of power and a 350-kW e-motor. Its gross combined weight is a maximum 82,000 pounds, with a range of over 450 miles fully loaded. The hydrogen is stored in 10 cylindrical tanks, each with 68 to 70 kgs of the fuel sitting at 10,000 psi. A 72-kWh battery helps smooth out the power.

While Hyundai is taking orders today, the first delivery will go to the Port of Oakland, Calif.

“Hyundai Motor views hydrogen as the clean energy solution for (commercial vehicles), including energy-intensive heavy-duty trucking, due to their various advantages in production, transportation, distribution, and storage,” the company said.

There were several companies with yard trucks on display at ACT Expo, but Orange EV somehow got our attention with their efficient-looking electric. A yard truck is like a truncated version of a big-rig diesel except that it’s meant only to haul trailers around warehouses and distribution centers, or across docks at shipping ports. Orange EV was only founded in 2012, but it has a number of firsts to its credit: It’s the first to commercially deploy 100% electric Class 8 electric vehicles into container handling operations. It also has over 700 of its electric trucks in service across North America, with 9 million miles of hauling.

Its e-Triever yard truck can haul 81,000-pound trailers on its 4x2 or 6x2 chassis at speeds up to 25 mph, which is as fast as you want to go on a dock or in a distribution yard. Like its Class 8 long-haul semi brethren, the e-Treiver costs more up front, but pays off with greatly reduced maintenance and charging costs compared to diesel.

As with many EVs, there are some pre-conceived notions to overcome among buyers.