Estimación de la energía requerida para la sustitución de la flota de autobuses públicos por autobuses eléctricos de la ciudad de Cuenca

Abstract

The current situation of the City of Cuenca, in terms of environmental pollution, is serious due to the large amount of pollutants that are emitted due to the combustion of fossil fuels. These pollutants from either the car park or the industrial sector can reach critical levels, representing one of the most important issues to be addressed in the city to ensure its reduction or elimination. Today, new alternatives for reducing air pollutants that not only affect the quality of the environment, but also affect the health of living beings, including people, are being considered, the most affected being those found near the points of concentration of pollution, such as the urban sectors of the cities. The City of Cuenca is no stranger to this situation, where one of the most important sources of pollution is urban public transport, consisting entirely of diesel buses. The present study consists in estimating the energy required to replace the public bus fleet with electric buses in the city. After a study of the initial variables of the electric bus that was available in the city for 3 months from December 2018, it was determined that the value of efficiency or autonomy of the bus is variable for each of the transport lines. That is why, with the help of a mathematical model implemented in MATLAB, it was possible to approximate the profile of the State of Cargo (SOC), which would have each of the public transport lines present in the City of Cuenca, in order to know the energy values that each line will require with its corresponding number of buses and therefore the Total Energy value, which was 121.1 MWh during one day of operation. The analysis of the feasibility of changing buses to diesel for electric buses was also carried out, and of the available capacity of the distribution network of the city that is in charge of the Centro Sur C. A. Regional Electric Company, determining that there is still a total of 137.57 MVA of power in transformers available from urban substations, where the necessary load for buses could be taken. In addition, it was determined under what conditions the change could be implemented, since the profile of the demand curve that buses will need should not represent an overload in the electricity grid. Only 53.6% of the total buses in the city could function properly giving normal public transport service, if they were replaced by electric buses while the remaining percentage necessarily requires partial recharges to complete the daily routes under certain load parameters.