Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The Driver Vehicle Standards Agency issued the emergency recall of 1,758 buses. A fire risk has been identified in the £800m fleet’s aircon and heating system.
The Driver Vehicle Standards Agency issued the emergency recall of 1,758 buses.A fire risk has been identified in the £800m fleet’s aircon and heating system.
Safety watchdogs have ordered the recall of almost 2,000 electric buses over fears they can catch fire if left unattended.
The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency has warned operators who use the Alexander Dennis Enviro200 and Enviro400 single and double decker buses of the critical safety issue.
The buses are currently operational across the UK, with more than 600 in London and a further 100 in Manchester. The Daily Mail Online has the story.
All of the affected vehicles were manufactured between May 3, 2019 and February 6, 2024. They all contain batteries supplied by Chinese firm BYD.
Initial investigations suggest the fault may be in the air conditioning and heating system. The alert was issued following a scare on board one of the buses – which can cost up to £450,000 each – putting the value of the entire fleet at £800m.
At present, there is no permanent solution to prevent future fires. Instead, operators using the high-tech buses are warned to ‘switch off the Hipsacold HVAC system when the vehicle is left unattended’.
To remind drivers to isolate the power supply were they allowed to pay
Alexander Dennis told MailOnline they are working on the problem with regulators and their suppliers. They stressed the issue is not related to a string of recent fires involving ‘different vehicle types and technologies’.
In September 2021, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced that all new buses in London would be ‘zero emission’.
As of March 31, 2023 – most recent figures available. London had a total of 476 of the buses subject to recall in their fleet.
A further 100 of the same bus type has been supplied to Manchester as part of their move to electric buses.
Although, according to the DVSA there are almost 1,800 of the affected vehicle type on British streets.
Certain routes in the capital are now entirely electric as part of Sadiq Khan’s commitment to reduce harmful emissions in the city.
Cities such as Coventry, Birmingham, Cambridge, Leeds, Glasgow and Aberdeen also use the buses.
In London they are fitted a dedicated wheelchair space that is accessed via and electric ramp on the centre doors.
The vehicles are powered by a pair of 150kW motors from BYD on the rear drive axle.
They contain BYD Lithium-iron-phosphate batteries providing between 339kWh to 382kWh of power and are recharged at a rate of 112kW using a DC CCS2 plug.
The nations of the world are pursuing an unprecedented energy transition. Efforts are underway to force a shift from coal, oil, and natural gas to renewable energy sources by 2050. But key elements of the proposed transition suffer from major safety issues, specifically batteries for electric vehicles and electricity storage and hydrogen fuels for industry.
Most energy sources involve safety risks. Gasoline cars can explode or burn, especially after collisions. Natural gas pipelines and processing facilities have been known to explode or combust. Nuclear power plants have caused famous disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima when cooling systems have failed. But green energy is bringing a new dimension of safety problems to society.
A transition from gasoline and diesel vehicles to electric models is a major part of the green energy revolution. President Joe Biden, other political leaders, and the International Energy Agency call for electric vehicles (EVs) to completely replace internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by 2050. EVs with high-capacity batteries are new technology that is rapidly gaining market acceptance. Automakers compete to increase EV range by introducing larger and more powerful batteries.
But battery fires may threaten the EV revolution.
Lithium batteries in cell phones and other portable electronic devices are banned from commercial airline baggage compartments because of fire risk. Batteries in electric cars contain graphite, metals, and other materials bathed in flammable electrolytes with thousands of times more energy than your cell phone battery.
Electric cars spontaneously combust. Earlier this year, a father from Elk Grove Illinois was about to pull onto Highway 99 when he felt his Tesla start shaking. He pulled to the side of the road and exited his car, just before it burst into flames. He was unable to save the child car seats from the back of the car and was glad that his children were at home.
This summer, a Florida car owner had her vehicle in for servicing and was given a Mercedes EV as a loaner. The loaner was parked in her garage and not charging when it burst into flames. The flames and smoke caused heavy damage to her home.
BMW, Ford, GM, Hyundai, and Tesla electric cars have all experienced problems with battery fires. In the most visible case, GM recalled all 141,000 Chevrolet Bolts produced between 2016 and 2021. In August, electric truck maker Nikola announced a recall of all 209 of its heavy electric trucks because of battery fires.
