Switch to electric buses results in significant savings

Government’s decision to introduce a fleet of electric buses at the Transport Board has resulted in millions of dollars in savings.

This was revealed by the Transport Board’s chief executive officer, Fabian Wharton, who told the Standing Finance Committee during debate on the Appropriation Bill, 2022 in the House of Assembly on Monday, that the switch was already paying dividends.

He said the state-owned bus company for which Government acquired 49 electric buses at a cost of $45 million in 2020, had significantly reduced the money spent on bus maintenance and fuel.

“Of course, when you purchase new buses you will immediately gain savings on your bus maintenance and that is one of the key cost drivers of the Transport Board. At the end of March 2019, we had $15 million in bus maintenance; at the end of 2020, we were looking at $12 million; at the end of 2021, it was $6 million,” Wharton pointed out.

“…. So the Government’s investment, that capital investment into those new vehicles, has really borne fruit in the bus maintenance.”

He disclosed that the Transport Board’s fuel costs had also decreased since the purchase of the electric buses.

“When we look at the financial year 2020, we are talking about $8.2 million in diesel. When you combine financial year 2021, you are talking about just about $5.6 million when you combine the diesel fleet and the electric fleet to give you what our total fuel costs would have been. In the year to date, up to the end of February, we are talking about $4.9 million, so you can see the savings,” Wharton said.

“We must bear in mind that we were going through the pandemic and the protocols that were in place. The size of that diesel fleet was a bit larger than we had anticipated and budgeted for because we were moving to reduce the size of that fleet so that we can gain those savings on diesel. That was principally because the diesel buses have a larger capacity and given that we were at 75 per cent and at one point 60 per cent [capacity], we needed to be able to move the travelling public within those restrictions so we had to maintain those buses a bit longer.”

Wharton explained that the Transport Board was also looking at ways to reduce its electricity bill by installing photovoltaic systems at its Roebuck Street headquarters and its Mangrove depot in St Philip.

He said discussions were already underway with the Ministry of Energy and the Barbados National Oil Company Limited (BNOCL) to find an alternative to charging the electric buses, in hopes of seeing a reduction in the $2.7 million associated costs. (RB)