By Rich Heidorn Jr.

PHILADELPHIA — Would you pay $1/month to ensure your kids ride in nonpolluting school buses — with seatbelts? Dominion Energy is betting that will be a winning proposition in Virginia.

Dominion is funding a project to bring 50 Daimler Thomas Built buses with Proterra batteries and drivetrains to the state by the end of 2020. If all goes well, it will seek state approval to add 1,000 buses by 2025 and replace all diesel buses in its service territory, which covers two-thirds of the state, by 2030. The utility says it would be the largest electric school bus deployment in the U.S.

Electric buses are about $200,000 more expensive than conventional diesel but have 60% lower fuel and maintenance costs and internal air quality that is six times cleaner, the utility says. Dominion would pay the increased cost of the buses and will own the batteries while school districts will own the buses. Dominion estimates its rate recovery for the first 1,050 buses will be about $1/month for average residential customers.

“We get batteries distributed all across Virginia. We get mobile batteries that can be taken where they need to be taken if there’s an outage. We get batteries that can be sold into PJM’s energy [market]. We get batteries that can be used for grid stabilization on the distribution system,” explained Lisa Moerner, Dominion’s director of innovation and sustainability technology.

“We get the batteries; they get the buses,” Moerner told Raab Associates’ Energy Policy Roundtable in the PJM Footprint on Wednesday. “Students get clean air. It’s a win, win, win.”

This is the new Dominion — the one that has cut coal’s share of its generation mix from 46% to 12% since 2007. It has an internal team working toward net zero emissions, in line with the state’s goal of a 100% reduction by 2050.

Accused of dragging its feet on offshore wind a few years ago, it is now planning what it says will be the largest OSW project in the U.S, with 210 turbines having a combined capacity of more than 2,600 MW.

The utility is urging its employees to drive EVs, installing charging stations at some of its offices, and hopes to have one-quarter of its own light-duty fleet converted to electric power or plug-in hybrids by 2025.

Between 2017 and 2018, EV sales in Virginia more than doubled to 6,375, and a Navigant study projects the state will have 105,000 to 224,000 EVs by 2030 — using 334,000 MWh to more than 732,000 MWh of power annually.

“We would love this growth rate for electric vehicles,” Moerner said. “EVs are a huge growth opportunity for us.”

The utility has asked Virginia regulators for approval to deploy automated meter infrastructure throughout its service territory and is developing a voluntary time-varying rate and evaluating demand-side programs to encourage EV charging during off-peak hours.

The reason for the shift is simple, Moerner said.

“The driving force is to continue to be a company. If you look at where were going with climate change, with people wanting solar on their roofs and everyone wanting an EV in their garage, if we don’t provide those services somebody else will.”

The company sees electrification opportunities beyond school buses and passenger vehicles, saying there are applications in the construction and mining industries and in airport baggage handling.

EV maker Tesla also is looking beyond passenger vehicles with plans to begin production in 2020 on an electric semi-truck. It would replace class 8 diesels that get as little as 6 mpg (meaning a truck that drives 150,000 miles a year will burn 25,000 gallons of diesel fuel).

The plan is to charge them overnight or at warehouses during loading and unloading. “Once these vehicles are cost-effective, fleets are going to want to electrify quickly,” said Patrick Bean, Tesla’s senior manager of policy and business development.

Bean also discussed Tesla’s new Cybertruck, a pickup that had a less than auspicious introduction at a press conference in November, when its supposedly indestructible windows shattered during a press conference with founder Elon Musk. “Love it or hate it, people are talking about it,” Bean said. “Pickup trucks are the best-selling passenger vehicles in the U.S. They are also among the least efficient vehicles in the U.S.”

Tesla reported more than 200,000 refundable deposits for the truck, which won’t be available until late 2021 at the earliest.

Bean said the company has increased the range on its vehicles by 10% this year because of efficiency gains on power trains. “Whether I work for Tesla or not, I am never buying another gas car,” he said.

Transportation Climate Initiative

The roundtable, at the law firm of Morgan Lewis, came a day after the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), an alliance of Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, released its draft memorandum of understanding for setting a cap on pollution from transportation effective in 2022.

The MOU would require wholesale fuel companies to purchase pollution allowances in a model based on the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative’s limits on power plant emissions. Assuming fuel companies pass the cost of the allowances to consumers, it would increase gasoline prices by 5 cents/gallon to 17 cents in 2022. The fees could fund EV chargers, electric buses, bike lanes and other infrastructure to reduce carbon, while the higher costs would encourage a switch to EVs or other alternatives to carbon-based fuels. The proposal is projected to cut emissions from transportation by as much as 25% by 2032.

TCI includes New York, all of New England except New Hampshire, and the Mid-Atlantic region of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia, D.C. and Pennsylvania.

“It’s no secret to anybody in this room that Pennsylvania has long been a leader in coal, oil, natural gas [and] nuclear power,” said Patrick McDonnell, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection. “But now Gov. [Tom] Wolf wants to be a leader in taking on the climate crisis.” Wolf’s January executive order calls for a 26% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2025 and an 80% cut by 2050, in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, McDonnell said.

Erika Myers, a principal in transportation electrification for the Smart Electric Power Alliance, said EVs could boost peak hourly electric demand by as much as 30%, making it essential that utilities engage in both passive behavioral load control and active direct load control to smooth usage. Myers said most utilities are not adequately preparing for EV loads. “Many utilities don’t include EV charging in distribution planning, or the mechanisms by which they’re incorporating that load are … not as sophisticated as they could be,” she said.