In total, the rate of EV fires does not exceed the fire rate for ICE vehicles. But EVs can ignite unexpectedly when charging overnight in the garage or even when just parked in the driveway, locations where gasoline-powered cars typically don’t catch fire.
Battery fires are very hard to extinguish. They can burn for hours while fire departments douse them with water, and even re-ignite after the fire appears to be out. Some fire departments have resorted to lifting the flaming EV and dropping it into a huge tank of water to extinguish the flames.
Grid-scale batteries are being deployed by utilities in Australia, the U.S., and other nations. These are huge batteries, which provide electricity storage to back up wind and solar facilities. When wind and solar systems generate excess electricity, it can be stored in batteries and released when the wind is not blowing or the sun is not shining. But grid-scale batteries also have issues with self-ignition.
Today, grid-scale batteries store only about one millionth of the electricity that the world uses annually, but many of the few batteries that have been deployed already have suffered major fires. Batteries have burst into flames in Arizona, California, New York, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Grid-scale battery fires result from thermal runaway, caused by mechanical damage, poor air conditioning, or overcharging.
What is the current leading cause of accidental fires in New York City? The answer isn’t cooking or smoking. It’s fires caused by e-bike lithium batteries. Batteries on e-bikes spontaneously burst into flames when charging or just sitting idle. After ignition, the batteries burn with a high heat and set fire to storage areas or whole buildings, sometimes killing or injuring residents.
According to the New York City Fire Department, e-bike fires jumped from 44 in 2020 to more than 200 this year. The fires caused 10 deaths and over 200 injuries in the city during the past two years.
Green hydrogen, produced from electrolysis of water, is also proposed as a new fuel for the energy transition. Leaders call for a hydrogen economy to reduce emissions and fight global warming. Hydrogen is touted as a transportation fuel and a replacement for natural gas and coal in heavy industry. More than $280 billion in subsidies have been committed globally to develop green hydrogen.
But hydrogen exists in nature only in compounds. Pure hydrogen is very reactive and takes only a low level of energy in the presence of oxygen to burst into flames. The world’s rush to deploy hydrogen fuel may become a major safety hazard.
In 1937, the airship Hindenburg exploded in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The explosion ended 35 years of efforts to deploy hydrogen airships. More than two dozen airships exploded from 1908 to 1937 from accidental hydrogen fires, killing hundreds of passengers and crew. The world decided hydrogen airships were too hazardous to continue their use.
But green energy advocates now call for a network of hydrogen pipelines, public hydrogen fueling stations for vehicles, and even the use of hydrogen to heat homes. These systems will need to compress hydrogen to 700 atmospheres of pressure, making leaks probable. And unlike natural gas, hydrogen leaks are prone to spontaneous combustion and resultant explosions and fires.
Vice President Kamala Harris recently announced $1 billion in grants for electric school buses. But the number of electric bus fires around the world is growing. God forbid we start seeing spontaneous fires in electric buses full of children.
It’s clear that world leaders are ignoring the growing safety problems of green energy. But these fears are being pushed aside in favor of Climatism, the fear of human-caused global warming.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
The Beatles once sang, “All you need is love.” But will Kamala Harris’ professed LOVE for electric school buses – plus the $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies she announced last October – be enough to usher in the new paradise?
The Beatles once sang, “All you need is love.” But will Kamala Harris’ professed LOVE for electric school buses – plus the $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies she announced last October – be enough to usher in the new paradise?
Hmm. Let’s do the math. The $1 billion in rebates pledged is to help purchase 2,500 electric school buses in some 391 school districts around the nation. But there are in fact about 500,000 school buses transporting children to and from school, to and from ball games and other events, nearly every school day.
By simple calculation, this suggests it will take a $200 billion investment just to replace existing school buses – which must be done, Kamala tells us, by the 2030 deadline or else CHILDREN WILL DIE.
Do factories, batteries, and other raw materials exist to build (or retrofit) 500,000 school buses – and every other vehicle in America today – by 2030? By 2050? Does that much money exist? Does that much electricity exist?
To be sure, the demand (from mostly leftist school boards) is out there. Nearly 2,000 school districts applied for the free money last year, pushing the demand SO HIGH “that the EPA had to double the amount of funding” from the initial pledge of $500 million.” Should Kamala keep her job in 2024, the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program is committed to handing out another $4 billion over the next five years.
