The Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) partnered with Napa Valley Transportation Authority (NVTA) for a successful award under the Federal Transit Administration’s (FTA) 2017 Low or No Emission Vehicle Program (Low-No). CTE provided project management and technical assistance for NVTA’s deployment of five 30’ BYD battery electric buses (BEBs) and five ChargePoint CPE250 chargers across three depot locations: Yountville, St. Helena, and Napa.
CTE’s primary responsibilities included route, charge, and rate modeling, which were used to help define the agency’s charging requirements specific to the agency’s fixed-route and on-demand service across the three cities. CTE supported the agency’s pre-award Buy America audit to meet FTA’s funding requirements and performed periodic bus inspections during the bus fabrication process to ensure the quality of the vehicles that were delivered to NVTA. CTE performed validation testing of the vehicles in September 2022.
CTE provided project administration and coordination to NVTA that helped to minimize vehicle procurement lead times, and helped to coordinate BYD’s implementation of a new farebox and driver barrier design on delivered vehicles. The project was delayed by COVID-related supply chain issues, labor shortages at BYD’s bus production facility in Lancaster, and Altoona testing timelines for the BYD K7M-ER (the final report was published in April 2022). CTE supported the post-delivery Buy America audit for the vehicles. By March 2023, NVTA had received all five BEBs, and retrofits for the five vehicles were completed at BYD’s San Carlos facility in June 2023.
All five BEBs were put into revenue service in July 2023. Key performance indicators (KPI) reporting for the five 30’ BYD BEBs was completed in Q12024. The average efficiency over the monitoring period was 1.39 kWh/mi. Results indicate that BEBs have been a cost-effective replacement of diesel vehicles in NVTA’s service, helping to reduce overall operating costs (specifically fuel) and mitigating climate impacts.
