AFLEET 2020 Update (Text Version)
This is a text version of the video for AFLEET 2020 Update presented on April 8, 2021.
Sandra: Ok. Well welcome everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. I'm Sandra Loi from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Today's webinar will feature an overview of the Alternative Fuel Life Cycle Environmental and Economic Transportation tool or AFLEET for short. Using the AFLEET tool, fleet managers can compare fuel use, environmental impact and vehicle costs using simple inputs. Today you'll hear from Andy Burnham, principal environmental scientist from Argonne National Laboratory who developed AFLEET. Today he will discuss recent updates to AFLEET including updated tail pipe emissions from the new EPA's MOVES3 model addressing diesel in-use, an off-road equipment cost calculator, and new total cost of ownership data from a recent DOE study. Before we get started, I'd like to review a few items so you know how to participate in today's webinar.
All attendees are muted and will remain so for the entirety of the webinar. Audio connection options for today's webinar include listening in through your computer or by calling in on your phone. For the best audio connection, we recommend calling in through a phone line. Be sure to mute your computer if you're calling in over the telephone to avoid possible feedback. There will be a Q&A session at the conclusion of the presentation. We encourage you to submit questions as the presentation is taking place. You can do so by typing them into the Q&A pane. The Q&A pane is noted as a question mark icon which should be located on the right-hand side of your control panel or screen. Once we arrive at the Q&A portion, we'll address as many questions as time allows. Should you have any technical difficulties, please reach out to me the host via the chat feature which appears in your control panel as a comment bubble. We are recording today's webinar, and it will be available on the Clean Cities website within the next week or so.
Now I'd like to go ahead and formally introduce today's speaker. Andy Burnham is a principal environmental scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He develops tools and provides technical analysis regarding the environmental and economic impacts of alternative fuel in advanced vehicles for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office Technology Integration Program. In addition, he performs life cycle analysis to update the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Technologies or GREET model. He received his bachelor's in environmental engineering from Northwestern University and his master's in transportation technology and policy from the University of California, Davis. Andy, you may begin.
Andy: Thank you very much, Sandra. I appreciate the introduction, and I apologize for the long tool names that can be a bit of tongue twisters. I think that's one of the things that government folks are good at creating like very long and funny, long acronyms. Anyway, so thanks everybody for joining in. I want to go over some updates of the AFLEET tool for 2020. So, the presentation I'll give is a little bit of an introduction of AFLEET for those who aren't aware or need a refresher about what it does, get into the specific updates that Sandra mentioned talking about total cost of ownership updates, NOx emissions from the latest EPA MOVES model, and then the off-road updates we've done. And then I'm going to go through a little bit of a demo showing kind of off-road capabilities. I'll show a little bit through the presentation mode and then switch over at the end to the actual spreadsheet so you can see kind of the tool in action.
So, for introduction there is kind of the suite of AFLEET tools. The tool started in 2013 as a spreadsheet. We've updated it every year nearly since then. It's focused—the spreadsheet is really detailed energy emissions and cost state analysis for light- and heavy-duty vehicles. But two years ago, we developed an online tool because the spreadsheet can be a little bit daunting for those who are either not used to spreadsheets or the first time using AFLEET. There's a lot going on there. So that is kind of the, a piece of what the spreadsheet can do. It's not all what the spreadsheet does but kind of a simple platform that can take a piece of it. The next kind of last piece of the AFLEET suite is the Heavy-Duty Vehicle Emissions Calculator. So that was developed because of the, because of the VW settlement and the ability to look at like NOx and PM and greenhouse gas emissions for VW's settlement funding.
So, I'll get into kind of AFLEET specifically with a little bit more detail. So, I mentioned many of these things. We're looking at petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutant emissions, and cost of ownership of light- and heavy-duty vehicles. We have 18 fuel and vehicle technologies so conventional are like gasoline and diesel. We have hybrids, plug-in electrics, and then alternative fuels ranging from natural gas, propane, hydrogen, and biofuels like ethanol, biodiesel, and renewable diesel. So, some of the key new features I've mentioned is the update of the tailpipe or vehicle operation and emission factories using the new EPA MOVES tool. We've updated vehicle cost data and charging infrastructure from various sources. But one primary thing forthcoming is the DOE report on total cost of ownership for both light- and heavy-duty vehicles.
And then finally, the new Off-Road Payback Calculator. So, kind of at the top here I'm talking about light- and heavy-duty. Last year for 2019 we added off-road as a capability including about 21 different types of off-road equipment. The focus last year was to look at just emissions so kind of what is the air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions as well as petroleum use of different equipment in a specific fleet application. So, this year we're adding basically the capability to compare the cost of off-road equipment as well as doing kind of environmental comparisons as well. Spreadsheet and you get the suite of tools available at AFLEET web.
