Florida Power & Light recently announced that it was buying five new diesel hybrid utility trucks, bringing the company incrementally closer to attaining its goal of converting fully one-third of its 2900 vehicles to hybrid power by 2010. FPL was the first company in the United States to put a diesel hybrid into service, buying a single truck back in May of 2006, and it was the success of that experiment that encouraged a host of other public and private corporations &mdash including UPS, which has fifty hybrid-drive delivery vans in its so-called "Green Fleet" &mdash to explore the benefits of the hybrid-powered work truck. Doing good for the environment is one thing, and companies like FPL are all too happy to publicize themselves as earth-loving, but corporate bean-counters quickly figured out that putting hybrids to work also could save a different kind of green: cash. FPL and UPS are buying parallel-type diesel-electric hybrids from the Eaton Corporation. They utilize an electric motor/generator between the clutch and input of the transmission, not unlike the system in Honda's Civic Hybrid. The electric motor's torque blends seamlessly with the diesel engine's, easing the load and thereby saving fuel, and it assumes the role of generator during braking, recovering energy normally lost and recharging the batteries. Moreover, FPL notes that its vehicles run on bio-diesel, formulated from 80-percent ultra-low-sulphur diesel fuel and 20-percent virgin soybean oil &mdash lowering emissions and saving some ten gallons of fuel (roughly $30) per day.
Photos courtesy of the Eaton Corporation and UPS.
Top: Eaton's Medium-Duty Hybrid Electric System
Bottom: Part UPS's "Green Fleet" of some fifty hybrid trucks.
