By James T. Hammond
Published April 14, 2010
Proterra Inc. has hired about 10 workers who will go to Colorado for training soon and return to build the first electric-powered bus in Greenville in July, said chairman and founder Dale Hill at a “Vision Presentation” about mass transportation held at Furman University today.
The company will ramp up to 100-150 buses in 2011, adding work teams incrementally. The factory being designed for location at CU-ICAR will eventually be able to produce 1,500 buses a year, said Westy Bowen, Proterra’s vice president of Integrated Supply Chain.
But the bold statement of the lunchtime conference was the gathering of ideas to make Greenville a world showcase for modern alternative-fuel public transportation. Planners and leaders showed diagrams and proposals for a Bus Rapid Transit system that might one day link the Proterra factory and the CU-ICAR campus with downtown Greenville, the Clemson University main campus, Furman University and the Greenville Spartanburg airport.
Furman President David Shi said Proterra’s arrival in Greenville, and the planning that already is under way for a region-wide mass transit system, could be transformative for the region, if people change their attitudes about transportation.
“We have not shed the attitude that buses are for other people, they are not for us,” Shi said.
Shi said such a transportation system, well utilized by the public, could go a long way toward curbing the high levels of ozone and other pollutants in the region’s air. Without such efforts, he said, the region could faces curbs on further industrial growth.
“We have a compelling economic development reason to develop an adequate public transportation system,” Shi said, “one to immediately and directly begin to reduce the ozone levels in our air.”
Bob Geolas, Executive Director of CU-ICAR, showed designer’s drawings of a transit station and fueling station for electric-powered buses adjacent to the CU-ICAR research campus. He said Clemson aims for the campus to be “a new kind of research campus” that reaches out to its surrounding community for ideas and refuses to build academic walls to innovation.
“We want to build on this vision, to create on an innovative culture across our community,” Geolas said.
“We think about that rail line that could link downtown, Furman, the Clemson main campus,” Geolas said. “We’d like to put those fabulous Proterra buses on that line, where people can see and experience them. We have the opportunity to build on all that we’ve invested here. The opportunities are exciting, and I’ll put in as much time as is necessary to make this happen.”
Hill, the Proterra founder, said that with 80 cities nationwide looking to build light rail sytems, there’s only likely to be enough money to build about eight such systems. The Bus Rapid Transit systems he aims to supply could generated 30-40 BRT transit systems for the same amount of money as the eight rail-dependent systems would cost, Hill said.
Bowen said that Proterra currently has more orders for its buses than it can currently produce in its Colorado facility. “That’s why we are in Greenville,” he said. At current demand levels for their buses, Bowen predicted that the assembly plant to be built at CU-ICAR would employ 1,200 in six years.
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