Electric bus planning for rural transportation with the utilization of renewable energy resources (retrofit on-board solar PV).

Abstract

Public transport is one of the methods to reduce traffic congestion. At present, around 61,000 buses are operating all over Malaysia. Most of these buses are run by diesel which led to the contribution of greenhouse gases emissions. To tackle this issue, Battery Electric Bus (BEB) is one of the solutions to reduce carbon emissions as well as traffic congestion. Even though some major cities already implemented and used BEB to solve the issue, but it is quite unusual to use BEB in the rural area, especially here in Malaysia due to some factors. Limited by driving range, BEB needs to spend some time to be recharged at a certain range. In Malaysia, there is around 309 charging station already make available to be used for the electric vehicle around the peninsular by ChargEV Malaysia. However, most chargers can only be accessed around the major cities, making it quite difficult and costly to implement in the rural area. Thus, a study will be conducted to do electric bus planning for rural transportation. The study will be constructed based on the same number of trips and a similar existing route by Perbadanan Pengangkutan Awam Johor (PAJ). Numbers of routes will be taken randomly all over Johor and two routes will be chosen which are situated in the rural area and have the longest route as well as take the longest time to reach the destination by considering the typical traffic along the route. Proper analysis is conducted to utilize onboard solar PV (OBSPV) for electric buses which may be able to reduce the stops time required at charging stations to charge the battery and increase the range of electric bus mobility. Using General Algebraic Modelling System (GAMS) an optimization software, the bus planning will be optimized to determine the proper scheduling of the bus (to reduce the waiting time of the passenger) as well as the economic impact to implement the project. From this, no additional charging station will be required other than the bus terminal itself. Besides that, a case study of electric buses with and without OBSPV is also will be presented. The environmental impact will be analysed as well by comparing the implementation of BEB and the existing diesel bus in terms of CO2 emission.