Electric, CNG vehicles fuel Lawrence’s drive toward alt-fuels

Electric, CNG vehicles fuel Lawrence’s drive toward alt-fuels

By Jerry LaMartina
Metropolitan Energy Center, freelance writer

The City of Lawrence, Kansas has taken actions for many years to protect the environment, including putting alternative-fuel vehicles into use.
In October, the city put into service a refuse truck fueled by compressed natural gas (CNG), with help from a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Cities grant of about $100,000. That money was part of an overall $15 million Clean Cities grant, awarded in December 2009, which also benefited several other municipalities, companies and others in the Kansas City area and elsewhere that had implemented alternative-fuels projects.

Kansas City-based Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC) administered the entire grant through a contract with the DOE. All the projects supported by the grant constitute MEC’s Midwest Region Alternative Fuels Project.

This is the city’s first and only dedicated CNG truck, says Steve Stewart, Lawrence’s fleet manager. The grant would only fund dedicated vehicles. The city also has a bi-fuel F-150 pickup, which is its first CNG vehicle. Bi-fuel vehicles are capable of running on more than one fuel but only on one at a time.
The truck cost just over $185,000, Stewart says. The grant provided $50,000, and the city paid the roughly $135,000 remainder. The grant required that the vehicle use a dedicated fuel – in this case CNG – Stewart says.
The Clean Cities grant also paid for 50 percent of the roughly $99,000 cost of a CNG fueling station the city installed. This is Lawrence’s first CNG station.
The city said in its project report to Clean Cities that it had chosen to deploy the CNG truck to evaluate whether the alternative fuel would meet its needs and save it money in the long run.
“So far the truck is meeting our needs, and I anticipate a return on investment of the CNG package within the seven-year life projection of the truck,” Stewart says. “ROI on the fuel station my take longer. As with anything new or different, people are slow to embrace change. The driver is adapting to the difference in the vehicle and learning to accept it.”
The grant also helped Lawrence put into use an electric vehicle called a club-car carryall, Stewart says. It looks like a golf cart but has an enclosed cab and a pickup bed. Maintenance crews at the city’s wastewater plant use it to haul their tools and supplies during service calls.
“We had put a similar electric vehicle into use, but we couldn’t haul equipment with it,” Stewart says. “So we used the grant to help us replace a full-size Ford Crown Victoria to haul equipment. Terms of grant were that you had to replace a full-size gasoline powered vehicle with the electric vehicle. It worked out really well, to the point that we’re about to replace another vehicle with another electric.”
The city paid $9,000 toward the vehicle’s cost, and the grant kicked in $2,000.
Those dollars always have to be considered – unless maybe you’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or somebody they play bridge with.
“Fifteen years ago, we couldn’t get grant money to do some of this alt-fuel implementation,” Stewart says. “We try to stay in touch with alternative fuels and do what we can. Until this grant came along, we haven’t had the money to do some of this stuff.”
Some of that includes plans to use two other CNG trucks to water trees on city property, which will start in the summer, he says. The water will come from a former fertilizer plant, which has nitrogen-rich water in containment ponds and which the city is remediating in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency. The city must contain the water to keep it from flowing back into groundwater. The city also provides the water to farmers in the area for use on their crops.
That water will help those crops grow, and Stewart wants to see alt-fuels use to grow, as well. While that growth embraces the practical value of alt-fuel vehicles – they decrease air pollution and other environmental damage wrought by resource extraction, they typically decrease fuel costs, they decrease dependency on foreign energy supplies – Stewart emphasizes the practical need to think through the financials.
“My biggest concern with it would be planning your budget for your infrastructure and the vehicles that you need, and then scheduling to give yourself enough lead time so you can get done what you need to,” he says.
While he keeps his eye on the budget, he also turns it toward the future.
“I’d like to see these efforts move forward after I retire,” Stewart says.

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lamartina.jerry@gmail.com

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CNG blends right in with these Black Hills

CNG blends right in with these Black Hills

By Jerry LaMartina
Metropolitan Energy Center, free-lance writer

Black Hills Energy (BHE) knows the value of both supplying natural gas to its customers and using it as an alternative fuel for vehicles: It’s clean, plentiful, domestic and less expensive than gasoline or diesel.

Black Hills Corp., headquartered in Rapid City, S.D., supplies natural gas and electricity to more than 750,000 customers in Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Colorado, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. BHE Nebraska Gas division is a subsidiary of Black Hills Corp., and is based in Lincoln, Neb.

