US Postal Service Happy with Azure Prototypes
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PE Helps Postal Service Innovate In Alternative Fuel
p.e.© Published by the National Society of Professional Engineers, 2007 January - February As gasoline prices have risen in the past few years, alternative energy sources have been receiving increased attention. However, the U.S. Postal Service has been innovating in this arena long before it became popular. The first electric mail truck was commis-sioned in 1899 in New York City, explains Han Dinh, P.E., the organization’s program director of vehicle engineering. Since then, the Postal Service has continued to investi-gate alternative energy technologies, using compressed natural gas, ethanol, propane, and biodiesel. It is also experimenting with electric, hybrid electric, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Such technologies, says the NSPE member, help the Postal Service decrease air pollution and dependence on foreign oil. They also help reduce costs. With the largest vehicle fleet in the nation—210,000 vehicles—energy is a major concern for the Postal Service. It is the third-largest cost center after salaries and benefits and automation.
Additional motivation for the Postal Service’s alterna-tive energy programs came from the 1992 Energy Policy Act. The law mandated that beginning in 1999, 75% of newly acquired federal fleet vehicles must be powered by alternative fuels. Dinh, who joined the organization in 1988 and helped launch the compressed natural gas program in the early 1990s, explains that the Postal Service began investing heavily in that program following the law’s enactment. The agency had 7,500 vehicles converted to compressed natural gas operation, making up the largest CNG fleet in the U.S. The program worked well and recouped the cost of the investment, Dinh explains, but the infrastructure is now deteriorating. Because many of the conversion companies have gone bankrupt, it is hard to maintain the vehicles.
Thus, the Postal Service is not converting any more vehicles to natural gas, although it has retained more than two-thirds of the original fleet. In 1993, Dinh established an electric vehicle program to test and evaluate the technology.
Subsequently, in 2000, the Postal Service awarded Ford Motor Company what Dinh says is the largest electric vehicle contract in U.S. history, for 500 vehicles. However, just two years later the program had to be abandoned because the batteries were no longer being manufactured.
Ford provided replacement vehicles and now only 28 electric vehicles manufactured by Solec-tria are operating in New York City. Another technology the Postal Service explored in the mid-1990s was propane. Thirty-five vehicles were converted to propane operation and still operate out of Key West, Florida. The Postal Service has taken advantage of ethanol. Currently, more than 30,000 vehicles in the Postal Service’s fleet can run on ethanol or a combination of ethanol and gasoline. Expansion of the ethanol program is limited, however, by the lack of refueling stations.
As part of the effort to reduce fuel costs, the Postal Service is testing hybrid electric vehicles, including 10 hybrid electric vans in California. Dinh notes that the incremental costs of hybrid electric vehicles are still fairly high—about $5,000 or more. But the agency will continue to test the tech-nology, he says, hoping that the fuel savings will compensate for the higher cost. Dinh and the Postal Service have received the most recognition for the agency’s biodiesel program. The organization is one of the first federal agencies to embrace biodiesel as a motor vehicle fuel, Dinh says. Over the last five years, biodiesel consumption in the agency’s fleet has risen from about 400,000 gallons in 2000 to almost 1.2 million gallons in fiscal year 2005. The Postal Service fleet has 1,000 biodiesel vehicles, and the program is slated to expand to other locations. Dinh and the Postal Service received the 2006 White House Closing the Circle Award, for environmental stewardship in the federal government, for research his team undertook on biodiesel engine wear in 2004. The engineering depart-ment worked with the National Renew-able Energy Labs to compare four vehicles operating on biodiesel with four others with similar mileage operating on conventional diesel. After three years, the department’s team pared down all the vehicles into 1,000 components and evaluated them for structural and mechanical damage, carbon deposits, and other signs of wear. The results indicated no significant problems with the vehicles operating on biodiesel. That was important because little information existed on the long-term wear of biodiesel vehicles. Dinh’s team is now sharing their findings with other federal agencies and industry organizations. Dinh sees much promise in the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. For the past two years, the Postal Service has been testing a General Motors hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in the Washington, D.C., area. That vehicle has delivered more than 650,000 pieces of mail and packages. In September 2006, another hydrogen fuel cell vehicle was added to the Postal Service fleet in Irvine, California. What needs to happen for more people and organizations to become interested in alternative energy? Dinh says the country will get a wake-up call if the price of gaso-line tops $5 a gallon. Otherwise, he says, Congress will need to pass legislation that forces the nation to increase its indepen-dence from oil.
