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Highway Contractor: It's Snow Time!

Highway HighwayContractor by Tina Grady Barbaccia as the Driven Snow Alternative fuels can power your winter operations fleet C an you ﬁght the white with the green? As the push to make ﬂeets greener continues to build up steam, alternative fuel power options are coming under increased scrutiny. Questions are being asked about efﬁciency, power, sustainability and even operator friendliness. But the questions are coming at a time when alternative fuels vehicles may be on the verge of a breakthrough. At one of the best attended educational sessions at the at the recent 2012 American Public Works Association (APWA) Snow Conference, host city Milwaukee outlined its progress to a winter weather ﬂeet that will increasingly rely on natural gas, as will other vehicles of the city’s barns. When Milwaukee ﬁrst attempted an alternative fuel initiative in 1980, the initiative to use compressed natural gas (CNG) for its ﬂeets didn’t unfold as seamlessly as had been anticipated. The engines in two 8 June 2012 Better Roads Dodge pickup trucks were modiﬁed, and CNG tanks took up valuable space in the pickup box. The pickups broke down often, harnessed very low power and could only travel within a 30-mile range. The city tabled the idea for a while, but then in 1992-1994, Milwaukee moved forward with its second initiative. This time, seven units were converted to CNG, including a pickup, cars, a police cruiser, a small dump truck and a medium-duty truck. This time, the CNG conversion used up about half of the space in the car trunk or pickup body with a system pressure of 3,000 psi. However, the city made a dual-fuel conversion so that if a truck or other equipment couldn’t get enough CNG, a switch would allow it to be run on gasoline. “We were afraid operators would forget about CNG [and just use the gasoline capabilities] so we installed hour meters,” says Jeffrey Tews, ﬂeet operations manager for the City of Milwaukee.

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