In this issue I’ll answer that question, plus two others: how can equity and racial justice be woven into the V2G proposition? And, seemingly farther afield but quite relevant: what role should we, the clean transportation community, play in the November 3 election and what may follow the election?
For those new to this newsletter, I’m Alison Wiley, here in Oregon, on a mission of electric buses, equity and inclusion. I’m not an engineer, but a big-picture generalist who interprets and translates the complex electric bus ecosystem, with a focus on racial justice. My readers include school bus and public transit folks, elected officials, utilities, manufacturers of electric buses and charging infrastructure, nonprofits, and consultants. I also develop electric bus education and outreach projects.
One of several reasons various utilities nationwide are investing in electric school buses (ESB’s) is their potential to feed energy back into the electric grid. Buses can only do V2G when parked. School buses are parked a lot because they transport kids on average just 5.5 hours/day, 180 days/year. Public transit buses operate year-round, 12 plus hours/day, so aren’t parked enough to have V2G potential. Wind and solar power pair especially well with V2G applications.
The large, Type D,electric school buses currently being made by Lion and Thomas Built have battery packs with 220 kilowatt hour (kWh) capacity. Energy is measured in kilowatt hours, the way diesel is measured in gallons.
The 220 kWh’s of an electric school bus battery-pack could charge 13,500 cell phones in a V2G /V2B application. Or, 6.67 average U.S. homes for a day.* Scale that up, over time, to 100 electric school buses, and you could do a lot with that fleet’s stored energy.
The equity-centered question is: whom will that V2G energy benefit? Who controls it? How might communities of color get a stake in this valuable resource, especially for resiliency purposes when a given grid eventually goes down? The large investor owned utilities (IOU’s) leading most V2G projects are regulated by commissions that protect ratepayers. But IOU’s are obligated to produce profits for stakeholders, and neither they nor their regulators are obligated to practice anti-racism. Many individual leaders in the electric bus world may study and practice anti-racism; my August newsletter quotes them at length. That’s not the same, though, as institutional or systemic change. A project proposal I’m working on right now would develop community- based V2G fueled by solar panels, with ESB’s banking energy for neighborhood resiliency. I’ll let you know how this idea develops.
The final question I’m posing today: what role should we, the clean transportation community, play in the November 3rd election? In my view, an active one. I do realize it’s outside the box to address politics in a professional newsletter. Like many of my good colleagues working on TE and electric buses, I am willing to travel outside the box.
Electrified transportation has a core element in common with racial justice and even democracy: they are not the default. They are birthed, and then survive, only by dint of hard, ongoing effort. The default situations are heavily polluting transportation based on internal combustion engines, a racially unjust culture based on white interests and white centeredness, and federal leadership that potentially devolves (it’s happened in a number of countries) from democracy into dictatorship.
One political party and president/vice president ticket candidate supports clean transportation, racial justice and democracy much more than the other. That makes the impacts of this election enormous, not just for our industry but for humanity. Voting is crucial but not sufficient. If we’re fortunate enough in the time of Covid to be writing and reading this newsletter, we’re probably not dealing with survival issues as millions are. We have enough bandwidth to do more. Examples:
An ESB advocate/attorney who reads this newsletter wrote and sent 16,000 postcards, in an organized effort with friends, into the swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin to get out the vote (GOTV). As volunteers, on top of their day jobs. My (small) church and I together wrote and sent about 2,000 of the roughly 15 million letters that Vote Forward sent into swing states. The list goes on.
These GOTV activities are great. But the new to all of us, more threatening dimension is that the incumbent president states he may not accept an election outcome that doesn’t favor him. That would be attempting a coup. Coups give birth to dictatorships. Worldwide, coup attempts get defeated by ordinary people like you and me calling out their illegitimacy. The nonprofit Waging Nonviolence lays this out in this succinct article, It’s worth a three minute read, as is a sequel to it with practical tips on wielding peaceful power, published just yesterday, here. In a similar vein, this afternoon I’m attending a training presented by Choose Democracy
The common denominator between electric buses, V2G scenarios and the citizen responsibilities of anti-racism work and coup-opposition work are that they are new to most of us. The last two feel like they shouldn’t be necessary, and I’m sorry to be the one to say they are. On the positive side, all four of these are life-giving, rewarding, powerful. Let’s learn and wield healthy power together.
* Thanks to friend and colleague Jon Jantz for the calculations. Jon is a subject matter expert across the electric vehicle space, and an electrical engineer working as an Electrification Consultant with Collaborative Efficiency. Also, thanks to friend and colleague Lisa S. for proofreading this issue (any errors are mine).
Alison Wiley (she/her/hers)
I am on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Chinook and Cowlitz peoples.
Whose land are you on?