We update kind of all of them at the same time. So, if you have already updated – if you have already downloaded the AFLEET spreadsheet, we'll be sending an email out later today with the announcement of the update. So, you should get that. If you haven't updated or if you haven't downloaded the spreadsheet before you can go to this website, kind of follow the link to the AFLEET page. And you have to sign in, just kind of give your email and then you'll be able to kind of hear about updates and so forth.
So, what is in the AFLEET spreadsheet and what's kind of new, related? So, the Simple Payback Calculator is the calculation mode that's in both kind of the spreadsheet and the online tool. And what is the payback? Well, basically you're looking at the incremental costs of a new alternative fuel vehicle and comparing that to a conventional counterpart. So, I can give an example. So, let's think about a natural gas transit bus. And you want to compare a fleet that is interested in purchasing that natural gas transit bus. So, a quick way to do an analysis would be to see what the kind of incremental costs of the natural gas transit bus is, compare that to your conventional counterpart, which a diesel transit bus, and say one is a million dollars in natural gas and the other is five hundred thousand, the diesel.
So, the incremental cost is five hundred thousand. So, to pay back that incremental cost you can accrue savings through fuel and maintenance typically. Those are kind of the big two. So natural gas is a lower costing fuel than diesel and it can, in some cases, provide lower maintenance. So, you would kind of do a calculation to estimate how much savings per year you get. So, if you're able to save a hundred thousand in fuel and maintenance each year, it would take five years to pay back that initial five hundred thousand increment. So, what we added is the ability to do off-road. We have on-road already. We also have for on-road vehicles the Total Cost of Ownership Calculator. This is for fleets who want to get a little bit more into the details of kind of the costs of owning the vehicle. So similar kind of passing over the simple payback over kind of insurance and fees and some of these things that oftentimes are kind of a wash between alternative fuel vehicles. The total cost of ownership gets into every single kind of vehicle-specific cost and lets the user compare that alternative fuel vehicle to the conventional counterpart.
We also have an Idle Reduction Calculator. So, to look at idle reduction equipment versus your baseline of idling. So very similar kind of process for payback so you can look at both emissions and payback of purchasing idle reduction equipment. Next is the On-Road Footprint Calculator. So this is the calculator that allows fleets and others to enter specific vehicles into the spreadsheet based on their model year, vehicle type, fuel type and usage and get the emissions of those vehicles. So if you had a fleet that you're working with or you're operating a hundred different vehicles, you could take the export of your fleet inventory software, put it into a CSV, copy and paste into the spreadsheet, and then you can get all your emissions data for on-road vehicles. We also have that for off-road vehicles as I mentioned in the previous slide. And that was our first initial add for off-road.
And then finally, we also added last year the EV Charging Calculator. So this is looking at the emissions benefits of public charging infrastructure. And that was often, we had that question posed to us in many, many ways is how do we estimate the benefits of putting charging infrastructure. So this calculator again oftentimes you have to set up a baseline. Here is my baseline of gasoline vehicles. Here is what our scenario using the public charging infrastructure will provide the kind of electricity to the vehicles, do an emissions comparison between that electricity and then you're kind of counterfactual based on gasoline vehicles.
So where does all of the data that comes into these calculations come from? So we have kind of three major sources. One is the GREET model. So Sandra mentioned that in introduction. That is another Argonne tool that has a lot of data on greenhouse gas emissions, air pollutant emissions, petroleum use, and energy. It also has fuel economy data. So this tool is a life cycle analysis tool you see in the graphic here kind of showing from left to right the fuel cycle. So basically, you don't want to just look at the emissions or the environmental footprint of the tailpipe emissions. We are often interested in kind of all the emissions or the energy use upstream. And this is particularly important for greenhouse gas emissions. You really need kind of those upstream emissions as you start to analyze alternative fuel vehicles. We also include from kind of top to bottom the vehicle cycles. So oftentimes you might get a question of yeah, the electric vehicles might have no tailpipe emissions. But what about the battery? It takes a lot of emissions and energy to build the battery. So GREET has another platform that calculates that. So we have incorporated that data into AFLEET as well.
