[penglish1]

The article doesn't make it clear - but "elsewhere" seems like it would clearly be better than urban busses. They assert that even in areas where grid electricity to charge the busses comes entirely from fossil fuels, there is less pollution produced - presumably because it is somewhat easier to make a fossil fuel plant cleaner at scale than 100s of busses. Fossil fuel plants could be any of natural gas (very clean), coal or.. oil, which in this case is something resembling diesel, or the diesel constituents of crude.

The title is (of course) fairly misleading - while we've got electric boats and semis it is unlikely that long haul transport for either will be electric any time soon. But - at least they are away from urban areas, for the most part.

[petre]

You can essentialy use the batteries of electric vehicles as energy storage. Most passenger vehicles don't need to run at noon when everybody is at work and surplus solar is available. They don't need to run at night when people sleep, electricity demand is low and wind whirls. Buses can also be scheduled for loading during these periods as they can run 200 km on a charge and transport capacity is adjusted according to demand - only a fraction of the fleet operates during low demand periods mentioned above, the rest can sit and charge. Long haul transport can run on plug in hybrids using HCCI internal combustion engines and/or gas turbines powered by diesel/gasoline or ideally DME/LPG. This can be all tuned using economics. Coal needs miners for extraction and is dirty to burn. Gen III+ and IV nuclear and geothermal are much cleaner and safer alternatives for base load.