How your child’s school bus can avoid power outages

The four vehicles parked at a depot in South Burlington, Virginia, look no different than the yellow school buses familiar to millions of schoolchildren. But beneath their steel shells, these buses are packed with technology that could be crucial in the clean energy transition.

While their main task remains transporting children, the vehicles take on a secondary task while stationary during school hours. The local utility puts the batteries to work and stores excess renewable energy so it can be pumped back into the grid when necessary.

The buses are a test of the idea that electric vehicles, often seen by skeptics as an expensive burden that could collapse power grids, could be just the opposite: a buffer that takes energy when there’s too much and delivers it if there is demand. electricity peaks.

Any properly equipped electric vehicle can be used to store excess electricity, avoiding the need for utilities to start up gas-fired power plants when there isn’t enough sun or wind. But school buses work especially well because they have large batteries and are parked for much of the day.

“There’s no better tool than an electric school bus fleet to help smooth out some of those curves,” said Duncan McIntyre, CEO of Highland Fleets, a company near Boston that supplies the buses and equipment. Synop, a New York company, provides the software to manage the interaction between vehicles, chargers and the electricity grid.

Utilities across the country have been testing the power of batteries in electric vehicles to help stabilize increasingly unreliable power plants and lines that have succumbed to pressure from hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather events linked to climate change.

This year’s grueling summer heat tested Texas’ power grid for weeks, forcing officials to plead with homeowners and businesses to use less energy so the state could avoid extended power outages or the kind of blackouts that could leave millions of people without light or heat in 2021 .

Some energy experts say a solution to these problems involves bringing together thousands of rooftop solar panels, home batteries and electric vehicles around a city or state into virtual power plants. Linked together using software, the collective ability of such devices to generate and store energy could be more than enough to prevent a blackout when power plants fail or strong winds take down a transmission line.

Grids mainly use power plants with fast start capabilities, also called peaking units, to serve as a backup energy source. But such plants typically use gas, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and are expensive to operate and maintain. Many have also failed to deliver when they were needed most.

Electric school buses in particular could be very helpful to the electric grid due to their limited use during school days and their wide availability during sweltering summer temperatures.

Schools in every state except Wyoming have committed to using electric buses, although the number on the roads is small: fewer than 3,000 as of June 30. the World Resources Institutea non-profit organization concerned with energy, environment and related issues.

The total number of school buses in California leads the nation, and Montgomery County, Maryland, has more than any other school district.

“We are on the edge of technology, which doesn’t happen often with school buses,” said Daoud Chaaya, vice president of sales for Thomas Built, a unit of truck maker Daimler that supplied South Burlington’s electric buses.

The World Resources Institute is urging U.S. policymakers to make all school buses run on batteries by 2030, a goal that would also reduce asthma and other diseases in children by eliminating pollution from internal combustion-engine buses.

“There are definitely a lot of challenges,” said Sue Gander, director of the institute’s electric school bus initiative. “It will take some time to get everyone there.”

Cost remains a major hurdle: An electric school bus can cost three times as much as a $100,000 diesel bus. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, allocated $5 billion over five years to help schools buy electric buses, and the price is expected to drop in coming years. In the meantime, school districts can defray their expenses by allowing utilities to use buses to store energy.

In South Burlington, the school district leases the electric buses from Highland, which also provides equipment to charge them and pays the electric bills. Those bills are lower than normal because of a deal that allows Green Mountain Power, the utility that serves most of Vermont, to draw power from the bus batteries when demand rises. They are part of a network that also includes batteries that homeowners install to provide backup power during power outages.

In total, Green Mountain Power has access to 50 megawatts of battery storage from school buses, home batteries and other sources, said Mari McClure, the utility’s CEO. That is as much as a small gas power plant. Unlike a power station that runs on fossil fuels, the power is available almost immediately.

The utility last month asked Vermont regulators to allow it to install batteries to customers who don’t already have them, an effort that would align with its work on school buses.

Ms. McClure said that over time, enough electric school buses and home batteries could be connected to the grid to avoid her utility having to buy electricity from out-of-state power plants. Commercial vans, pickups and garbage trucks could join the network as more companies and cities buy electric vehicles.

But connecting these vehicle batteries to the electricity grid not only costs time but also money. While installing a standard electric vehicle charger for buses can cost between $3,000 and $7,000, initial data from early demonstrations of electric pickup trucks indicate that the equipment needed to send power back to the grid ranges from $10,000 to $58,000, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. independent non-profit organization. Utilities may also need to upgrade their power lines, transformers and other equipment.

There are also difficult legal and financial issues that need to be resolved. Many states are struggling to determine how to compensate homeowners and businesses for the power they feed into the grid through batteries and rooftop solar panels.

Energy experts said such issues would be addressed and the high costs of electric vehicles would fall as utilities, regulators and manufacturers gain more experience.

Vehicle batteries can meet a number of needs for customers, utilities and the wholesale electricity market, said Daniel Bowermaster, senior program manager for electric transportation at the Electric Power Research Institute. “From a technology perspective, these things are within the realm of possibility.”

Officials in South Burlington, where the diesel bus fleet has been largely paid off, said they were willing to spend more on electric buses. The new buses are much better for the environment and public health, said Tim Jarvis, the school district’s financial manager.

There are other benefits too.

Sean McKenzie, transportation coordinator for South Burlington schools, who runs a bus due to a labor shortage, said children no longer had to shout over the roar of a diesel engine.

“I was surprised they were quieter,” he said.