The second major data source is the EPA's MOVES modeling software. I'll get into a little more detail later about this but basically this is the key software for states to analyze kind of air pollutant emissions from vehicles. And then finally, fuel price is really important. We use a Clean Cities alternative fuel price report. We have data for both public and private fueling stations by state. So that's a very important assumption when doing kind of a cost analysis. We provide defaults based on what we've seen in the past year and then do projections of what fuel costs will be in the future. But it's always the tools like this the ability to run scenarios. So, we have the ability to do kind of an uncertainty and then also you say well, the gasoline price is maybe between $3.00 and $2.00 and we're able to see what maybe the payback would be between those couple different scenarios.
So I mentioned the online tool. It does replicate the Simple Payback Calculator. It is just a graphic user interface that allows you to kind of step through the process graphically instead of the spreadsheet kind of figuring out where to go next. It has very similar components. It is only for light- and heavy-duty vehicles at this point. But it does provide you petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions, vehicle emissions, and simple payback. It has all the vehicle and fuel technologies that the spreadsheet does have, and you can find it at the website I provided there.
And then I'll just quickly go through the Heavy-Duty Vehicle Emissions Calculator, which I mentioned is a tool that helps really for looking at funding opportunities real quick, real fast tool to do that. It is focused on medium- and heavy-duty. That was part of the VW settlement focus. And it kind of narrows down the metrics you can look at so it's really focusing on NOx and PM as well as greenhouse gas emissions and allows you to do cost effectiveness for your proposal. It only goes down to four vehicle technologies, fuel and vehicle technologies. This is a medium-, heavy-duty tool, and it's kind of focusing on NOx benefits. So things like biodiesel, renewable diesel, they may provide some greenhouse gas emissions but they will not provide any benefits for NOx. So those are kind of excluded from this tool to make it simpler to use. You can find the tool at the AFLEET website.
So now getting into the specific updates that we did for this year, one of the key things that I've talked about for the past five years is diesel in-use NOx. There has been significant interest from kind of the regulatory bodies like EPA and CARB in California about reducing NOx emissions from heavy-duty vehicles as well as light-duty vehicles. So thinking again about the VW settlement for light-duty—and we can talk about for heavy-duty similar issues—is that what we've seen is in the real world diesel vehicles have higher NOx emissions than their certification standard. So that's kind of all VW, the VW scandal is all about was folks specifically cheating on their testing. But even for heavy-duty vehicles who are not cheating at all but doing kind of testing on an engine itself, getting it certified. And then when you put that engine into the real world what we've seen is that specifically in low-speed, low-load duty cycles, kind of like stop and go, lots of idling that the SCR system that is in all of the model year 2010 and newer diesels didn't operate so well in those kind of city stop-and-go cycles.
The EPA has this modeling cost for MOVES that was developed really to estimate these emission impacts. But being a big complex model and the data requirement EPA didn't update their model for the last three to, well 2017 was their last kind of minor update. But even then, they didn't have data for new heavy-duty diesel. So model year 2010 and newer that required these SCR and also diesel particulate filters. So they were making assumptions based on their best guesses of kind of pre-2010 data and then what they thought were good assumptions of how things have changed with the new emissions standards. The reality was that their functions weren't, they had some problems with the assumptions. And it was very clear that they needed to update not just the heavy-duty but also the light-duty diesel.
So last November, EPA did release MOVES3, which is the newest model, and it does include updated diesel NOx emissions for heavy-duty vehicles. But somewhat surprisingly, it doesn't have updated data for light-duty diesels. And potentially some reasons about that is what we've seen with EPA is that they do focus on kind of gasoline and diesel just in general. Like it's always been hard to get them interested in analyzing alternative fuels. But even there, diesel light-duty is not as big as diesel heavy-duty. So they use their resources to spend more time on diesel heavy-duty at this point. The other tool kind of both people use to do these kind of emissions analyses beyond AFLEET is the EPA DEQ or diesel emission quantifier. As of their current version which they released in December they don't have the MOVES3 data. So they're still using kind of the MOVES2014 which was the previous version and had thee problems with kind of heavy-duty NOx emissions. That's what AFLEET for the past several years has these multipliers to be able to try to rectify that challenge.
So what I'm showing in this chart here is how things have changed from kind of the previous version of MOVES model in 2014 to the newest MOVES3. And so the line kind of dashed across is at a ratio of one. So that kind of normalizes all of these different vehicle types. These are all diesel vehicles NOx emissions at kind of their baseline, what they were in MOVES2014. So, if you're above this line that means that the MOVES3, the new model has higher emissions for that piece of equipment for that truck or car. And then if it's below the line it's lower. So again, somewhat surprisingly, is the passenger truck and the passenger cars or both kind of light-duty vehicles has lower NOx emissions than the previous model. You can kind of see in the bullet points that I have here the previous multipliers we used were about 5X for light-duty vehicles. So, there assuming that maybe there's a 25 percent reduction for passenger trucks which is likely not the case.
