Heag mobilo, which belongs to the Heag Group of the city of Darmstadt, has acquired a further 24 buses for a total of 16 million euros and has now received them.
On Friday, Heag mobilo managing director Michael Dirmeier presented some of the electric vehicles in the depot at Böllenfalltor.
Five electrically powered buses have been in use in Darmstadt since summer 2020, one since the beginning of this year.
Together, according to Dirmeier, the six vehicles have already chauffeured Darmstadt residents and their guests as well as residents of the Darmstadt-Dieburg district over 300,000 kilometers in an environmentally friendly manner.
The Lord Mayor of Darmstadt, Jochen Partsch (The Greens), spoke at the presentation of an important and valuable contribution to a better urban climate. At the same time, he pointed out that even electric buses can only make a really significant contribution to reducing CO2 if the electricity used to charge the batteries is pure green electricity. The Heag-mobilo sister company Entega delivers in Darmstadt, as confirmed by its managing director Thomas Schmidt. His company is already ensuring that Darmstadt's trams run on pure green electricity, i.e. with energy obtained from wind and solar energy, for example. With the conversion of the bus fleet to electric drives, Heag mobilo will save around 2.5 million euros in diesel and thus also 6,600 tons of CO2 per year.
56 charging stations in the depot
Since the vehicles are not recharged on the route, but only hooked up to the power grid on the premises of the depot, 56 charging stations were installed there in March, at which the batteries of a bus can be fully charged in less than four hours.
The Entega also faced the task of designing the charging infrastructure in such a way that the city's power grid is burdened as little as possible.
Darmstadt wants to operate a pure e-bus fleet by 2025, apart from two double-decker buses. All in all, the Heag mobilo bus fleet currently comprises around 70 vehicles. The 24 new vehicles are eleven standard and 13 articulated buses. Both the twelve-meter-long standard buses and the 18-meter articulated buses have a battery capacity of 384 kilowatt hours. According to the information, the shorter buses can travel around 220 kilometers and the articulated vehicles up to 170 kilometers. At Heag mobilo, however, it is expected that the battery capacity will increase further due to technical developments and that buses with a greater range will be available by 2025.
The new Darmstadt mobility department head Michael Kolmer (Die Grünen) emphasized that the new electric buses not only reduced environmental pollution in terms of emissions, but also caused considerably less noise than vehicles with diesel engines. Kolmer is certain that the targeted mobility turnaround will only be achieved if people are offered attractive offers such as the new, environmentally friendly Heag mobilo buses. In this way, for example, people who could not afford an electric car could also make their contribution.
When financing the 24 new electric buses of the Mercedes-Benz eCitaro type, the city of Darmstadt also relied on funding from the federal government and, in this case, the Federal Environment Ministry. According to this, the federal government bears 80 percent of the additional costs of an electric bus compared to a diesel bus. jor.