Conundrum.
It’s what folks with their backs against the wall call a state protocol that mandates they abide by it no matter the cost, even when the cost might be astronomical, and in more ways than one.
The more official definition is a confusing or difficult problem or question. Insert New York State’s impending electric vehicle mandate, expected to fully begin taking effect by 2030, and ask Genesee County Public Works Commissioner Tim Hens what that’s going to mean in terms of expense and logistics for the department, and the two-digit conundrum he will face as result.
Would you believe about $80 million?
“And that’s not even counting the fact that you probably aren’t going to have the electric in the system to provide chargers for 54 trucks all at the same time,” Hens said during an interview with The Batavian.
Just how does he arrive at such a figure? Well, electric vehicles have an estimated hour’s long charge to go out and do the snow plowing, he said, which means you would need back-ups for the trucks you need out on the roads in the first place. Each truck takes six hours to charge, so that would have be accounted for as well.
“So we have six trucks that run snowplow routes. So if I’ve got to do six times nine, I’ve got to buy 54 trucks. My building is designed for six, so I need a new building to hold 54 trucks. I need 54 chargers. The Level One chargers are a couple hundred thousand a piece, so I’m looking at a new building. So there’s a $30 to $40 million building, plus 54 trucks at, let’s say, $700,000 a piece. That’s another $40 million.”
Then there’s dealing with the staff, having drivers out with a truck an hour at a time before having to return for another vehicle. They have to plug the used truck back in, load the other one up and go back out. He said what used to take three hours is most likely going to now take five or six hours. It’s a longer shift, or more help would have to be hired, he said. Overtime would have to be managed.
“Instead of three-hour routes, we have three times as many people and three times as many trucks, and everybody goes out at the same time. And now the routes are only an hour long instead of three hours long,” he said, noting the strain the electric use would have. “Right now, a Level Three charger is a 90 amp, and I think the heavy-duty ones might be 90 to 120 amps a piece. So if you’ve got 54 of those, that’s almost five megawatts. And that’s probably three or four times what’s available in the grid at any given point.”
When Hens thinks back to the blizzard in December 2022, he knows the outcome would have been different with these future regulations in place.
“You know what's going to end up happening is the taxpayers are going to have to foot such an exorbitant bill, they're going to flip out. And really, what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? It will be if there's a blizzard and people die because they're stuck in snow, or we can't plow because the plows don't push snow when it's five below zero in a 60-mile-an-hour wind,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did. We would have had people dying.”
Yet when members of the County Highway Superintendent Association have raised their concerns with the people establishing these regulations, they’re told, “We’ll figure it out.”
“It's so disjointed that you can't even really describe it to somebody. When people look at you like, what? What is Albany planning? you guys tell them this, and no one's listening to you. It's frustrating. And it honestly doesn't matter if it's a Republican county or a Democratic county. It is full on. None of the professionals in the industry think it makes any sense, and everyone's against it,” Hens said. “We had a presentation at one of our professional development conferences last January and the guy worked for Tesla, he’s an electronics guy. He was even saying electrifying the heavy-duty, over-the-road and construction fleet is not feasible at this point.
"If you electrified every over-the-road truck, every single truck stop in the United States across the map, you would have to have a 40 to 50-megawatt power source at that truck stop so the trucks can recharge and keep going on the roads," he said. "It's hysterical. It's comical if you start throwing out the real numbers and the facts out there.”
He said that inside that climate-friendly vehicle are 20,000 pounds of batteries in a heavy-duty dump truck that will be dead and without any resale value in 10 years.
To clarify, Hens is not against going green where possible and helping to save the planet. But there are ways that make more sense than using heavy-duty trucks, he said.
“I want to be as green as the next person. There are a lot of places where the electric vehicles make sense, like the postal routes, or even like our facility maintenance vehicles for the county that just go from building to building to building all day,” he said. “Absolutely, those could be green, you know, plugged in, or some other green system. But you have to be practical about it.”
New York’s Advance Clean Truck Rule is to take effect Jan. 1, 2025. It will build upon existing regulations enacted in New York in 2012 by requiring all new sales of passenger cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs to be zero-emission by 2035. It would require an increasing percentage of new light-duty vehicle sales to be zero-emission vehicles (ZEV), starting with 35 percent of sales in the model year 2026, 68 percent of sales by 2030, and 100 percent of sales by 2035.
New pollutant standards for passenger cars, light-duty trucks, and medium-duty vehicles with internal combustion engines from model years 2026 through 2034 would also be required. The regulation allows manufacturers to meet the emission requirements and successfully transition to cleaner vehicles.
State Assemblyman Steve Hawley has appealed to Gov. Kathy Hochul to delay the regulation’s enforcement after he has been contacted by several constituents that tried to purchase new trucks for their small businesses.
“The regulations set to start in January 2025 are already affecting vehicle retailers to sell heavy-duty vehicles because there are so many unanswered questions for the consumers,” Hawley said in a letter to Hochul. “The Legislature passed, as part of the 2024-25 budget, a directive to the NYS Energy Research and Development Authority (ERDA) to conduct a highway and depot charging needs evaluation within the next 18 months. This study should be done prior to implementing mandates on an industry that is imperative to New York State.”
Hawley fully supports and agrees with the state Automobile Dealers Association and the Trucking Association, both which expressed concerns about the new regulation, he said. Both organizations just want a more thorough examination of the regulations before they are fully implemented, and Hawley asked that Hochul allow for the ERDA to complete its evaluation.
Previously: New electric vehicle regs frustrate local waste hauler as he finds a way to keep moving forward