The other one that's again interesting is the combination LH long haul truck. And they have lower emission for that, about 25 percent lower than their previous model. So they did all this work to try to incorporate all this new data that's showing that these vehicles are emitting more than they kind of were expected to. What happened with combination long haul trucks was they did adjust kind of those emission rates that the vehicle does emit more kind of on a per mile basis. But they adjusted their assumptions on hoteling or kind of extended idling so basically truck stop idling. They previously had assumed that long haul trucks were idling a lot overnight and they had collected data from Verizon and actually from NREL and some DOE work. And that data suggested that their assumptions from hoteling were kind of too high. And so they kind of drastically cut that emissions back.
You can see for every single other piece of every other vehicle the NOx emissions are now higher in the new model which was to be expected. And it ranges from about 1.5 as a multiplier for single unit long haul trucks and single unit short haul trucks kind of going up to about 2.5 for refuse and combination short haul trucks. So the multipliers that we have previously were 4X for these kind of urban duty cycles so kind of the buses and the refuse trucks and the single unit short haul stuff. And then for the highway vehicles, combination long haul, combination short haul, single unit short haul we estimated about 50 high, 1.5. So kind of in the ballpark of what they ultimately changed their estimates to, kind of ignoring what they did with combination long haul trucks. At the top end it's not as high so we don't see any of the emission factor getting to 4X. The highest is 2.5. So there are a couple of things that they modeled kind of the changes between the model year 2010 and model year 2020. So they're seeing and projecting that the diesel vehicles are getting better over time. The early kind of model year 2010 when that technology first came out, the emissions were kind of worse. They were working out the kinks and so forth. Now they're coming down. So that's part of their assumptions to be aware of.
Ok. So the other thing, so how do we incorporate that data? So previously we had the diesel in-use feature that you could select yes, yes and no. And if you've heard me present the plan was always to kind of get rid of that feature once EPA updated their tool. I guess unfortunately they didn't update the light-duty diesel so we kept the feature. But it only works for light-duty now. So you see in this chart here that we still do about a 5X update or 5X multiplier for light-duty diesel. And then for all the other heavy-duty we just use what EPA gives us so kind of what I was showing in the previous chart. What their updated emissions were using. They spent a lot of time and research to get it so that's what we use.
Then the last piece is that again EPA doesn't focus on alternative fuels. They did do some research on natural gas vehicles. It was kind of the pre-low NOx generation of engines. So you can kind of see in the middle there where it says CN, GL and GE in the blue bars. These are their estimates and I incorporated those of how the natural gas vehicles compare to diesel. So in general fairly significant reductions. Somewhat stranger and again, sometimes their data is a bit of a black box of why the single unit, long and short haul has somewhat of a lower reduction. But be that as it may, the current generation of natural gas vehicles and propane is now low NOx. So you can see, it may be hard to see but kind of next to that in a very small green bar that says 0.05 is that we did the analysis and those low NOx vehicles even though diesel is higher because of their update are still reducing emissions by 95 percent. So very, very low emissions for CNG and LNG low NOx engines. And that's for all pieces of equipment. I forget we do need to modify that. Previously it's, well, we had an adjustment for school buses because they weren't certified at the lowest standard. That changed recently so it is in the model at 0.05, but I do need to update that slide.
And then for propane and kind of the other fuels what we see is even gasoline pretty significant reductions compared to diesel. And gasoline is kind of really only in school buses. They don't have a lot of heavy-duty. There isn't transit buses or refuse trucks. It's more kind of medium-duty. But they do show pretty significant reductions in their NOx there. And then going to propane, they are now certifying at the lowest optional low-NOx standard, and that data is showing a 95 percent reduction. So that's the default setting if you're using AFLEET. You'll have the low-NOx engines for heavy-duty already incorporated.
So, moving beyond emissions, going to total cost of ownership, I was part of a study at DOE to look at the total cost of ownership of both light- and heavy-duty vehicles. This was an analysis project, not a Clean Cities or kind of technology integration. So, a little bit more modeling, but I think the results are of interest for folks because it is showing kind of some real-world results that I think are pretty interesting. So, one here kind of like a top line is that at a 15-year kind of lifetime of a vehicle, hybrids especially and then even battery electric vehicles of 250- to 300-mile range have a lower cost of ownership than gasoline vehicles today. And this doesn't even include any incentives. So no federal $7,500 or less or savings. It's unincentivized cost. So, what you see here is the various pieces of the total cost of ownership: the vehicle cost, which is basically vehicle depreciation, very small amount of financing, fuel especially important for gasoline vehicles, insurance, maintenance, repair, and taxes and fees. And what you see here is that these are kind of estimating these in real-world vehicle types. The benefits that say an electric vehicle get are from significant reductions in fuel costs and also fairly significant reductions in maintenance and repair. So we dug into that a little bit more in the study. And I'll share some details about that. Depreciation as well because I think that's an important factor that people talk about.