bullboards/wraplink.asp?url=target= _blank href='/bullboards/wraplink.asp?url=target= _blank href='/bullboards/wraplink.asp?url=target= _blank href='/bullboards/wraplink.asp?url=www.gao.gov/new.items/d07244.pdf'''''> https://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07244.pdf February 2007 United States Government Accountability Office GAO Report to Congressional Requesters US Postal Service Vulnerability to Fluctuating Fuel Price Requires Improved Tracking and Monitoring of Consumption Information. United States Government Accountability Office Washington, DC 20548 February 16, 2007 The Honorable Tom Davis Ranking Member Committee on Oversight and Government Reform House of Representatives The Honorable John M. McHugh House of Representatives The U.S. Postal Service (the Service) delivered over 213 billion pieces of mail to over 146 million delivery points in 2006.1 Almost $72 billion was spent in providing these and other postal services required as part of meeting its universal service mandate. The Service is one of the major users of fuel in the federal government, spending over $2.3 billion on transportation and facility-related fuel in 2006.2 Its vehicle fleet of over 216,000 vehicles is the largest civilian fleet and consumed over 123 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. The Service also incurs fuel expenses as part of its mail delivery and transportation contracts with highway trucking companies and air carriers.3 Another area where the Service incurs fuel expenses is in heating and operating the over 34,000 facilities it occupies. The Service relies primarily on electricity, natural gas, and heating oil for these operations. The Service is also subject to certain federal energy conservation requirements as part of the Energy Policy Acts of 1992 and 2005. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPAct 1992) required federal agencies to increase their purchase of alternative fuel vehicles (AFV), and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 ( EPAct 2005) details requirements for federal fleets to use alternative fuels in these AFVs. As shown in figure 7, fuel costs for the Postal-owned vehicle fleet increased 19 percent from 2005 to 2006, while consumption decreased by 5 percent. Figure 7: Postal Fleet Fuel Costs Have Grown Faster than Fuel Consumption Recent fluctuations in transportation and facility fuel prices have revealed the Service’s vulnerability to fuel price volatility. The Service remains highly vulnerable to fuel price fluctuations,
In addition to these legal requirements, other federal guidance exists to reduce fuel consumption. For example, in January 2007, President Bush issued Executive Order 13423 to strengthen federal agencies’ environmental, energy, and transportation management. Major provisions of this order included: • Vehicles: Use certain hybrid vehicles when commercially available at a reasonable cost. Although the Service is not subject to the executive order, this federal policy provides guidance on goals and practices that could be replicated to improve transportation and facility energy efficiency. Although the Service has purchased thousands of AFVs to comply with provisions of EPAct 1992 aimed at reducing reliance on petroleum-based fuels, financial and operational limitations have hindered the Service’s ability to use alternative fuels in these vehicles. The Service has increased its AFV fleet by nearly 20 percent from 2000 and currently possesses one of the largest alternative-fuel capable fleets in the federal government with nearly 40,000 AFVs. The majority of these vehicles are capable of operating on ethanol or compressed natural gas (CNG), and also include some that operate on electricity and liquefied petroleum gas. Most of the Service’s AFVs, however, do not operate using alternative fuels, but primarily use gasoline and diesel fuel. Alternative fuels accounted for roughly 1.5 percent of the total fuel consumed by the Service’s internal fleet in 2006. Financial and operational limitations associated with higher fuel and vehicle prices, lower fuel efficiencies, and an insufficient nationwide alternative fueling infrastructure have limited the Service’s use of alternative fuels. Postal Service officials stated these issues made operating its fleet on alternative fuels cost prohibitive. For example these officials stated that: • The Service found that the cost for a gallon of ethanol 85 (E85) is typically 17 percent more expensive than gasoline, is 26 percent less efficient, and may result in higher maintenance costs because it is corrosive. • There is a limited supply of AFVs available for purchase by the Service, and those that are available to the Service that meet the EPAct requirements contain larger engines than generally needed for delivery operations. As such, these unnecessarily large engines lower fuel efficiency when using gasoline or alternative fuels, and reduce the Service’s miles per gallon. • The limited nationwide alternative fuel infrastructure has hindered some of its previous alternative fuel efforts. For example, the Service converted some of its vehicles to operate on CNG in the early 1990s. While this was successful in the short term, manufacturers that the Service worked with to produce the CNG vehicles went out of business or simply stopped producing the vehicles, and many fueling stations that had provided CNG stopped selling it, leading to a shortage in the fuel. Furthermore, even where alternative fuel pumps are available, their distance from a Postal Service facility may be too great to justify the costs to refuel at that pump. Service officials stated that only 0.6 percent of service stations across the country offer alternative fuels. Our past work, as well as officials from DOE and GSA have raised similar financial and operational limitations. We recently issued a report on the challenges associated with using alternative fuels, including that the nationwide alternative fuel infrastructure is poor to nonexistent throughout most of the country.23 For example, we reported that there are a limited number of E85 fueling stations nationwide (mostly concentrated in the upper Midwest), and that E85 cannot use the same infrastructure as gasoline because it is more corrosive. As of January 2007, the DOE Website indicates that only 1,003 E85 stations are located throughout the country. Recent studies conducted by DOE have found similar decreased fuel efficiency and increased cost results for ethanol.24 DOE is currently in the process of finalizing guidance on a waiver to EPAct for federal fleets based on factors that may include alternative fuel price and travel distance. A Service engineering director stated that discussions with DOE, automobile, fuel industry officials, and the Service about these financial and operational limitations have taken place, but progress has been difficult to achieve. This official stated that the Service’s demand for AFVs and alternative fuels is not large enough to result in significant changes to the availability and price of AFVs or to the nationwide alternative fuel infrastructure. We are continuing to look at issues surrounding the nationwide alternative fuel infrastructure and plan on issuing a report in the middle of 2007. Service officials also noted that they continue to look at alternative fuel vehicles and other options to improve vehicle fuel efficiency.
For example, the Service has recently focused testing on hybrid vehicles. These officials noted, however, that while the mail delivery tests using hybrid vehicles are going very well and are conducive to the stop-and-go driving of mail delivery routes, hybrid vehicles are not considered AFVs and are ineligible for EPAct 2005 credit because they are powered primarily by standard gasoline. Nevertheless, the use of hybrids is consistent with the President’s recent executive order requiring federal agencies to cut their energy consumption by, among other actions, using hybrid cars.