When you talk about e-mail, generally you think of the unending flood of electronic messages -- much of it useless spam -- that we receive and send from our cellular telephones, Blackberries, laptop and desktop computers. For most of us, e-mail is a fairly recent phenomenon of the last decade and a half.
But down at the post office, they've been engaged in e-mail -- on and off -- for a century in the form of electrically-driven postal vehicles. In fact, postal services from the Royal Mail in Britain to La Poste in France to Deutsche Post in Germany have investigated using electric vehicles in a variety of shapes and sizes for local mail delivery; and they continue to do so. In 1935, Deutche Post operated a fleet of 2,400 battery electric delivery vehicles.
More recently, seeking to reduce its operating expenses and reliance on imported oil, La Poste committed to the replacement of much of its delivery fleet with electric models, which can be charged from the nation's nuclear-generated electricity grid.
Bradshaw Carrryall electric postal van - British Royal Mail
n the UK, the Royal Mail has been experimenting with battery-powered Bradshaw Carryalls (photo left) for home mail delivery in the university town of Oxford, with apparent success. The Isle of Man has just put into postal service an electric MegaTruck.
On this side of the Atlantic, the U.S. Postal Service is again re-evaluating bringing back the EV, and for good reason; they are a perfect fit for normal post office operations: short, frequent, stop-and-go trips often under 25 miles a day with each vehicle returning to its local postal facility each night, making recharging convenient.
According to Michael Ravnitzky, who serves as staff assistant to Postal Regulatory Commissioner Ruth Goldway, the U.S.P.S. has a fleet totaling more than 200,00 vehicles, 142,000 of them dedicated to daily local mail delivery. Most of these Long Life Vehicles or LLVs are right-hand drive and were put into service between 1987 and 1994. Their Grumman-built aluminum bodies were designed to last 20 years, which means that some parts of the fleet have passed their designed service life; although the Post Office has announced plans to extend the life of these vehicles another 7 years. While their 2.4 liter 4-cylinder Pontiac engine is EPA rated at 18.5 mpg, in actual use it is between 8-10 mpg. If gasoline is priced at $2/gal, that works out to be 20-25 cents/mile. Of the $926 million the Postal Service spent in FY2008 on supplies and materials, most of this was for fuel. $1.39 billion also went to vehicle maintenance.
In contrast, Ravnitzky calculates that even including the amortized cost of replacement batteries and depending on the local cost of electricity, a battery-powered LLV should cost between 8-12 cents a mile to operate. He further estimates that EV maintenance costs are only about 40% that of gasoline models. While he acknowledges in a recent white paper provided to EV World that cold weather operations will require use of either hybrids or gasoline/diesel vehicles on longer routes because of the impact of temperature on the capacity of storage batteries, he believes the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Among the factors he lists as favorable to the redeployment of battery postal vehicles are the following:
The existence of short-duration, repetitive, predictable routes
High fuel prices with significant volatility
Operating costs of gasoline engine trucks compared with electric drive trucks
The importance of controlling costs of delivery to the home
Potential limitations on the use of gas engine vehicles in some cities
Environmental benefits and pollution reduction
Revenue opportunities from the sale of pollution credits or carbon credits
Continued availability of ICE or hybrid vehicles for routes unsuited to electric drive vehicles
Opportunities for retrofit of existing vehicles for test and evaluation purposes
In "Electric Drive Vehicles For Mail Delivery: Identifying Key Issues", presented last week at a conference at the Rutgers University Center for Research in Regulated Industries, Ravnitzky also addresses the vehicle-to-grid opportunities that a large electrically-powered postal service fleet presents. He writes...
With 140,000 Long Life Vehicle (LLV) ordinary delivery vehicles and 200,000 vehicles total in the entire fleet, the Postal Service could serve as an excellent test bed to evaluate such concepts regionally or nationally.
The existing power grid includes minimal storage capacity –– there is only 2.2 percent capacity in pumped (water power) storage.
The electric power grid and electric vehicle fleet could be exceptionally complementary as systems for managing power because the electric drive vehicle fleet can store power and release it quickly upon demand –– a cheaper alternative to building expensive generating equipment used only a fraction of the time, or expensive and controversial power transmission lines.
As a crude means of comparison, 140,000 postal vehicles at 150kW (mechanical) per vehicle yields approximately 21 gigawatts (mechanical) (GWm). This can be compared against approximately 600GW of electric utility generation in the United States and 209GW from nonutility generators. He notes that while postal vehicles would not, typically, be available to provide power from their batteries back into the local grid during peak demand times, usually mid-afternoon into early evening during summer months because of air conditioning loads, they do sit parked some 16 hours out of each day. This means they could "serve as an asymmetric sink for down regulation only, or can serve as a symmetric regulation source." This could provide the Post Service with a potential new and needed source of revenue.
On this point, Ravnitzky states, "The Postal Service could create revenue from electric drive vehicles by undertaking brokering of V2G services from its fleet, particularly contingency and regulation grid services. In this way, the Postal Service would be capitalizing upon the fact that the postal fleet is used for only a small portion of the day."
He concludes...
Electrification of the Postal Service delivery vehicle fleet is practical, achievable and desirable, and should be initiated now. Though cost studies are essential, the case is obvious. As a government agency performing a constitutionally mandated critical public service, the Postal Service should be a first mover on electric drive vehicles, and the federal government should encourage and support that effort.
Aye-i'm sure these vans will help us deliver at the speed of lightening.
The downside? they only charge 10 at once. 