So yeah. For depreciation one of the key, I think, concerns of light-duty vehicles and I guess as we start getting to heavy-duty is like how much can I sell the vehicle for. Because typically ownership of a car or truck isn't 15 years. The first owner may get rid of the vehicle in say two years. And they want to know what the value holds at different periods of time. So many of the analyses that have gone on have looked at kind of the data they have for say model year 2010 Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts that came out kind of early because those came out in 2010, and now we're 10 years or so after that so you can kind of see how these vehicles depreciated. And so this gets kind of a bit of a problem kind of talking about how diesel was working out the kinks with their SCR system when that technology came in. The first generation of any technology has those issues. And as you move kind of subsequent generations and especially with electric vehicles where battery prices and battery capabilities are changing very drastically so going from BEV 100 to BEV 300 you have to be careful about citing studies that use that type of data.
So I am showing some of that data. Just I wanted to preface that. And what you do see as kind of those curves like the BEV curve kind of beyond the first couple of years, which I'll get to later. But they do depreciate, the data that we do have. And Nissan Leaf, all new Nissan Leaf they depreciated faster than kind of their gasoline counterparts. What we do see for hybrids is that they're depreciating almost at the same rate or typically even better than hybrids, or excuse me, that gasoline ICE vehicles especially once you get out into the future but it's pretty small. There's not a huge change. What's interesting is these first couple years, the years kind of one through three and what we're seeing with the latest data so model year 2017 and 2019 data from the study was that those vehicles were depreciating less than their gasoline counterparts. So that's, I think that's a pretty interesting outcome. And I think it's just something to be mindful that again these vehicles are now getting to the capabilities to compare to ICE gasoline vehicles with capabilities. And we just need to be mindful that that depreciation from old vehicles probably isn't that relevant anymore. So hopefully I've made that point clear.
Ok. So last I'll talk about maintenance for both light and heavy-duty vehicles. This is something that I've spent time in doing for AFLEET. So kind of as I worked on this project I kind of was meeting maintenance and repair analysis. So we did a maintenance schedule because if you were at some previous discussions about maintenance and repair from peer exchanges and things like that, some people will say "Hey, electric vehicles have no maintenance," and that's just not true. They have maintenance, and we can go through a maintenance schedule and talk about it. So I'm kind of, I'll walk through this and kind of the first bluish greenish bars are things that are pretty standard across all powertrains and that's things like headlights and wiper blades and a starter battery inspection. Then going to tires. Again, there isn't much difference if at all between those vehicles. Electric vehicles may even have a little bit higher tire cost because the vehicles are heavier, and they have higher torque so if you're at a stop light and the joy of an electric vehicle is that kind of instant torque. If you are using a lot of instant torque you may wear out your tires a little bit faster.
Shocks and struts again pretty standard across vehicle types. Something you don't change. Brakes are interesting. The data is poor. There hasn't been any rigorous studies of this. But there is decent anecdotal information that suggests not just electric vehicles, fully electric but the hybrids and plug-in hybrids can significantly reduce brake wear. I mean it makes sense because you have regenerative braking. You can use that to kind of reduce your brake pad wear. If you live in a cold climate and I live in Chicago and you have to deal with kind of the salt and some of the other issues of living in a northern climate. Some of those things might be problematic and you may have to replace your rotors no matter what even if you're kind of using them lightly. Anyway, so next is coolant. So pretty big reduction there, the big one being engine oil of course. So electric vehicles don't have to change their oil so that's a big savings there. But there are some small coolant changes that they have to deal with. Filters again fully electric vehicles don't have many of them except for the cabin air filter.
Then getting to kind of the more powertrain related, engine related maintenance. So we see transmission service, spark plugs, sensors, and timing belts. Those are actually pretty significant maintenance items. And what we see kind of in total 40 percent reduction for EVs. So this is really just focusing on maintenance, scheduled maintenance. Repairs are another area. And we did analyze that as well, and we saw a pretty similar type of a result: about 40 percent reduction for BEVs. When you talk about hybrids and plug-in hybrids, the reductions are 10 to 15 percent. There was a recent consumer report study, actually a former Argonne employee authored that. And they were collecting real-world data from consumer report folks who respond to their survey. And they were showing kind of similar significant reductions in maintenance costs, so good there. For BEVs they were showing even bigger reductions for plug-in hybrids, which is interesting. So this is an area that needs further research. But I think it's definitely clear that while it isn't zero maintenance, it's definitely less maintenance.
