A recent Theodore Dalrymple piece brought to mind something Indianapolis’s city-bus company, popularly known as IndyGo, included in its January 2021 board report:
The 4,300 solar panel array on the roof at 1501 building continues to produce enough electrical power to charge all ZEPS [zero-emission-propulsion-system] buses with the additional power being absorbed into the electrical system of the main building.
The relationship between that passage and the Dalrymple piece will initially seem obscure. The Dalrymple piece proposes a theory for why public-administration personnel tend to cultivate an “inability to speak in plain language and to answer straight questions with straight answers”:
The imposition, adoption, and mastery of this type of language is the means by which ambitious mediocrities gain control over bureaucratic organizations. It drives people of higher caliber, who might otherwise pose a challenge to them, elsewhere.
In contrast, IndyGo’s report seems merely to state an objective fact and to do so in a way that leaves little room for interpretation. But appearance often differs from reality when IndyGo is involved, and in this case its seemingly straightforward statement encourages a couple of false impressions.
The quoted passage’s linkage of IndyGo’s solar array to its electric buses, for example, tends to encourage an impression that had apparently been formed by some of the local punditry: that those buses don’t cause carbon-dioxide emissions. Although some IndyGo bus-charging details aren’t clear, that impression seems clearly false.
We know that IndyGo’s Red Line electric buses have proven unable to operate all day on a single charge, so some charging takes place during the day. But it appears that the total daytime charging duration is not long, while the Red Line’s hours of operation are. So most charging must have to take place at night, when the array generates no electricity. And the locations proposed for the Red Line’s daytime chargers suggest that the buses will be charged from the grid, not from the solar array. So for the most part the solar array doesn’t seem to power the buses, at least not directly.
Anyway, whether it does or not doesn’t much affect emissions. Using the entire array output solely to power IndyGo’s building would enable the power company to avoid just as much carbon-dioxide emissions as would be avoided by splitting that output between the building and the buses. Even directing all the array output to the grid would avoid nearly as much emissions as direct bus charging would. So long as the array output isn’t wasted, that is, the emissions savings it affords is largely independent of whether it’s used for bus charging.
But that savings is also largely independent of whether the Red Line runs at all. And what isn’t independent of Red Line operation is how much electricity the power company must generate and how much carbon dioxide it must therefore emit. That means that the Red Line does indeed cause carbon-dioxide emissions—to a degree that’s virtually independent of IndyGo’s solar array. So IndyGo’s solar array is scarcely more relevant to the Red Line’s merits than the solar farm at the Indianapolis airport or the wind farms that Interstate 65 passes through on the way to Chicago. (As we’ve observed elsewhere, incidentally, that solar array will have no detectable effect on the climate.)
The impression that Red Line buses don’t cause carbon-dioxide emissions is therefore false. So all we’re left with is the quoted statement’s literal meaning, i.e., that the array generates enough electricity to charge all the buses. And that statement is hard to misinterpret.
Again, though, we’re dealing with IndyGo, and IndyGo tends to be parsimonious with the truth. As a previous Naptown Numbers post explained, for example, it avoided straight answers that might have put voters wise to how exorbitant the cost in transit tax would be for each passenger mile that IndyGo’s current expansion will add. As another post showed, IndyGo’s gross exaggeration of mixed-traffic travel times distorted expectations of its dedicated lanes’ effects on mobility. So we should be on guard for something missing or false.
In that connection consider what’s missing from the following chart, which accompanied IndyGo’s statement that the solar array generates enough electricity to satisfy electric-bus consumption:
What’s missing are the figures for consumption; the chart provides only the generation figures. And a little investigation reveals a possible reason why those figures are missing: IndyGo’s statement is false.
Specifically, the ranges reported for a test of Red Line buses averaged 206 miles, while the battery capacity of Red Line buses is 642 kilowatt-hours (“kWh”). If the 93% capacity usage mentioned in the range-test report is any guide, those buses’ average consumption rate is about 2.9 kWh/mi. Even if we assume the lower, 2.5 kWh/mi rate suggested by the “80% usable” figure given elsewhere, we infer from the Federal Transit Administration report of 829,270 Red Line “revenue miles” in 2020 that the Red Line consumed at least 2,068 megawatt-hours (“MWh”). That’s over two and a half times the 805‑MWh array output for that year given by IndyGo’s chart.
