School district and transit agency officials met virtually last week to share their experiences with replacing their diesel and compressed natural gas buses with battery electric and fuel cell electric vehicles.
Raymond Manalo, vehicle maintenance manager for the Twin Rivers Unified School District near Sacramento, summed up the message from the Center for Transportation and the Environment’s (CTE) Zero Emission Bus Conference for those districts that may be hesitating. “Don’t be afraid to take the plunge,” said Manalo, whose district has 30 electric buses among its 115-vehicle fleet. “There’s so many new techs out there, you can find what is right for you.”
Nate Baguio, vice president of sales for The Lion Electric Co., said his company — which started offering battery electric school buses in 2016 with a 60-mile range — now has models that can travel more than 150 miles on a single charge, with a 200-mile range expected in future models.
“The electric bus today … handles 95% of [the routes] the yellow school bus needs to cover right now,” Baguio said. “It’s inevitable that all the 500,000 school buses in America will be electric, and I believe sooner than a lot of people think.”
US Lags China, Europe
But CTE Executive Director Dan Raudebaugh said the U.S. is lagging behind China and the EU in making the switch.
“The European Union just recently announced that they’re investing literally billions of dollars in renewable hydrogen and hydrogen infrastructure to support transportation,” Raudebaugh said. The EU in July announced it would spend billions to support the installation of at least 6 GW of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer by 2024, growing to 40 GW and becoming “an intrinsic part of our integrated energy system” by 2030.
“In China, there are 420,000 electric buses,” Raudebaugh continued. “In the U.S., for battery electric buses, [transit agencies] have about 1,000. So, you can see that this market is a global market, and this is technology that is happening. Our choice in the U.S. is either to build it here … develop it here, or to import that technology and give away all those high-tech jobs to other countries around the globe.”
Aside from eliminating carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, battery electric buses (BEBs) and hydrogen-powered fuel cell electric buses (FCEBs) are quieter, cheaper to maintain and don’t contribute to particulate emissions that can cause asthma and make people more vulnerable to COVID-19.
The downside? Electric buses can take longer to fuel, have shorter ranges and cost at least three times as much as conventional diesel vehicles. As a result, school districts and transit agencies are looking for grant funding to help them make the investments.
And the demand is likely to outstrip the funding in places such as California, said Ashwin Naidu, landside operations manager for San Jose International Airport.
In 2018, California mandated that transit agencies purchase all-electric buses starting in 2029. Earlier this year, the California Air Resources Board approved a rule requiring all commercial trucks and vans sold in the state be zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) as of 2045, the first such requirement in the U.S.
“ZEV funding is going to become much harder [to obtain],” Naidu said. “So, for airports that are out there listening, definitely get in line, because there are a lot of airports that are going to jump on board for that ZEV grant funding.”
In July, D.C., California and 14 other states announced a joint memorandum of understanding pledging that all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales be zero-emission by 2050, with an interim target of 30% ZEVs by 2030. Also signing were Connecticut, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.
Working with Utilities
Speakers at the conference said school districts and transit agencies considering the switch must work with their utilities to ensure they have the electrical infrastructure needed. They also should develop time-of-use rates to control charging costs, they said.
Doug Francis, associate transportation director and head mechanic for Gaylord Community Schools in Michigan, said his district’s charging costs have been higher than expected. “It’s basically the same as a diesel per mile for a school bus. About 26 to 27 cents/mile,” said Francis, who says he has asthma from breathing diesel exhaust for 35 years.
“Those of us in the state of California know [it requires] a long lead time working with [Pacific Gas and Electric]. Getting the correct transformers. Getting the IT infrastructure,” Naidu said.
Twin Rivers’ Manalo urged transit agencies to “future proof” their plans.
“Think about where you want to be and plan for that. Trench anywhere you might want an [electric vehicle charging system]. While you have everything disrupted, you can run pipe and wire and always add the actual [charging] later down the road.”
Caley Edgerly, CEO of school bus maker Thomas Built Buses, said utility companies have become more collaborative than when the company announced its first BEB in 2017.
He cited Dominion Energy, which is helping school districts in Virginia buy 50 Thomas Built BEBs by paying for the difference in the capital costs over diesel buses. (See Dominion Sees Green in Electrification.) Dominion also is backing proposed legislation that would add funding to replace all of the state’s 1,700 school buses with electric versions.
Edgerly acknowledged his company’s move to BEBs has not been without mistakes.
“You don’t know what you don’t know, so you have to find new partners and not be comfortable with the ones that you had in the past. We also have learned [that] you have to expect to get a bloody nose from time to time.”