We also looked at heavy-duty bus data, basically only transit bus data. Leslie Eudy does great work on this and kind of gets into the details. But as you start zooming out from maybe just a specific transit agency and kind of the issues they deal with, kind of dealing with the technology in the beginning and kind of more the technology focus, we're seeing again 40 percent reduction for BEVs is pretty, is kind of the median assumption that we're expecting. Again, potentially even more reductions down the line. But that's kind of what we're seeing. So pretty similar between light-duty and heavy-duty.
So, with the last about ten minutes I'll leave hopefully about ten minutes for questions to do a little bit of demoing of the new features. So I want to kick off with the Fleet Footprint Calculator, which isn't new per se. It's from last year, but it will kind of tie into what I'm going to show kind of for the new payback calculator. So here's a case if you're working with a fleet or you are a fleet and you're interested in looking at the emissions of your existing vehicles and equipment. So again, if you are familiar with AFLEET you've likely used that feature of putting data into the On-Road Fleet Footprint Calculator and getting the emissions of the vehicle. Here it's doing that for the off-road. So the procedure of doing that is the same. You say where are you from because emissions are based on which state you're in. Then you can adjust maybe your fuel production assumption. So, this gets into whether you're using say renewable natural gas for your natural gas vehicles or what grid mix are you using for your electric vehicles. And if you add biofuels, of course, you want to adjust for that as well.
So, for, pardon me. I definitely could never be a teacher because if I speak for basically more than 30 minutes, I start to lose my voice. So, apologies. So, the other piece of assumptions that you would change are things like talking about the MOVES related things. So, you see here diesel in-use small supplier and the low NOx. So, you can see these are kind of a dimension by default. No for the diesel in-use and yes for the low NOx. And then if you're interested in kind of the difference between the emissions coming out of the tailpipe of your off-road equipment versus your well-to-wheel you can adjust the assumptions on the inputs page here. There are three options there. The bottom one is kind of the vehicle production. So I mentioned we can look at producing the vehicle or in this case we don't have the data or the materials to analyze the materials in heavy-duty or off-road equipment. So that feature isn't available, but it's one and two for comparing well-to-wheel versus tailpipe-only air pollutant emissions. I guess to put a pin in that is the case while you may want to look at well-to-wheel air pollutant emissions that would be option number two is say you're interested in comparing electric vehicles. So, of course they don't have emissions from their tailpipe but they do have emissions from the grid. So you would want to look at those emissions potentially if you're doing maybe a broader comparison of emissions in your area.
So the next step is entering your fleet data. And so I mentioned this before. This works very well for fleets that can export their inventory data. So these are yields that pretty much every fleet is going to be tracking, kind of what's the broad equipment type. That might have to be tweaked a little bit for the AFLEET category. But that's relatively straightforward. The model year, how many hours is the piece of equipment used, what's the rated horsepower, and what's the CO use. So the one that may or not be tracked in an inventory is horsepower. So we do provide some default information off the side. I'm just kind of showing this in the presentation mode scrolling over, and you can see some default information. So you could fill that in in case you didn't have that information from your inventory. But of course it's better if you use that data. And then that's it. You enter that data, and you get the results. And you get it either in the Footprint Calculator as a line-by-line of the emissions, or we go to the footprint output sheet and you get a summary of the total energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and air pollutant emissions on an equipment type category.
And you can see it in tabular format as well as a graph and charts. So the last thing I'll show you is crack into the spreadsheet real quick. And it always can be a little bit spotty doing a spreadsheet demo, but I thought it would be somewhat useful since it's new to the off-road comparison. So here's a case where you have done your footprint analysis and you look at the vehicles and you identify kind of your big pollutant, the old dirty equipment in your fleet, and you're interested in replacing that. So say you want to replace—it could be say a municipal fleet that has some lawn and garden equipment as well as forklifts and you want to do a replacement on those vehicles and look at what the potential options are.