Also, the above plot, which is based on that 2.5 kWh/mi consumption rate, shows that the ratio is higher in winter. During that season the Red Line may consume about seven times as much energy as the array generates. And even that ratio is probably understated; things like heater operation presumably make the consumption rate in winter higher than the above-assumed average. So it’s hard to consider IndyGo’s statement defensible. (Not that IndyGo wouldn’t attempt to defend it anyway; when IndyGo’s 11,000-rides-per-day Red Line prediction came a cropper, remember, IndyGo denied that its prediction had meant what it plainly had.)
Now, none of this proves that converting from diesel buses to electrics would necessarily be a bad thing. After all, electricity costs less at the moment than diesel fuel. And as an original proposition electric motors would seem to require less maintenance than internal-combustion engines. But what we get often differs from what we expect.
This may be why IndyGo reportedly canceled a $6.5 million order for five electric buses after its experience with the Red Line. And note what’s implied by the $7.5 million payment its board of directors thereupon approved for thirteen diesel buses: diesels appear to cost $723,000 less per bus than electrics. So the Red Line’s thirteen electric buses may have cost something like $9.4 million more than thirteen diesel buses would have.
That difference could well exceed what electrics save on fuel. It’s been reported from Milwaukee that recently manufactured diesel buses are getting 5.85 miles to the gallon. With that mileage a recently quoted Midwest diesel-fuel price of $3.24/gallon implies that the fuel cost for the Red Line’s 829,270 vehicle miles in 2020 would have been on the order of $459,000. That’s $262,000 more than what the Red Line’s above-estimated 2,068‑MWh electricity consumption cost if the price was the 9.5¢/kWh implied by IndyGo’s claimed $76,433.20 electricity savings. The $3.7 million in savings that results from projecting that difference over a fourteen-year bus life doesn’t come close to making up for the $9.4 million bus-cost difference.
We hasten to add that in some ways this analysis is unfair. It compares forty-foot diesels with sixty-foot electrics. It assumes that electrics will last no longer than diesels. As we speculated above, moreover, electric buses’ propulsion systems could require less maintenance than diesel buses’ do. And diesel bus mileage hasn’t historically been as high as the Milwaukee bus company reportedly enjoyed.
On the other hand, we assumed a diesel-bus price higher than what Milwaukee paid. And diesel buses don’t require dedicating real estate along their routes to charging stations. Because of diesel buses’ greater flexibility, moreover, a given level of service may not require as many diesels as electrics. And from Indianapolis residents’ perspective some of the electricity-cost savings may be illusory; it may amount to shifting fixed power-company costs disproportionately to ratepayers who don’t own solar panels or wind turbines.
Then there are the electricity-price increases we can expect to be caused by renewable-portfolio standards and other market distortions. The electricity price has already risen to over 15¢/kWh in California, and it would become more expensive than diesel fuel well before it reached the 30¢/kWh that the Energiewende has inflicted on Germany.
So it may be too early to tell how good an idea it is for IndyGo to convert to electric buses. And in truth the withheld consumption numbers don’t help much in making that determination. IndyGo’s pattern of obfuscation should nonetheless make us uneasy, particularly in light of the Red Line rollout.
That rollout was an operation of surpassing ineptitude. The whole Red Line design was based on a bus-range assumption that even a moderately thorough investigation would have shown to be unrealistic. The Red Line started operation before it even had a working payment system and before its drivers had been adequately trained. IndyGo still hasn’t mastered the bus timing required to confine Red Line buses to the dedicated lane they’re supposed to use on College Avenue. And there’s little reason to believe that the Red Line’s paid ridership will ever average much more than half the promised 11,000 per day.
So, however small the resemblance is between IndyGo’s crude falsehoods and the weapons-grade opacity quoted in the Dalrymple piece, the Red Line rollout tends to support the Dalrymple theory that mediocrities use such obfuscation to put themselves in control.
The people in government who dispense B.S. are listened to more than the people who speak facts and truth. Facts and truth require thinking. The people in charge would rather listen to and believe the B.S. because it does not require any thinking - something they hate to do. So, the B.S. artists just repeat nonsense that they learned in school - about climate change, transit, TOD, economic development subsidies, affordable housing, etc., taxation, etc. and believe they have special knowledge because they can regurgitate the nonsense they have been told. Anyone challenging the doctrine of B.S. will be considered a problem that needs to be rooted out of the system or dealt with in some manner that mutes their impact. Usually this is done with even more B.S. because making up sh.t is all they know - and it works magically on those who have been taught not to think.