Electric vehicles are all the rage these days. They are cheaper to power, require less maintenance and are considered more environmentally friendly than gas vehicles. In a long-term effort to reduce community greenhouse gasses, the city of Durango isn’t hesitating to jump on the EV bandwagon.
Switching over to electric vehicles is one way the city can move forward with its new sustainability plan adopted in June. The plan identified energy consumption and transportation emissions as the source of 92% of Durango’s greenhouse gasses. The long-term plan aims to reduce communitywide greenhouse gas emissions by 54% by 2030 and to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by 100% by 2050.
City staff members and administrators took a Ford F-150 Lightning, a 66-inch bed electric-powered pickup truck, on test drives earlier this month as part of the city’s exploration of electric vehicle options.
Marty Pool, sustainability manager for the city, said the F-150 model was chosen because it is a good representation of a range of vehicles entering the market.
He said city vehicles are intermittently replaced as needed, and the city wants to prioritize phasing electric vehicles into its fleet as opportunities arise.
“We are looking at this from the total fleet perspective,” Pool said. “Obviously, the transition isn’t going to happen overnight. But we need to start somewhere and we need to understand everything that transitioning our fleet is going to entail.”
The city has a fleet of 328 vehicles ranging from light-duty cars and pickups to police vehicles, buses, trolleys, dump trucks, plow trucks, wheel loaders and backhoe excavators, all of which consume fossil fuels.
And those aren’t the only tools the city uses that burn fuel. Lawn mowers, skid steers, tractors, backup generators and water pumps contribute to the city’s fuel consumption.
As the city and its fleet grew over the last decade, so did its use of gas, Tom Kramer, city fleet manager, said in an email to The Durango Herald.
In 2012, the city’s fleet of vehicles consumed 198,986 gallons of fuel. In 2021, it consumed 275,051 gallons of fuel, he said. That is enough fuel to drive a Toyota Camry from Los Angeles to New York City 3,846 times. On average, the city used about 200,000 gallons of fuel annually during the last decade.
Winter is typically the most fuel-demanding season as a result of the need to plow snow, Pool said.
Despite a larger fleet and more fuel consumption over the last decade, the city actually spent more money on fuel 10 years ago than it did in 2021.
In 2012, the city spent $585,160 on gas and diesel for its fleet. But in 2021, it spent $391,352, Pool said.
He said the difference is because the city relies on diesel fuel more than gasoline, and diesel is priced differently.
The most demanding departments for fuel usage are Durango Transit for its buses and trolleys, recycling and trash collection, and the police department, which deploys cruisers on patrol every day, Kramer said. Likewise, the vehicles in those departments are the highest priority for replacement by electric vehicles because they provide direct services to residents.
Moving to electrically powered vehicles would save the city as much as $700,000 in annual maintenance, repair and fuel costs based on the current average gas prices, because the cost of electricity per mile is about 85% to 90% less than gas per mile, Pool said.
He said there are also potential savings in reduced maintenance needs, although those figures are more complicated to calculate.
Pool said the city prioritizes good price values, maintenance records and reliability when it is searching for new vehicles to add to its fleet.
The test drive of the F-150 Lightning marks the city’s first step in what is ultimately a total replacement of the city’s fleet. Kramer worked with a local dealership to schedule the test drives across various city departments.
Pool said feedback from city staff members was “overwhelmingly positive.”
“It is a riot,” he said. “It’s quick, it drives really smoothly. Obviously, it’s quiet. And the range on the battery is great.”
He said the F-150 Lightning’s extended range is 300 miles, comparable to what the city expects from a vehicle with a full tank of gas.
He said the city has experimented with using fast chargers for quick battery top-offs in addition to leaving it plugged in for overnight charging. During the trial, fast charging wasn't necessary because a full charge from spending the night plugged in provides plenty of juice to last a whole day.
“We haven’t even gotten close to depleting the entire battery, even (with) test-driving with different departments and staff all day,” Pool said.
Converting to a full fleet of electric vehicles is miles down the road for Durango, which makes some logistics to the sustainability project difficult to decipher. For example, what ratio of chargers to vehicles is needed to keep the fleet at full functionality? Pool said that depends on vehicle type, use patterns by city staff members and the types of chargers the city installs.
Some chargers are more effective than others, he said. A Level 2 charger can provide 15 to 25 miles after an hour of charging. Level 3 fast chargers can provide 100 to 200 miles after an hour of charging. Those charging capacities are, in theory, sufficient for a group of 10 vehicles that only drive 10 to 15 miles per day; especially if the vehicles are regularly changed out for fully charged ones, he said.
Similarly, a police cruiser that hits the road every day might need its own delicate type of charger in order to recharge every night, he said.
It is also difficult to calculate how quickly cost savings would be realized when transitioning to electric vehicles. That sort of financial analysis would be done on a unit-by-unit basis as the city steadily replaces its fleet.
Pool said if an electric vehicle costs a little more than a comparable gas-powered vehicle, cost savings would become apparent incrementally.
“The smaller the price gap between the EV version and a gas-powered version, the quicker the savings are realized,” he said. “This is why it’s exciting to see the cost of EV’s coming down and for a much wider variety of EV’s hitting the markets in the coming years.”
In related news, the city received an $18,000 grant from Charge Ahead Colorado, a grant program under the Colorado Energy Office, to install two dual-port stations at Durango Public Library.
Pool said the library is a key location to making electric vehicle charging accessible to the community at large. The chargers will be installed near the entrance to the library near East Third Avenue and 19th Street.
cburney@durangoherald.com