So I'm going to switch over to the spreadsheet. Hopefully that was a seamless transition. Sandra, you can pipe in if there's any issues. But so we're in the spreadsheet now, and if you've been here before this looks familiar. And I kind of walk through some of the key things even just in the off-road footprint demo. But here are the steps that I'll just kind of quickly go through. The first is your state. And before I do that is like because we have lots of calculators now, and we have lots of ability to answer different questions these different calculators let you do. We have a little quick reference guide here at the top of like what these tables here, where are they used. So the first table here, primary vehicle location, is used in the payback, the TCO, the idle reduction and the footprint sheet and so on and so forth. So we get a little bit of intro of like where this data is used. Also, we have a user manual, and it has even in the spreadsheet a little bit of an intro guide that basically walks you through maybe not as graphically as what I just did before but here are the steps of doing an off-road equipment simple payback. That's one, two, three, four and five. Here are the sheets that you need to adjust.
So, getting back to the sheet. Basically, the key thing is always picking the state you are in. I'm in Illinois. We scroll past the vehicle portion. You can do that at the same time if you like. And then you get to your refueling information. So this is a feature that is important specifically as you get into say alternative fuels like natural gas and propane, where fleets may be able to get much lower costs than at a public station. So by default we have the private station. We can change that. And I added this feature because I thought I'd just, it would be easier for me visually and should have done this a while back. If you click public station and then you know in yellow which I should have mentioned is that's where you change your data. So that way it makes it a little bit easier because the columns are here. Which one should I be entering data for? So by default, its private station and you would enter the data on this side. If you're interested in doing fuel price sensitivity you can click yes. There are little hyperlinks off to the side if you are interested in looking at infrastructure cost as well as doing kind of the fuel price range. For now we'll skip past that. But again, these fuel prices work both for the on-road and off-road.
I showed you in the Footprint Calculator the fuel production assumption. So if you are interested in looking at instead of this regional grid mix, you can change the mix. You can potentially do number one, which is a national average or to your specific region you may put a user-defined and enter your specific grid mix like 75 percent natural gas, 25 percent renewable. You can enter it through that hyperlink down there. Then is the petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions. You can see as I'm scrolling through there are little notes. So if you're, "Hey, what is this feature I wouldn't," I wrote little notes of like this is where it's used or this kind of explains what this data is about. So if you have questions, see the user manual. But even in this spreadsheet, there are little mouse-over type notes to help you. So here I will change something to look at, say maybe well-to-wheel instead of just tailpipe. Scroll past the idle reduction. Scroll past electric vehicle charging, and you get down to the off-road equipment.
So what we did for off-road equipment is break it down into two kind of categories. So we have light-duty and heavy-duty for our vehicles, on-road vehicles. Here we have small and large. So with small you can think about kind of 25 horsepower and lower. Basically, a lot of lawn and garden type of equipment you'll see. And you click on the orange or the drop-down menu, and you can change what type of equipment you want to look at. You can also, there are, I believe, 46 vocations of data that we have in the background. So if you wanted to instead of do zero-turn commercial turf, which this is where the default data is, you can click on the hyperlink. It sends you to the equipment vocation selection. You can go down to commercial turf equipment and choose a different piece of equipment. So instead of zero-turn, I want to do stand-on commercial turf. And then I can go back to inputs, and the assumptions have changed based on that data. So this is a good resource again maybe if you don't have your own data but you want to do some type of analysis. We have a lot of prepopulated data.
I know we're getting to five minutes. I'll cut this short. But basically, very similar to doing the payback analysis, you have to enter the vehicles you're interested in so you can do the analysis. Here we're looking at switched to stand-on commercial turf. I want to look at gasoline, diesel, and all-electric. A feature that we have especially as you're getting into some of these smaller equipment is that their battery needs replacement. And they maybe even kind of rotate their batteries shift-wise. So you have, instead of a charger that's going to be at the end of the day, you have two batteries and you swap them in and out. All our costs specifically for electric vehicles are costs kind of assuming the battery and the equipment. But if you want to add like more batteries you can do so here. You can switch whether it's lead acid or lithium ion. We have some estimates of what the costs will be kind of for big deep cycle batteries versus these smaller packs that are used in small equipment. So you can adjust that here, and that data it's kind of an addition. So you have that number and this number, and you get your total. Right now, I won't assume any battery replacement in this case.
And then for large it's the same thing, a lot of different pieces of equipment, a lot of construction. We'll stick with forklifts now. You could change lead acid for or lithium ion for the battery replacement. At this point the data is based on kind of the kind of default equipment. So if you change lead acid and lithium ion, you're not going to change like the cost of the equipment right now. We didn't have enough data to do that. But and some pieces of equipment they do let you have this feature, that feature. But right now, we're using kind of the data that we did have for the pieces of equipment that are available. So after entering just units that you're interested in, you can go to the Off-Road Payback Calculator, and you get your results and you get basically these types of comparisons.
