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Electrifying Transit

a guidebook for implementing battery electric buses

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year

     Internship - Summer 2018

     Published - April 2021

role

     lead author + researcher

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kit

Opportunity

The use of battery electric bus (BEB) fleets is becoming more attractive to cities seeking to reduce emissions and traffic congestion. BEB fleets may provide benefits such as lower fuel and maintenance costs, improved performance, lower emissions, and energy security. Despite growing demand, no comprehensive guidebook for policy makers and transit agencies existed.

kit

Goal

Consolidate and organize contemporary BEB research and literature into a streamlined, usable guidebook so stakeholders feel confident and competent planning for their own BEB deployment. 

kit

Challenges

Upfront cost premiums

BEB range

Charging infrastructure

Unfamiliarity with BEB technology

Complex planning

Stakeholders

Policymakers

Transit Agencies

Utilities

City Planners 

Bus OEMs

kit

phase 1

collecting the information

As a starting point, I interviewed internal BEB researchers at NREL to get an idea of the main categories of BEB roll out, and then spoke with transit agencies and BEB OEMs to get an idea their pain points and existing processes.

The next step was compiling relevant and recent BEB data and creating a bibliography of 104 documents.

literature 
review

interviews 

kit

phase 2

coding + organizing the data

How do we organize the information so stakeholders can easily shift between macro project planning to micro technical details?

kit
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While the bulk of the information landed in the technical details category, policy makers and transit agencies needed a way to understand how these variables influence each other. To do this, I created example scenarios and route analysis frameworks for multiple variables simultaneously. The final need was a way to envision all the variables simultaneously in relation to a timeline. 

kit

Color Key  

summary, flowchart that frames all the information

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facts, data, examples

need for hypothetical scenarios, analysis frameworks

relate and visualize all variables simaltaneously in relation to time and stakeholder involvement

organize the huge amount of technical data so it's easy to navigate and flows thoughtfully

relate multiple variables through example scenarios and create route analysis frameworks 

kit

Categorizing + Color Coding

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Organizing variables for route analysis and project execution map

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results

a comprehensive guidebook for implementing battery electric buses, published 2021 through the National Renewable Energy Lab in collaboration with The United States Agency for International Development. Cited on the U.S. Department of Transportation's Electric Bus page

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kit
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example

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example

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example

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