When Denver’s Regional Transportation District (RTD) purchased 36 BYD BEBs for use on the agency’s 16th Street Mall shuttle, it generated headlines accusing Xcel Energy of price gouging the agency, said Carly Macias, senior transportation planner.
“We had expected to pay a lot less in our energy costs than we were,” she said. “And Xcel wasn’t even aware that they needed to educate us on how utility rates work and what would be the best for our fleet.”
She said the buses’ power costs dropped 20% since January, after Xcel implemented a time-of-use rate with lower demand charges, which had represented about 80% of the buses’ electric bill. RTD expects to save 25 to 30% with the new rate and improved charging schedules.
“We do quite a bit of charging between 6 and 9 p.m. … We need to change our behavior,” Macias said. “We need to shift this load to save money, but we also don’t want to increase our demand charges by having a higher peak. So, it’s very much an ongoing challenge that we’re trying to figure out.”
Macias said her agency also has been sharing lessons learned with Minneapolis’ Metro Transit because that region also is served by Xcel. “And then Xcel also has the benefit of seeing, ‘OK, this is what we did with Metro Transit, and it worked well. Maybe we can apply it in Colorado.’”
Chance Baragary, a project director for St. Louis’ Metro, said his agency donated a space for Ameren Missouri to build a new substation adjacent to its garage. “That will help with our power reliability, obviously, and make sure we have plenty of power for our initial fleet and as our fleet commitments to grow,” he said.
“Our 40-foot buses will be on a morning run and an afternoon run, so they will have some peak daytime charging,” Baragary said. “But we’re working to push that to off-peak as much as we can.”
Simon Lonsdale, head of sales and strategy for AMPLY Power, which provides “charging as a service,” recounted its work with Tri Delta Transit in eastern Contra Costa County, Calif.
The vehicles return from 1 to 4 p.m., with the drivers plugging them in.
“What was happening was that these vehicles were starting to charge up right in the middle of the afternoon and through the evening and were fully charged just about the time when cheap power came onstream from PG&E,” Lonsdale said. Now, smart-charging delays the consumption of power until the cheapest TOU rate appears and then staggers the charging to ensure each bus is refueled by morning, he said.
Steve Clermont, director of planning and deployment for CTE, said it is still “very early days” for EV rates across the country. “It doesn’t seem like there’s any single solution that’s going to meet the needs for everyone,” he said. “You still need to educate [utilities] on what your specific needs are. A lot of times it seems the schedules are designed around light-duty residential charging versus the heavy-duty charging that’s needed by transit agencies.”
Including the Drivers
In addition to following a charging schedule to minimize costs, speakers said bus fleets making the change must consider their drivers and technicians.
“Technicians will need to know what they can and cannot work on,” Twin Rivers’ Manalo said. “We actually require [training] from our vendors as part of our purchase contract. And the drivers are also a critical piece because they are either going to make or break your cost per mile.”
“Seventy-five percent of the cost of providing our service is in the operator — the person in the seat,” said Karl Gnadt, managing director of the Champaign-Urbana Mass Transit District. “Seventy-five percent of operating [costs] is personnel. If I have to have personnel just sitting around … waiting for our buses to charge every 30 miles or so, I am by default not experiencing operational efficiency.”
Using Buses as Emergency Generators
Current generation electric buses also have the ability to provide power to the grid or a building.
“If we had an emergency, they could power dorms or dining halls,” said Todd Berven, associate director of auxiliary services for the University of Georgia, which has 20 electric buses. It will soon add 13 more to phase out some of its remaining 50 diesels. It also plans to seek a grant to add solar generation to its bus yard, which Berven said will have the university “driving on sunshine.”
“On a 40-foot New Flyer fuel cell bus, [there is] almost 600 kWh of stored usable energy,” said Jaimie Levin, senior managing consultant for CTE. “On an articulated bus, [there is] over 1 MWh of usable energy. CTE has been working with some of our partners on inverters that allow those vehicles to plug in … at a hospital or seniors center and run those facilities in an emergency. And what does it take to refuel those vehicles? Minutes. So that brings a tremendous amount of resiliency capability with hydrogen fuel cell technology.”
Manalo said Twin Rivers is working on a pilot bus-to-grid program with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. “The buses are equipped to do that. The charging infrastructure is equipped to do that. But there’s some logistics that still need to be worked out,” he said, noting that increased cycling can reduce battery lifespans. “Who pays for that in the long run?”
