USE YOUR IMAGINATION.

Streetsblog's Kea Wilson isn't.  "To Get More Electric Buses, We Don’t Just Need a Better Battery; We Need a Better Grid." She elaborates.

A groundbreaking new technology may soon help U.S. transit agencies overcome perhaps the single largest barrier to electrifying bus fleets: creating on-route electric charging stations capable of affordably and quickly fueling up buses as soon they run out of power.

As bus manufacturers rush to invent an affordable lithium ion battery that can hold a charge long enough to cover long routes in sprawling U.S. cities without a trip back to the depot, Northern California-based startup, Apparent, is urging agencies to take a more proactive approach: by installing ultra-efficient miniature power stations along bus routes — equipped (of course) with the company’s energy optimization technology.

These mini-hubs, called “distributed energy resources” by the energy industry, certainly aren’t new; any bus stop with a solar panel on its roof to help riders charge their cell phones qualifies as one. But most distributed energy resources have struggled to meet the massive energy needs of the largest electric vehicles on the road — or to do it cheaply enough that agencies can afford to make use of them.

Here's the problem, according to her.

A long-range electric bus powered by a lithium ion battery requires a massive amount of power to keep on the road — but a battery-powered bus takes anywhere from two and a half to six hours to fully charge, rather than just a few minutes at the pump for its fossil fuel-powered cousin.

And even under optimal driving conditions, the amount of energy required to charge the popular Proterra e-bus battery, for instance, is comparable to the daily energy consumption of more than more than seven energy-guzzling American homes — and that massive charge can only carry the bus about 125 miles.

And again, that’s under optimal conditions; steep hills, rough road surfaces, and heavy passenger loads can make e-bus batteries even more inefficient, cutting their driving range by as much as 24 percent and requiring mid-route charges that can keep a bus sidelined for hours.

Bus agencies in sprawling cities, meanwhile, often need their buses to cover far more distance in a day than the average battery life can manage — which means agencies need to rotate buses with depleted batteries out of service for hours, and rotate in fully charged buses to replace them.

Gosh, if only a technology existed to charge the batteries en-route.  The bus lines of Hamburg might be short enough for quick top-ups at the end of the line.  How hard, though, would it be to equip a battery bus with a pantograph configured to draw power from a pair of overhead wires?  Trackless trolley coaches used to be a thing.