The US Postal Service this week announced the arrival of its first electric vehicle charging stations and electric delivery vans at a postal facility in Atlanta, the first facility of what will be an eventual 400 “Sorting and Delivery Centers” (S&DCs) at USPS locations around the country.
Damn right, INFRASTRUCTURE, Baby!
Postmaster Louis DeJoy, and why does he still have a job, said in a press release that “integral” this and “modernization” that:
“As we transform our operating processes and invest in new automation, new technologies, and upgraded facilities and vehicles, we will generate significant efficiencies that reduce our costs, slash our carbon footprint and minimize waste.”
DeJoy also thanked Joe Biden and Congress for some $40 billion in Inflation Reduction Act money making all the electrification and building upgrades possible, so hooray.
Those wacky beluga whale-shaped "Next Generation Delivery Vehicles" (NGDVs) from military contractor Oshkosh won’t be widely deployed until around 2028, so in the meantime, the Postal Service will begin electrifying its fleet by purchasing Ford’s E-Transit full-sized delivery vans — 9,250 of em — “commercial off-the shelf” EVs, or COTS. The carbon cost of carrying all those abbreviations around is likely to be negligible, thanks to EVs.
Some 75 percent of the expected 66,000-truck NGDV baby beluga fleet will be electric, and the other quarter will run on fossil fuels because they’ll be needed on longer, often rural routes where EVs aren’t yet cost-effective. (Both versions of the vehicle will look similar, but with different innards and drivetrains.) Eventually, the Postal Service intends to make its fleet 100 percent electric, as the technology becomes available.
Electrifying government vehicle fleets — the Postal Service’s is the largest of any agency’s — has been a key part of Biden’s climate strategy, because federal purchasing power is a hell of a driver for industry to scale up EV technology.
USPS’s first phase of electrification will include 14,000 EV charging stations, and conversion of some 400 existing sites into those Sorting and Delivery Centers, which the press release ‘splains will “provide faster and more reliable mail and package delivery over a greater geographic area” and “will serve as the local hubs to deploy EVs along local carrier routes.”
And holy cats, has this transition been needed. As we noted when the postal Service announced its electrification plans, the current fleet of boxy, un-air-conditioned postal trucks built by Grumman started going into service back in the late 1980s, when I and many other people still had a hairline. They’re dirty and inefficient AF, too, getting only about eight miles per gallon, which is about as bad as my beloved curb queen 1973 Chevrolet, Vlad the Impala. The gasoline version of the NGDV whaletruck only gets around 14 mpg, and that’s with the AC off, so once they’re fully in service, the electric whales will cause a vast drop in the federal government’s carbon emissions.
And hey, those old Grumman trucks can be crushed and made into something useful, too. Maybe after a great big mail truck demolition derby. We should totally start one of those online petitions.
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I, for one, welcome our new electric overlords. But I'm going to keep a close ion them.
Great, now my mail is woke