Nearly 2,000 school districts applied for the first round of rebates from all 50 states, including Washington, D.C., U.S. territories, and federally recognized tribes. The demand was so high “that the EPA had to double the amount of funding” from its initial pledge of $500 million, a White House official tells Parents on background.
A total of 391 rebates were awarded, and the Vice President anticipates thousands more applications as the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program awards a total of $5 billion over the next five years. That’s 12,500 down, just 487,500 to go!
School districts NOT getting the federal free money are faced with a much different scenario. Even the smaller electric school buses today cost about $250,000 compared with just $50,000 to 465,000 for a diesel-powered bus of the same size. The larger battery-electric buses can run from $320,000 to $440,000 versus just $100,000 for a diesel bus.
Take the Dallas (TX) Independent School District, which has about 860 buses. To replace the entire fleet with large diesel buses would cost, therefore, about $86 million. But those 860 buses, if battery-electric, would cost a minimum of $275 million. And that does not include the cost of charging stations and retraining mechanics. That’s over three times as many taxpayer dollars the school district would have to extract from voters.
All this, of course, has been under the assumption that electric school buses are just as reliable as diesel-powered buses – and that they can keep children warm in winter and cool on hot days as well as buses with diesel engines.
The Ann Arbor (MI) Public Schools Board of Education learned recently from its environmental sustainability director, that the electric school buses they bought have “a lot of downtime and performance issues” and “aren’t fully on the road.” Moreover, the infrastructure upgrades needed to use these buses, which were estimated at just $50,000, “ended up being more like $200,000.”
To the surprise of many educators, electric school buses may break down and require towing. As with any electric vehicle, this poses risks not common to gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles. One is that they are heavier – and thus require larger tow trucks (remember, tow trucks only tow the cabs of 18-wheelers, not the trailers). Towing capacity should be about half the weight of the towing vehicle, and the typical electric school bus weighs 36,000 pounds.
Another thing the electric bussers ignore is the wear and tear on bus tires, which cost about $3,000 per set (likely higher by now, with inflation). Goodyear notes that electric school bus operators have to consider the extra weight of the buses, which makes balancing the tires for load capacity and durability even more important – and more frequently done. The extra weight also means that the tires do not last as long as on lighter weight diesel buses.
Electric bus enthusiasts like Kamala Harris will tell you that spending an extra $150 billion or so is worth the price to theoretically save children from diesel exhaust (despite the major improvements in diesel technology and much cleaner diesel fuel mandated in recent years). But they are silent about the number of actual lives lost by children mining the raw materials for electric vehicle batteries.
Using data supplied by Pacific Gas & Electric, Colorado journalist Cory Gaines noted that the $260,000 cost differential between diesel and electric school buses means that any school district wanting to take advantage of the predicted much lower operating costs will need major help with the huge upfront capital costs. Which means both federal and state subsidies – and higher taxes to pay for the subsidies.
Noting that electric buses have longer downtimes and higher towing costs, plus require (again upfront) costs for installing and maintaining charging stations – and other hidden costs, the payback on the electric school bus (at an average of 16,000 miles per year, a high-end estimate) comes out to about 20 years – longer than the lifespan of the bus. And that’s if nobody dies or is injured by a school bus fire.
Gaines, who runs the Colorado Accountability Project on Facebook, gives an additional caveat for buses operating in cold climates (like the Colorado mountains, the Great Lakes region, and Alaska, where today there is but one electric school bus).
Unlike diesel buses that scavenge waste engine heat for passengers, electric buses have to divert battery energy into heat. On very cold days, the amount of energy needed to keep children warm could exceed the amount used to travel the route. That may not matter on short trips to and from school — but imagine a basketball or hockey team on a bus trip to a game across the state.
Charging the battery for an electric school bus takes up to eight hours using AC power, but with a diminished range in cold weather taking children on long bus trips for any purpose might require an extra day on the road in each direction. That means an extra day each way of feeding and housing the children (and keeping watch over them).
Or school districts could just say, Sorry, kids, no more school travel. We can’t afford it!
Duggan Flanakin is a Senior Policy Analyst with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.
A former Senior Fellow with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Mr. Flanakin authored definitive works on the creation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on environmental education in Texas.
A brief history of his multifaceted career appears in his book, “Infinite Galaxies: Poems from the Dugout.”
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