Being a Leader as EPA Application Deadline Approaches

Winning, Regardless of Winning

This section is for all school bus fleets new or mostly new to electric buses, which is most of the roughly 13,500 school bus fleets in the U.S. I encourage you to apply for EPA’s current funding round. Find my concise overview of it here. You will win in the long run, as leaders in your communities, if you engage on this, whether or not you win funding in this round. Even, or especially, if you are retiring soon, you will have moved your fleet forward and added to your legacy. (And thank you for your service; school transportation rocks!).

To prepare to do the simple application, you might glance through this screenshot of it (thank you, Tim Farquer, for providing it). Go to this EPA page and scroll down to Supplemental Application Forms (below Supporting Documents). Open and download the Rebate Program Utility Partnership Template and the Rebate Program School Board Awareness Certification. Have the necessary conversations with your school boards and utilities and fill out these documents now, to make the January 31, 2024 submission deadline. You can’t make progress on even getting your first ESB without support from your school board and active involvement from your utility.

For ESB purposes, your utility is defined by where your ESB charging will happen. If you’re not sure who your utility is, learn who your bus yard pays its electricity bill to. Many cities and regions have more than one utility, with surprisingly erratic, checkerboard-style boundaries of their territories. The district office may have a different utility than its bus yard. If you are an ESB advocate rather than a bus fleet, see the Alliance’s toolkit for advocates, aimed at advocates helping bus fleets to apply. 

Let’s talk about volunteer ESB advocates for a minute (and if you know of any volunteers advocating for fossil-fueled buses, please let me know about them). Like many of you, I’m fond of young people. I just met with two high school seniors who live an hour up the Columbia River from me. They wanted my advice on how to advocate for ESBs for their school district, which doesn’t yet have any. I listened carefully. We discussed funding, power dynamics, decision-makers and influencers, and how their 60-strong Earth Action club could become influencers. These kids were sophisticated. I encouraged them, citing how middle-schooler Holly Thorpe convinced the Miami-Dade school board to apply for ESB funding, which they then won, setting their large bus fleet on the zero emissions path to zero emissions. The power of a young advocate.

Entering the EV Video Challenge, presented by EPA, is another thing I encouraged these cool high schoolers and their club to consider. Kristin K. from EPA personally asked me to let my readers know that at this writing, no electric bus videos have yet been submitted. And first prize is $3,000, in each of the three divisions, with $1,000 for second place and $500 for third place. Deadline is January 24, 2024. Students, bus drivers, all kinds of people can enter. Similar to my statement above about applying for funding, creating and then circulating a pro ESB video in your community can make you a leader, and move your community forward, whether or not you “win”.  I don’t buy into the idea that we’ve got to have losers in order to have winners. I see us as all moving forward in different ways, together. Along those lines . . . 

Many fleets have been electrifying for years — without any EPA funding. They’re doing it with state funding (primarily Volkswagen funds), utility funding and financing partners. Highland Electric Fleets is the leading company that partners with districts to finance school bus fleets’ transitions to electric. I’ve seen them make a point of working with diverse, low-income districts (good!). The banner photo at the top is of an ESB ribbon-cutting at Manassas City Public Schools in Virginia, which has not landed any EPA funds. Their partners are Highland and Dominion Energy, a large utility that has been investing for years in ESBs for school districts throughout its Virginia territory, with the plan of gaining vehicle to grid (V2G) benefits from them. (Extreme weather events and power outages are increasingly common not just in Virginia but throughout the continent; demand for what utilities call distributed energy resources, such as ESBs, will keep growing.)