Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools takes on green hue

By Jerry LaMartina
Metropolitan Energy Center, freelance writer

The spring of 2011 looked especially green for the Kansas City, Kansas Public Schools.

That’s when the school district put into service 47 new school buses fueled by compressed natural gas (CNG), a CNG fueling station and four hybrid-electric minibuses. These alternative-fuel buses displace about 24,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year.

The project is thought to be the biggest CNG deployment ever by a Midwestern school district, and it puts the district’s roughly 165-bus fleet at 31 percent CNG.

KCKPS took this step toward going green by spending $8.4 million on the project, and it was reimbursed with $3.6 million from a $15 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Cities grant awarded in 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. 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.

George Taylor is former director of transportation for KCKPS, a job he held from 1999 to mid-2013. Taylor had to crack the books to bring the project to fruition.

“I spent probably three years in preparation for this, educating myself and exploring grant opportunities,” he says. “Several grant applications were rejected.
Before I made the applications, I had to educate the board of education and the assistant superintendent of business services. After it was awarded, I spent another year educating them on the benefits of CNG.

“It was a pretty easy sell.”

Taylor says he had to be “very proactive in every phase of the project.”

“My reputation was on the line if this didn’t work or wasn’t successful,” he says. “During my tenure, it was an excellent choice. It was an excellent program. We had little problems, but they were nothing but a little blip on the radar. Otherwise, it worked flawlessly.”

Taylor gets calls from people who are interested in switching to CNG-fueled vehicles.

“They see the savings and they latch onto that,” he says. “They think that with one phone call with me they’ll get everything they need to know. I tell them first of all you need to get yourself educated about CNG, slow-fill or fast-fill station, do your fleet all at once or in smaller numbers. They need to begin educating the people who have the purse strings. The reliability of the equipment you want to use. Give them the ability to support you in doing this.”

Taylor says the reasons for embracing alternative fuels are “to secure energy independence for the nation, and to save money for the school districts.”

“It allows districts to put that money into educating in the classroom. Also, very important to the community and the student population is the environmental impact.”

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lamartina.jerry@gmail.com

Happy Cab rolls around with MUD, flashes smile at CNG

By Jerry LaMartina
Metropolitan Energy Center, freelance writer

A few years ago, Happy Cab Co. of Omaha, Neb., joined forces with the Metropolitan Utilities District of Omaha (MUD). Their goal: Develop a market for natural gas vehicles (NGVs) in the Midwest.

They made it, with help from part of a $15 million U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Clean Cities grant awarded in December 2009. The grant 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.

Happy Cab received $593,000 from the grant and matched that from its own pocket for the project, whose total cost was nearly $1.2 million. The cab company trained its technicians in compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicle conversion to minimize labor costs and reduce overhead for the project. Their technicians then installed dedicated CNG kits – certified by the Environmental Protection Agency – on 54 Chevrolet Impalas and one Ford F550 flatbed tow truck and rescue fill vehicle that can do roadside, fast-fill refueling. Happy Cab put the Impalas into service in its taxi cab fleet in an effort to maximize the volume of gasoline that the CNG would displace.

And the company partnered with MUD to open a public CNG fast-fill fuel station in Omaha in
June 2011 at a former gas station owned by Happy Cab’s sister company, I-80 Fuel, at 5318 L St. MUD designed that station and another in Omaha with public access, at 63rd Avenue and Center Street.

John Davis, Happy Cab’s director of operations, says the project has displaced 75,000 gallons of gasoline a year since it went into service. That’s easy to like from an environmental perspective, and the company’s technicians and drivers also like the CNG-fueled vehicles because the technology was new to them, Davis says.

“Through the implementation of this NGV program, the techs have learned how to troubleshoot CNG-related issues and in some cases make recommendations for best practices that can and will improve reliability, performance or both,” he says.
The technicians and drivers think the vehicles are very comparable to gasoline models, Davis says. The only difference is the fuel and its delivery system.

“The big difference is being limited on refueling infrastructure,” he says. “There is a gasoline station on almost every corner. However, the drivers have to plan out refueling times for CNG. When comparing CNG with diesel on medium- or heavy-duty trucks, CNG is a cleaner-burning fuel, so it doesn’t create the heavy black exhaust gases or the distinctive smell that diesel leaves behind. The CNG engines are also so much quieter, so much so that when CNG garbage trucks go into service there have been reports of customers calling and saying they missed their pickup because they no longer hear the garbage truck coming down the block.”

Fleet managers like the alternative-fuel vehicles, too, Davis says, in part because CNG is about half the cost of diesel per gas gallon equivalent (gge). Medium- and heavy-duty trucks typically get eight to 10 miles per gallon, so the return on investment for them typically is greater compared with gasoline-fueled automobiles.

Because alternative-fuel vehicles and fueling stations do require an investment of money, Davis advises those who are considering it to start by doing their due diligence.

“I would recommend that the fleet manager seek out a fleet utilizing NGVs that are comparable to their own,” he says. “They need to know how many miles their vehicles average each week. They need to consider how long their vehicle may sit and idle at a job site and what type of fueling infrastructure they have in their service area.”

This due diligence from a financial and practical perspective pays off environmentally, as well.

“For a number of reasons, we need to do our part to lower our carbon footprint in our community,” Davis says. “This project was the right thing to do environmentally, and it made sense from a business perspective when leveraging the matching funds because it made the ROI attainable in four years.”

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Lamartina.jerry@gmail.com

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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