Editorial: A Fueling Alternative
This Editorial appears in the May 19 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.
Retail fuel prices skyrocketed again last week, with diesel jumping 18.2 cents a gallon to a national average of $4.331, the biggest one-week increase since October 2005 and more than 15 cents more than the last record.
Gasoline jumped 10.9 cents a gallon to an average of $3.722, the seventh consecutive record high price, as measured by the Department of Energy’s weekly survey of filling stations.
Fleets spent about $1.1 billion more for diesel than they did in the corresponding week of 2007, as we report in our story on page 1. To put that in perspective, $1.1 billion would have been enough to cover the industry’s entire diesel bill for the corresponding week of 2000, when the average was $1.40 a gallon.
So it was an interesting week for UPS Inc. to announce a major investment in alternative-fueled vehicles, with plans to buy 200 hybrid-electric delivery vans and 300 compressed natural gas vans.
The hybrids alone — expected to be as much as 40% more efficient than the traditional package cars they replace when they are delivered in 2009 — are expected to save UPS 176,000 gallons of fuel a year. Also, they will reduce carbon emissions by 1,786 metric tons a year, UPS said, or the equivalent of removing 100 conventional delivery vans from the road.
One interesting aspect of these vans, according to Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp., which will build the vehicles (but not the power systems), is that the hybrids don’t need to be plugged in at night to charge their batteries. The batteries store power capture generated as the vehicle brakes.
The hybrids will couple an Eaton Corp. electric system with a Cummins Corp. ISB diesel engine, on a chassis rated up to 29,000 pounds. UPS deployed 50 hybrid electrics in 2007.
The CNG vans, powered by Cummins, are an addition to 800 such vehicles already in operation for UPS, also rated at 29,000 pounds.
At the very least, this development shows that a significant player in the fleet industry has found these alternative-energy vehicles to be reliable and productive enough to be worth a major commitment. It also is a concrete step toward doing what a lot of companies would like to do: reduce dependence on volatile oil.
