Bucket Trucks with Electric Motors are on the way.
Electric pickup trucks, school buses, and even a few electric 18-wheelers have been used. On the other hand, are the electric aerial job platform vehicles, also known as bucket trucks? Con Edison may have a solution. New York City’s electricity company, which is also one of the country’s biggest, is partnering with a Canadian maker to bring battery-powered bucket trucks to its fleet by 2022.
ConEd’s fleet is not huge — the utility operates about 300 bucket trucks — but the utility wants to message automakers that it is time to electrify these vehicles.
“This is a significant move forward in Con Edison’s fleet electrification journey.”
ConEd CEO Tim Cawley said in a statement that “medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are more difficult to electrify than cars,” but that “the acquisition of our first all-electric bucket truck proves the demand is real today and can only intensify from here.” “While this is a tiny phase in Con Edison’s path toward fleet electrification, it is a significant step.”
On creating and constructing its electric vehicle, ConEd is collaborating with two Canadian companies, Lion Electric and Posi-Plus. It will be fitted with a crane and cherry picker to support ConEd staff in accessing power lines and other elevated facilities, as well as a Lion8 all-electric chassis, which underpins a few of Lion’s electric cars.
The car will be delivered in early 2022, during which it will be used in a test program. If the project is practical, ConEd plans to incorporate the bucket truck into its fleet of trucks that maintains the overhead electric grid in New York City and Westchester County.
On a single fee, the class 8 truck is expected to travel 130 miles. When plugged into two AC Level 2 chargers, the battery would take eight hours to recharge, according to ConEd.
Before this statement, coned has been trying to remove pollution from its fleet. Since last year, the organization has bought a new light-duty car, either a plug-in hybrid or an autonomous vehicle. The organization said it is looking at various developments to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels in medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, and it plans to expand its fleet of all-electric bucket trucks in the future. It would not specify when it expects to phase out all fossil-fuel-burning cars from its fleet, however.
