For those of you new to this newsletter, welcome! This newsletter/blog’s purpose is to support the electrification of school buses, with a focus on the Northwest and social equity, for the health of our communities and our climate.
Electrification means change. All of us have navigated before, probably growing wiser in the process. What advice would you give the younger version of yourself? Or the younger version of your organization? What good choice, years ago, would have made a crucial difference going forward?
OK, maybe you’re shy, so I’ll go first. I’d tell my young, twentysomething self to listen more to experienced people. I was willful back then, sometimes fiery. I confused my opinions with facts. Quieting my ego and listening to good advice would have made the young Alison much smarter, much faster.
While different in some ways, in terms of electric bus adoption, pupil transportation is a younger version of public transit, by 8-10 years. “The future is electric,” I heard the school bus manufacturers say at the OPTA conference last June. This, from the guys who moments earlier confirmed their love of gas and diesel. “The public wants electric,” they said matter-of-factly. “We’re making electric models now. Everyone’s just waiting for the price to come down.” *
What the school bus OEM’s didn’t say at the conference in Bend last summer was how to prepare, now, for your eventual electric school buses, while waiting for the price to come down. To learn that, I went to a (public transit oriented) electric bus conference in San Francisco recently. I followed my above advice, listened to experienced people, and furiously took pages of notes as bus organizations and electric utilities talked about their lessons learned as they have been replacing (mostly diesel) buses with electric buses.
“Talk to your utility FIRST THING,” they said, as in, when electric buses first start crossing your mind. Talk to your utility even if you don’t yet know quite what to say. (Are you reaching for your phone yet?)
“We may be adding to your load within a few years,” you could say in a nerdy-cool voice. “Don’t want to be throwing you any surprises.” (They hate surprises, and will start to like you right away.) They will want to know where your bus-yard is, and if you’re planning to move it or upgrade it, or add a new yard. See below for the different types of utilities.
Utilities are accustomed to fueling things that stand still, like hospitals, rather than buses, which move. They learn ten years ahead of time that a hospital will be built, and then plan on that time-horizon for the load and charging infrastructure needed. Your eventual electric school buses will use much less electricity than a hospital, especially as you’re just starting to transition your fleet. But since school buses take a year or less to build, you can see why talking early on is good.
Your utility will be interested in the times of day or night you will be charging (fueling) your buses. They MIGHT give you a better rate if you can fuel when they want you to, i.e. when they have excess load they want to get rid of. Utilities are constantly juggling supply and demand within their grid, balancing energy in with energy out, with little or no ability to store surplus energy.
So, that tricky balancing act makes timing a big deal for utilities. Like your kids who ride the school bus, utilities thrive on predictability. But don’t expect them to give you a discount or lower rate just because you’re a school district. Time of use (TOU) is relevant to a utility, not nonprofit status. Their job is to get electricity to their customers safely and reliably, just like school buses’ job is to transport kids to school safely and reliably. So much in common; so much basis for a good relationship!
That said, utilities vary widely. Consumer-owned utilities like co-ops are generally keen to sell more electricity, i.e. grow their load, which is paradoxical since they are not-for-profit.(The Beneficial Electrification program led by Keith Dennis, whom I interviewed this week, is a great topic for a future newsletter.) In contrast, investor-owned utilities (IOU’s) like Pacific Power don’t grow their profits by growing their load, but rather, by capital investments like charging infrastructure.
Many school districts use Pacific Power, which has announced plans to phase out its coal power generation over time, replacing it with wind and solar. While I know that’s mostly because renewables have become so cheap, I am still punching my fist in the air: YES! Clean energy!
Back to the original question: what advice would you give the younger version of yourself, or the younger version of your organization? If my agenda isn’t already happily transparent, I’ll make it so now: listening to bus colleagues who have been where we are heading makes us more effective. Those colleagues are saying: start talking to your utility now, before you ever order your first electric bus.
* An electric school bus (ESB) costs 2.5-3.5x more than diesel up front. Fuel and maintenance savings offset some of that over the lifecycle of the bus. Many utilities, both nonprofit and IOU’s, are starting to partner with school districts by investing in ESB’s. And the Clean School Bus Act, introduced by U.S. Senators including Jeff Merkley from Oregon, would supply federal funding for electric school buses and charging infrastructure, if it passes.
Alison Wiley (she/her/hers)
I am on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Chinook and Cowlitz peoples.Whose land are you on?