Antelope Valley Transit Authority is the transit agency serving the cities of Palmdale, Lancaster and Northern Los Angeles County. Antelope Valley Transit Authority is operated under contract by MV Transportation, and is affiliated with and offers connecting services with Metro and Metrolink. In 2021, the system had a ridership of 1,003,100, or about 3,700 per weekday as of the fourth quarter of 2021.
Since 2014, AVTA has been converting its diesel transit vehicles to an all-electric fleet. With the final step completed this month, AVTA became the first zero-emission transit agency in North America. The 87-vehicle fleet now consists of BYD electric buses, New Flyer’s Motor Coach Industries (MCI) coaches and GreenPower microtransit vans.
To keep their fleet charged and running, AVTA has installed Heliox, ABB, WAVE and BYD chargers. It uses The Mobility House’s smart charging and energy management system, ChargePilot, to optimize charging and secure the lowest cost of electricity.
When left unmanaged, the charging of large electric fleets can significantly increase a transit’s operating expenses. To make sure AVTA avoided unnecessary peaks in electricity costs, The Mobility House’s ChargePilot was deployed to manage 12 Dual Port Heliox Flex 180 kW (DC) chargers for the fleet’s newest and final addition – 24 MCI Coaches.
ChargePilot intelligently adjusts the charging performance for each vehicle according to real-time travel schedules as well as the local utility’s time-of-use tariffs and demand charges. Simulations by The Mobility House indicate that optimizing the charging of the 24 MCI coaches with ChargePilot will save approximately $532,000 per year versus unmanaged charging, representing a 67% savings in annual electricity costs.
Additionally, ChargePilot helps AVTA collect data required for low carbon fuel standards (LCFS) credit monetization. Using the charging data collected from ChargePilot, AVTA is able to completely cover the cost of electric fueling and actually generates revenue of $0.15 per mile from LCFS credits from the state of California.
According to en.wikipedia.org; ngtnews.com. Source of photo: internet
