Eventually there may also be more options with battery swapping - that's a lot more feasible with a fleet within a relatively small geographic region.
The vehicle, when stopped, has other functions to perform. It has hydraulic lifters and compactors that need quite a bit of power to operate. It's a working platform, not a simple garbage transportation mechanism.
Even to the extent is isn't for transportation, see how far away the dump is from your home. That distance has to be covered twice at least once a day, and possibly as much as 3 times per day.. and during one of those legs the truck is fully loaded with possibly up to as much as 20,000lbs of trash.
Finally, they have to operate in all conditions, in both very low and very high temperatures. The logistics of this aren't as simple as it would be for a standard vehicle.
The engines in diesel garbage trucks often run at idle when those hydraulics are working, lifting a 100 kg residential can or a 1-ton dumpster through a few meters of motion is not noticeable to a 350 HP diesel, accelerating 30 tons of truck and trash in the same amount of time is why they're equipped with so much more engine power.
Power in kW = Pressure in bar * Flow in liters per minute / 600
2.5 kW = 150 bar * 10 l/min / 600
or a little more than 3 horsepower. That gives you about 15 tons of force. Maybe the trucks use two cylinders, one on each side, so double it? Plus 10% for pump inefficiencies, and 5% for electric motor inefficiencies (200% for diesel-to-kinetic losses)?
Still negligible compared to accelerating a huge steel box plus dozens of tons of trash to roadway speeds 1000 times a day.
Looking up some existing PTOs and pumps on munciepower.com, it looks like typical refuse systems are provisioned with PTOs and pumps rated for on the order of 10-50 kW, and diesel "prime movers" of 200-400 kW.
EV's are great at delivering high power on demand, for short periods. A selling point of Tesla since the Roadster days was the astounding acceleration. Peak torque at a dead start is a key characteristic of electric motors.
What's far more challenging is range, a problem Tesla has addressed quite capably for passenger vehicles, though which remains largely unmet for cargo and heavy-transport equipment (including snow ploughs).
Interestingly, there was a period where a non-electrical power network was fairly frequently encountered at neighbourhood or city scale: hydraulic power networks. These often operated high-power loads, though typically for short periods or efforts as my first paragraph describes. Hydraulic accumulators lifted weights or water and provided on-demand power for moving lock gates, cargo hoists, and other typically industrial tasks. These were developed in the early 19th century and many remained operational well into the 20th, with the Wikipedia article below listing several operating into the 1970s.
Smaller such networks exist in dentist's offices, auto repair shops, and in many Amish workshops, based on compressed air, and utilising similar principles.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_power_network>
(I'm presuming LeifCarrotson knows much of this, others may not. I didn't myself until a few years ago.)
In much of London, they drive a relatively short distance to offload the waste. Some is handled locally (e.g. composting food and garden waste). The rest is taken the much longer distance by barge or rail.
Barge: https://www.wandsworth.gov.uk/news/2019-news/june-2019/thame...
Massive upfront cost (infrastructure and NY seems to be a bit fraught) and also likely expensive to run, but with high population density it’s got to be better.
However this would then have a fleet of snow trucks that weren’t used 99% of the time, as the rubbish was mostly sorted.
They're trying to map these things out but it will probably take more than a decade. Until that happens you can't even begin to budget for a new city-wide underground infrastructure project. Any project has to be point to point and focused.
Let alone the issue of the rats.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...
Ironically one of the largest vacuum trays system in the world IS in NYC… but it serves Roosevelt Island, not the “mainland”
Swappable batteries at the dump depot? There's a company in Australia doing swappable batteries for trucks (https://thedriven.io/2022/03/25/worlds-largest-electric-truc...)
I may be biased by my experiences. At home the transfer station is about 4 miles away, and at my parents' place that I've been cleaning out it's probably 1.5-2 miles by road - or less than half a mile if I could go up a couple hundred yards of steep forested hillside.
Having driven a Hybrid 'Truck' (really more of a ute[2]) for just under a year, I can say that EV plows will likely show their deficiencies when you need them the most [3].
[1] - On the whole, this is still better than doing nothing with it and just allowing it to vent, or burning on-site (which, sometimes you do see at local landfills.)
[2] - The Maverick -does- do a decent job IMO of showing what's possible with a small purpose-built hybrid truck or truck-like thing; However manufacturers that make bigger EVs are likely reluctant to build a truly 'minimum viable product', as it will bite into fleet sales of larger EV/Hybrids introduced.
[3] - Recently, we had sustained sub 10F temps. My overall mileage went from 35-42MPG to 25-30MPG.
Not necessarily. The heaviest snow falls just below freezing. Very low temperatures bring light, fluffy stuff — the kind skiers crave, and that a human can lift huge shovels of.
Be interesting if they're able to clean/compress/use methane produced by the dump itself instead of having it flared off - or drive a generator tied into battery charging. It really needs to be burned instead of just being released as-is, might as well get use from it.
For garbage trucks you have stop and go movement so EVs eliminate idling. Given the size of the trucks it's probably not a big deal to make sure they have adequate battery capacity.
Plow trucks have a completely different use model where they're run at speed for long periods and one day of plowing could have the same distance traveled as weeks of trash collection. Hybrids would likely be an improvement in efficiency but the same way they do for other trucks - batteries support high demand periods while the generator is fine for the lower sustained loads.
Edit: a drawback of the smaller fleet for snow management is that garbage trucks aren't as well suited for salt/sand/deicer distribution. Nobody designs their garbage trucks to spray. I hope.