Evaluation of energy consumption and electric range of battery electric busses for application to public transportation

Vehicle fleet electrification is the main target of the following decades, as a measure to decarbonize the transport sector. Electric urban busses consist of a solution for upgrading the bus fleet aiming to an improvement of urban areas and city centres air quality. To electrify the bus fleet at the city of Athens, Greece, the responsible organization, Athens Urban Transport Organization S.A. (OASA), organized a pilot program for using battery electric buses (BEB) in existing bus lines. The goal of the pilot program was to evaluate the energy consumption of the selected busses under real operation scenarios. The main target of this study is to describe the combined experimental and simulation methodology followed for the evaluation of the BEBs’ . The experimental part of the study is based on the monitoring of the BEBs under real operation for a specific bus line. During the operation of the vehicles, energy consumption along with environmental conditions and A/C usage were monitored. The simulation models were used to predict the energy consumption under different driving conditions and quantify the impact of operating parameters on energy consumption. Experimental results showed that the average daily energy consumption ranged between 96 kWh/km and 220 kWh/km, values strongly related to ambient temperature. Simulations highlighted that A/C usage can lead to two times higher energy consumption for the same route and load. Finally, the expected electric range of buses considered in the study calculated between 130 km and 170 km for the selected line, load equivalent of 25 passengers and 7 kW of A/C consumption.