What's your acquisition cost? What's your operating cost? What is the incremental? What is your operating savings here? And then what's your payback? So, in this case 7 to 13 years, 13 years for the commercial turf, 7 years for the forklifts. Then it provides your environmental factors in table forms. You have externality costs as well. And then nice graphs that you can adjust and do the filter out and make that a little prettier. I know that's reaching to the last bit so not leaving time for many questions, but that's what I have. If we do have any questions, I'm happy to stick around a little longer or yeah, I'm happy to stick around. So, thank you very much. I appreciate your attention.
Sandra: Thank you so much Andy. Great information. Always exciting to see the updates that come out every so often. So then there's clearly a lot of great information in here so thank you for all of that and for walking through it. We do have two questions that came in. So if everyone wants to hang on so we can get through these two I'd like to put them out there. The first one is why was the TPO study done for a 15-year period and not 8 or 10.
Andy: That's a good question. And part of the analysis, we did multiple years. So our framework allowed to change the year of ownership. So, we have in our report three and five. I was showing kind of the 15-year as a way that, that's kind of mostly the best case scenario for total cost of ownership of advanced vehicles that do cost more. And I do think it's that big incremental cost of, again, like electric vehicles that are the challenge right now. So ownership basis though, the lifetime it is better. But if you are looking at shorter periods of time, it is a little more challenging to do to kind of beat out gasoline.
Sandra: Great. Thank you. Another question we have is can you please explain what the depot in-use emission multiplier is.
Andy: I don't know when that question came if it was before or after I spent a lot of time on it but maybe I didn't explain it well enough. So, I'll flip back into here. So the idea was that EPA provided us with diesel NOx emissions that just weren't, let's just say were low. And so I was talking about these multipliers down here, five times for light-duty, four times for heavy-duty, except 1.5 for those other vehicle types. So basically what I did to kind of estimate the real-world emissions was use these multipliers. And you can see down in the left-hand corner some of the studies that were referenced in this work, some that I participated in, some that were from other researchers that said hey, diesel is not getting one gram per mile like MOVES said. It's getting, it's emitting four grams per mile of NOx. So, what I will do or what we did previously was you could use that multiplier and say yes. I want to use the diesel in-use, and I'm going to change the MOVES data from one gram per mile, multiply times four, and it's now going to be four grams per mile.
So that's what the multiplier was all about was really just trying to correct, adjust this data because they hadn't updated their model. So the reason why they did update the model and why we still have that feature is because they didn't get to the light-duty diesel. So this next slide is here like maybe show that. You still multiply their diesel NOx emissions for light-duty cars and trucks by five. So if it's, again, if it's one gram per mile for a passenger car, if you use a diesel multiplier it will be five. And that's based on kind of real-world testing data. So it's not just kind of out of thin air. And now because they updated their heavy-duty we see it as now one. So we just use their number, and maybe I shouldn't have said one too many times. But it's kind of the ratio. It's the multiplier that we're multiplying by. Hopefully that answers it.
Sandra: Thank you. Andy, if you have time, we have one more question I'd like to put out there.
Andy: Absolutely.
Sandra: So the question is, great. So could you talk a little bit about—and you might have mentioned some of this earlier—what kind of transit fleet information AFLEET contains. Does it just include data for standard 40-foot buses, or could someone model emissions from other types like articulated buses or cutaway buses?
Andy: So we use EPA's modeling software. So their data provides information kind of at a vocational basis. So, and by that it's kind of these categories that I mentioned or you kind of see down here: transit, school, refuse, different types of short-haul and long-haul freight trucks. For articulated versus like a 40-foot, we provide kind of default information for where default is basically 40-foot for cost and emissions. And so, it depends. And so like air pollutant emissions, they may change a little bit by 40-footer versus a 60-footer maybe. The data isn't very good to do that for tailpipe emissions, so we don't kind of adjust that type of analysis. But if you had information on say fuel economy, you could look at the greenhouse gas emission impacts of how a 40-foot or 60-foot bus may, how it might differ between different alternative fuels or so forth by adjusting the fuel economy. So that would give you the greenhouse gas. But air pollutant emissions, no.
Sandra: Ok, great. Well, thank you so much. So we're about four minutes over, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap things up. But thank you again to Andy our presenter, really appreciate you diving into AFLEET. And if anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out to myself, and I can connect you with Andy. I also plan to share the link to where the recording and the presentation slides will be posted, which I noted at the beginning should be within the next week or so. So thank you again all for participating today, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you.