Electrifying Bus Routes – Insights from Jakarta

Many cities are interested in transitioning to a fully zero-emission bus fleet to combat local air pollution, reduce GHG emissions and to find long term financial savings. Jakarta is one such city who wants to improve the lives of its citizens by only procuring zero-emission buses after 2025 in line with C40’s Green and Health Streets Declaration but has struggled to navigate the wide variety of new technologies on offer and their respective charging requirements. 

This report illustrates how a city can assess the different charging options and requirements to deploy different electric bus technologies and how they can select a solution appropriate to their circumstances, drawing on analyses’ conducted in Jakarta by the C40 Cities Finance Facility.

The report’s four key insights are that:

• Undertaking a 100% replacement strategy to deploy zero-emission buses exclusively on pre-designated bus route can better enable the operator to reliably evaluate the deployment, ensuring high-quality information for analysis and future decision-making.
• Bus technologies and their respective charging strategies need to be analysed as a system. It is not necessarily the case that shorter routes need smaller batteries and longer routes need larger batteries.
• Understanding the relationship between operational requirements such as air conditioning, loading, and distance with the measured battery range is necessary to inform an optimal charging strategy.
• The preferred charging schemes and infrastructure must be considered within the context of the local grid capacity and the capacity to upgrade this within the future.