Battery Electric Buses in European Cities: Economic Comparison of Different Technological Concepts Based on Actual Demonstrations

Today, the conversion of diesel fueled public bus fleets into those powered by batteries is one of the most important issues for public transport operators. At the moment, there are several test-operations in different European cities, mainly in the frame of European Commission funded projects. Finding business cases is a crucial task, since the operation with the new technology should be at least not significantly more expensive than compared to Diesel, besides having clear societal and environmental benefits. Within this context, the presented work investigates different technological concepts for the introduction of electric buses. They are based on already existing and potential future electric bus network and operation of different cities with different approaches. The investigations are performed in direct cooperation with the respective public transport operators to obtain meaningful results. The overall aim is to find the most convincing configuration of charging locations, charging power and battery capacity, resulting in economically meaningful business-cases for each city. Therefore, detailed simulations are performed in order to calculate the Total-Cost of Ownership (TCO), comprising all investment- and running costs over a certain period under consideration. The battery, representing an important cost-factor of the new system, is particularly considered regarding the expected lifetime in different operation scenarios. The TCO of respective E- Bus and Diesel-Bus systems are directly compared. Ecological aspects, namely emissions of noise and pollutants, are valued to assess the overall benefit. Sensitivity analyses over the most important variables are performed to assess risks and uncertainties.