BHE joined the effort to create a sustainable market for natural gas vehicles in the Midwest when it received a $250,000 grant as part of a $15 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Cities grant from December 2009. The overall grant also benefited several other municipalities and companies in the Kansas City area and elsewhere that had implemented alternative-fuels projects. The grant was administered by Kansas City-based Metropolitan Energy Center (MEC) for the DOE. All the projects supported by the grant constitute MEC’s Midwest Region Alternative Fuels Project.

The grant helped pay for the second public compressed natural gas (CNG) station in Lincoln, which opened in October 2012. The Lincoln Airport Authority had also received a federal grant from Clean Cities and opened the first public CNG station in August 2010. BHE’s total project cost was $640,000.

BHE has created local partnerships and funded incentives for some Lincoln-based fleets and the city to adopt CNG, and the company is expanding its own use of CNG. BHE currently has 36 CNG-fueled vehicles in its 50-vehicle Lincoln based fleet, customer relations manager Paul Cammack says. So 72 percent of the fleet is fueled by natural gas.

While its natural gas vehicle count is rising, BHE’s fuel costs are falling. The company is saving an average of $100,000 to $150,000 a year by using CNG, Cammack says. As of Dec. 31, 2013, the company had displaced 35,000 gas gallon equivalents (gge) by using the alternative fuel.

“In addition to our own fleet, BHE partners are up to more than 100 CNG vehicles, and we expect it to more than double by end of this year. And those are just the ones we know about.”

Why does BHE embrace CNG?

“If you look at it from a purely corporate view, … each one of these vehicles is a new burner tip for natural gas,” Cammack says. “It’s great for our company. From a personal point of view, it’s also very important to know that CNG is good for the environment. Just because we can’t see smog doesn’t mean we don’t have poor air quality. And it’s important for our country to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

Cammack’s biggest surprise was customers’ reluctance to convert easily and readily to CNG.

“You can put the facts and figures in front of them, but sometimes, for whatever reason, they don’t pull the trigger and convert to CNG,” he said. “It may be an inherent fear of natural gas, especially compressed natural gas. And then there’s lack of infrastructure for fueling.”

When Cammack runs across somebody who’s thinking about making the CNG jump, his advice is to ease into the transition.

“We tell customers as we put all the facts and figures in front of them, ‘Just do one, just convert one vehicle.’ We’ll help a customer defray the cost of a conversion system on their first vehicle. Once they realize, ‘Hey, this works and I’m saving money,’ then they’ll be back to install more conversion systems on their own.”

When BHE completed its Clean Cities project report, the company said it would outsource the installation and maintenance of future CNG stations to a third-party contractor. Cammack says that’s because doing so helps BHE focus on its primary mission as a utility company.

“I think you’ll find that with most utility companies, selling retail CNG is just not in their wheelhouse,” he says. “Credit card transactions, maintaining a CNG station – that’s not part of how most utilities operate. I think it was helpful that some utilities like us built CNG stations – ‘walkin’ the talk’ – but now I’ve got contractors that want to put in stations.”
Cammack says the Clean Cities grant was invaluable.

“The grant helped the airport and the grant helped us,” he says. “We wouldn’t be where we’re at without that. The grant money has been the catalyst to make this happen. I’m very thankful for that. Actually, the whole community of Lincoln should be grateful.”

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lamartina.jerry@gmail.com

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Buildings, audits and success

With the Metropolitan Energy Center building program ending, we thought it would be a good time to look back at the success of Home Performance with Energy Star.

Since 2014, the HPwES has had more than 396,000 kWh in energy reduction. Thousands of homes have been served by certified auditors and contractors. With the coming of 2016, the program is not ending. However, the program will be changing and will consist of more low cost prescriptive measures that reduces the first cost barrier for many participants.

Until there is more news about the upcoming changes, in the past year alone, there have been more than 6,500 energy efficiency improvements completed on Kansas City area homes through partnerships with area utilities resulting in an average of 12% energy savings or about 10 million kWh of electricity and 1 million ccf of gas.

MEC has supported several companies who “met the minimum requirements to perform Home Performance with Energy Star assessments. A listing of these companies is below.

[gview file=”https://mec.bluesym10.work/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Web-Listings-By-Analyst-Dec-2015-Final.pdf”]

We thank each and every one who had a hand in making this program such a success. We could not have done it without you.

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