With full electrification still out of reach for its fleet of refuse trucks, Toronto is piloting a made-in-Canada technology developed by Effenco to help reduce the city’s emissions

The City of Toronto is taking important steps toward greening its municipal fleet by installing new hybrid-electric propulsion systems on 58 refuse trucks.

The hybrid-electric propulsion technology comes from Montreal-based Effenco, a clean-tech company specializing in advanced energy systems for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

Backed by Martinrea International, a Canadian automotive and industrial supplier investing in promising climate-tech innovations, Effenco has developed its systems around high-capacity energy storage devices called ultracapacitors. The ultracapacitor stores energy while the vehicle is running and then releases it when the engine is off.

It is designed to be fuel-agnostic, working with compressed natural gas, renewable natural gas, biodiesel and diesel vehicles, says Bruce Johnson, executive vice-president for Martinrea Innovation Development at Martinrea International Inc.

Its strongest use cases are vehicles with constant stop-and-go duty cycles, such as port tractors, distribution-centre trucks, and waste-hauling fleets. And unlike full battery-electric platforms, ultracapacitor systems avoid carrying around the weight of large battery packs.

For Toronto’s fleet of refuse trucks, powered by compressed natural gas, “Effenco’s system allows the refuse truck body to operate, including during pail-lifting and compaction cycles, while the engine is shut down during these periods, significantly reducing idling and associated emissions,” explains Johnson, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“You’re not getting to 100 per cent electric, but when you combine technologies like [Toronto] already has with compressed natural gas (CNG), you are [still] taking down your carbon footprint for ongoing operations.”

Piloting Effenco’s system

Toronto began testing Effenco’s ultracapacitor system a year ago by retrofitting a single refuse truck to understand how the technology would perform in real-world conditions.

The city’s refuse trucks run 10-hour duty cycles and service 1,300 to 1,500 homes a day. They’re moving 100 feet at a time, stopping to pick up waste, then repeating the cycle. During those stops, the vehicle’s revolutions per minute spike to power the arms and loaders, which is when the vehicle’s idle times and emissions increase, says Abi Thomas, general manager of the city’s fleet services division.

But because the Effenco system lets the ultracapacitor power the refuse body during those stop-and-go periods, the engine no longer needs to jump to high idle.

“From the initial pilot that we did, we saw a reduction of 30 per cent emissions from our CNG model, a 20 per cent reduction in fuel consumption and a 15 per cent reduction in maintenance costs,” says Thomas, in an interview with Electric Autonomy.

“This technology actually reduces the noise levels and that goes a long way with the comfort of our operators as well.”

After completing the first-year pilot, Thomas says the next step was to expand the pilot across a larger portion of the refuse fleet to evaluate long-term performance.

Toronto secured nearly $5 million in funding from Natural Resources Canada to support a major rollout of 58 refuse trucks equipped with Effenco’s system, out of a total in-house fleet of about 200 vehicles.

So far, the city has retrofitted eight vehicles, and will continue transitioning the rest of the fleet until the end of next year.

“Throughout, we’re continuing to monitor what some of the benefits are that we see, the operational reliability of the system, the fuel consumption, and the maintenance costs,” says Thomas. “As we have a longer runway of understanding that data, that’s going to help really inform us forward on this technology.”

The procurement process

Toronto’s decision to procure Effenco’s ultracapacitor system stems from the city’s broader climate commitments. After declaring a climate emergency in 2019, the city set a goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2040, with municipal fleet decarbonization identified as a major priority.

To accelerate the adoption of promising technologies, City Council approved a streamlined procurement approach, in partnership with MaRS Discovery District through the  Mission from MaRS program, that allows the city to test and deploy vetted climate solutions more quickly than traditional processes.

Through this mechanism, Toronto evaluated Effenco’s system as a proven emissions-reduction technology. “We can leverage technologies that MaRS has vetted through a competitive process and that have proven their ability to show GHG reductions,” says Thomas.

Thomas adds that the city saw the potential of Effenco’s ultracapacitor technology early on, but needed confidence that the technology could be supported and scaled over the long term. That assurance came when Martinrea International stepped in as Effenco’s manufacturing and commercialization partner.

According to Martinrea’s Johnson, startups often struggle to move from prototype to mass production. With Martinrea’s global manufacturing footprint and established supply chain, he says, the company can take promising clean technologies “that might otherwise stay niche” and turn them into reliable, “large-scale production products.”

Steps to full electrification

Effenco sees its ultracapacitor system as both a bridge and a complement to full fleet electrification.

“I think there will be more battery electric vehicles, but I think the technology has to catch up,” Johnson says. “I think the capacity for battery building and doing it with less carbon is going to have to increase. Long story short, [ultracapacitors] are a great technology that has an immediate benefit.”

Effenco is also currently developing a fully electric platform that replaces lithium-ion batteries with ultracapacitors entirely, which will make the vehicle less expensive and lighter.

“We’ve been in discussions with the City of Toronto on that, but that’s very preliminary because we’re still about three years out from having a product,” says Johnson. “There will be applications where you can do full electric, but you don’t have to necessarily rely on lithium-ion batteries.”