Electric school buses serve Oakland-area power grid as ‘batteries on wheels’

This article was published by The Energy Mix on May 29, 2024.

By Mitchell Beer

A fleet of 74 new electric school buses in Oakland, the first to serve a major school district in the United States, is expected to deliver a 2.1-gigawatt-hour boost to the power grid in the San Francisco Bay area, enough to power 300 to 400 average U.S. homes.

The buses serving the Oakland Unified School District “are expected to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 25,000 tons annually in a city where 72 per cent of public school students come from low-income families,” Bloomberg reports. The community is surrounded by a busy port, truck traffic, and lots of manufacturing and located in California’s Alameda County, where a recent study by the American Lung Association (ALA) found some of the worst air quality in the country.

“School bus electrification can really play an important role in making our air healthier for everyone, especially children,” ALA CEO Harold Wimmer told a webinar earlier this month.

The Bloomberg story appeared less than a week before the Harvard University Center for Health Decision Science (CHDS) reported significant health and environmental benefits from replacing old diesel school buses with electric ones. A team of three authors that the benefits of changing out the vehicles are “likely to exceed replacement costs, especially in major metropolitan areas,” CHDS writes. “In large cities, they found that the health benefits associated with reduced mortality and childhood asthma total US$207,200 per bus.”

Bloomberg says the Oakland vehicles belong to Zūm, a Silicon Valley start-up that manages school bus fleets in several major U.S. cities. So far, about 10 per cent of the company’s 3,000 buses are electric, the news story states. “Electric school buses are a unique fleet as they’re essentially large batteries on wheels that drive very few, predictable miles and can support the grid,” co-founder and COO Vivek Garg told Bloomberg.

The buses in the Oakland depot were supplied by Chinese electric vehicle giant BYD.

In addition to serving school boards with clean power and delivering better health for students and drivers, Bloomberg says the buses’ daily schedule makes them a great fit for vehicle-to-grid programs that use electric vehicle batteries to balance daily power demand.

“There is an excess of supply during the solar peak and this is a way we can move some of that energy from that time of the day to when we actually need it,” said Rudi Halbright, product manager for vehicle-grid-integration pilots and analysis at Pacific Gas & Electric. “With 74 buses, that’s a lot of power, so it really has a big impact for us. This pilot specifically is designed to pave the way for us to do this on a large scale.”