Collaborative Leadership for a Zero-Emission Transit Future
Last month, C3 joined a group of decision-makers from Charlottesville and Albemarle County to check out the on-site hydrogen bus fuel production facility in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. This was the second such excursion after a first group visited the facility in May, with both elected and appointed officials joining from the City and County, as well as decision-makers from UVA and the wider region.
For C3, we saw a multitude of benefits in taking the opportunity to travel so far outside of our service area. For one, it was a chance to see zero-emission transit (from fuel production to tailpipe emissions) in action. It was also a chance to see, in real-time and in the wild, how our decision-makers across jurisdictions are talking about the collaborative transition to a zero-emission transit system. Beyond that, we hoped to learn more about the diesel hybrid buses that Champaign-Urbana’s transit agency, MTD, deploys with such reliability. Of course, C3 is an organization that likes to pursue every possible avenue toward decarbonization, so we took the Cardinal train to get there!
In a number of ways, Champaign-Urbana’s transit system and jurisdictional landscape bear similarities to the Charlottesville and Albemarle urban areas. Both localities are composed of two distinct jurisdictions that are each heavily shaped by the presence of a significant university. Both Champaign-Urbana and Charlottesville-Albemarle have ambitious, visionary leadership that is seeking novel ways to decarbonize across sectors. Both CAT and MTD seek to engage the public in key decisions that shape the transit landscape in pursuit of equitable transit capable of truly serving the community that needs it most. With a groundbreaking clean hydrogen production facility location on-site at MTD’s bus depot, CAT leadership sees the MTD facility as a potential blueprint for our own zero-emission transition.
Shaking Up the industry
What makes the facility “groundbreaking”? Don’t worry, it’s not groundbreaking like fracked gas! All of their onsite hydrogen production for their 12 hydrogen buses is currently powered by a 2MW solar array just across the street from the facility. To quote MTD’s Managing Director Karl Gnadt, owning and thereby controlling the means of clean energy generation in this manner allows them to be “intellectually honest” when they say that their hydrogen fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) truly produce zero emissions. Indeed, the only tailpipe emissions from these FCEBs are air and water.
However, in order to accommodate an increase to their FCEB fleet, MTD is likely to begin bringing in liquified hydrogen produced from a plant powered by fracked gas, a move they hope will be temporary while Illinois pursues investments in clean hydrogen production. As part of CAT’s zero-emission bus transition, the agency would have to be very careful to ensure a steady supply of a sufficient amount of green hydrogen to justify the prioritization of hydrogen FCEBs. In discussing this with C3, CAT Director Garland Williams gave his assurance that he was conscious of this need and planned to pursue a diverse mix of zero-emission bus fuels in order to build resiliency into the future fleet.
Regional collaboration
Because MTD is a unified regional system, it has a much larger fleet than any of our regional operators by themselves, which has implications on the long-term financial considerations for bringing in new sources of funding and the fuel itself. This trip highlighted for the agencies that coordination in their implementation strategies across multiple smaller fleets was going to be a critical step to being as successful in laying out a budget path as MTD has been with its much larger single fleet.
As might be imagined with stakeholders and decision-makers present from across Charlottesville and Albemarle’s transit landscape, the range of priorities and perspectives over the course of the tour was wide and varied. What stood out, though, was the level of engagement and commitment to the work that C3 has long promoted: questions and discussion abounded around everything from how to maintain a consistent supply of green hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen produced using renewable energy) to the benefits of expanding CAT’s fleet using diesel hybrid buses (which Karl Gnadt described as an ideal bridge toward zero emissions). A top conversation topic was how the hotly-anticipated Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Transit Authority (CARTA), which will be voted on separately by the County (December 11) and the City (December 16), will be positioned to pursue more ambitious endeavors, such as a green hydrogen production facility with a capacity high enough to allow CAT to operate a significant number of hydrogen buses.
While a deeper dive from C3 into the benefits of a regional transit authority is coming in next week’s blog, it is worth noting here that MTD has been empowered to carve a trailblazing path in no small part due to the regional stakeholders - the Cities of Champaign and Urbana and the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana - entrusting the agency with a high degree autonomy. MTD can do things like collect revenue from taxes, and to design a transit system that is aligned with how residents of the locality actually live and travel. Joined-up thinking like this has allowed them to maximize route efficiency, as well as opening up additional Federal funding streams by increasing the system size. While MTD provides service even into the rural areas, the broadened access to diverse funding streams means that the County does not spend any of its own money on service, instead availing of Federal and State funding.
One surprising detail from the trip is that despite aggressively pursuing decarbonized transit, having retired their last fully-diesel buses in 2023, MTD currently does not operate battery-electric buses (BEBs). Alongside their 12 FCEBs, the bulk of MTD’s fleet comprises what it described as flawlessly reliable diesel hybrid buses, purchased using Federal Low or No Emissions grant funding. CAT’s current route setup and range requirements pose a challenge to any immediate, whole-system adoption of BEBs, but this is not the case for Charlottesville area school buses, which have much shorter routes as well as more downtime during the day, and are unlikely to face any range challenges.
Must love co-benefits
There is one extremely compelling secondary use of BEB batteries. It is possible, and can more than double their lifecyle, to use bus batteries as solar energy storage after their storage capacity has been reduced to about 80%. Indeed, this why Dominion is already providing funding to Charlottesville for electric school bus charging infrastructure, with the energy giant in pursuit of additional grid storage by repurposing electric school bus batteries.
Imagine a collaboration between Charlottesville, Albemarle and UVA (and beyond!) that empowered CAT to operate a mix of ZEBs: FCEBs powered by solar-powered “green” hydrogen generated on site, and BEBs whose batteries are repurposed to store additional solar energy in a micro grid so that the power stays on even when the sun goes down, with electric school buses ensuring that our children’s lungs are no longer vulnerable to damaging diesel fumes from dirty fossil fuel emissions. This is no mere pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic utopia, but rather a highly pragmatic, whole-system solution that prioritizes collaboration over fragmentation, amplifying the power of our community’s shared resources.
In discussing diesel hybrid buses for CAT’s fleet expansion, Director Garland Williams told C3 that there are still barriers in the form of the space required for necessary on-site spare part storage. Even with that consideration in mind, however, C3 is not giving up on calling on CAT to use diesel hybrid buses instead of conventional diesel during the next few years of its planned fleet expansion. We have an obligation, whether decision-makers or advocates, to take all possible steps to mitigate the damage our decisions can do to our communities. Hybrid buses serve both future and current residents, by immediately improving the air quality with deeply lowered greenhouse gas emissions from transit. As climate justice advocates, it’s not a question of either service improvements or lowered emissions, but a “both/and”.
The engagement shown by stakeholders from across the region around Charlottesville and Albemarle during this shared mission to learn more about FCEBs, BEBs and regional collaboration was inspiring. We believe that they were, in turn, inspired to enact a vision of a greater regional transit system that can serve as a model of visionary, collaborative leadership to inspire more agencies across the county. We hope that next time we meet, it will be MTD taking Amtrak to visit us to learn more about CAT’s zero emission bus facilities - for example, how about that solar micro-grid from second-life bus batteries powering a hydrogen bus fuel production facility?
