I am not wishing you happy holidays and 2025. The world is changing, and I want you to have something sturdier than just feeling good, because feelings change like weather changes. Instead, I’m wishing you resilience in 2025, because the earth’s climate and the world’s political climate are both heading into more extreme territory. Electric school buses (ESBs, my favorite topic) can play a role in resilience. But we can also build our resilience without them, and I’ll write more about that next month.
This issue includes:
- MOVER progress
- Beaverton School District’s and OpConnect’s success
- Lion Electric goes dark, and what it means
- WASBE update and call for speakers
- Reminder: deadline to apply for Clean School Bus Program rebates is January 9, 2025
I’m Alison Wiley here in Oregon, an ESB and equity geek, and a partner in the MOVER resilience project. I’ve worked in low-carbon transportation since 2006, focusing on electric buses since 2016. Find my Electric School Bus website and back newsletters here. I help school bus fleets move forward with electrifying, by writing this newsletter and as a consultant and grant writer (last year I helped to land a $20m project). This newsletter is a member of the nationwide, equity-focused Alliance For Electric School Buses (AESB).
MOVER is moving forward on resilience
As I’ve mentioned in prior newsletters, the MOVER project in Hood River, Oregon, is designed to shelter a community during a power outage. When complete, it will do that by using a bidirectional ESB and solar panels to power a microgrid at Wy’East Middle School. The hard parts are creating the microgrid and engineering the backward flow of electricity. (If it were easy, everyone would already be doing it.) MOVER stands for Microgrid Opportunities: Vehicles Enhancing Resiliency. (MOVER is easier to remember.) My TEDx talk dramatizes how a MOVER type microgrid could shelter people during an extreme/lethal weather event. Spoiler: it has a happy ending.
What’s a typical chronology for a charger project? At the Hood River County School District bus yard, a couple of miles from Wy’East Middle School, here are the chronological steps of our recent eight-port charger installation. This site is not part of the microgrid at Wy’East. It future-proofs for ESBs both currently funded, and not yet funded.
- Detailed site design (in this case, by Mike Smith of Gradient Xergy)
- Finalization of bids and then contracts
- Excavation of site (chargers are construction projects)
- Installation of conduit and wires
- Installation of vault, meter and electrical panel
- Installation of pedestals and chargers
- Lastly, commissioning of the chargers, led by Mobility House
Let’s now travel west from Hood River, Oregon, and go 72 miles down the Gorge, with the mighty Columbia River to our right. Across the river to the north is the state of Washington, which is richer in ESB funding, and also number of ESB deployments, than Oregon. But!
At Beaverton School District (BSD) we find the largest ESB fleet in the Pacific Northwest. Craig Beaver, Administrator of Transportation at BSD, and Cliff Harrell, Shop Manager, are currently running 43 ESBs, of a total fleet of 315. Five more are to arrive within 2024, and 32 more within 2025, for a soon to be total of 80 ESBs. Unusually, BSD diversifies its ESB fleet among almost all available manufacturers: BlueBird, IC, GreenPower, Lion and RIDE (formerly BYD). Craig was recently named 2024 Transportation Supervisor of the Year by School Transportation News.
BSD also shows a rare form of leadership in posting its ESB data, including cost savings. BSD’s average monthly operating cost for ESBs is $1,277/month, compared to $3,879/month for diesel and $2,971 for propane. Finally, Craig leads an energetic (ha!) monthly meeting for ESB people, especially those in in the Pacific Northwest, on second Wednesdays at 9 a.m. To get invited to join it, reply to this email and I’ll notify Craig.
Charging, as we know, is the hardest part of ESBs, and the more ESBs, the more complex the charging infrastructure. Besides their proactive utility Portland General Electric, who handles charging for BSD’s massive ESB fleet? OpConnect, an Oregon company does; see below. From left: Dexter Turner, founder and CEO; Amy Hillman, Vice President of Sales; Andrew Lee, Director of Account Management.
Lion goes dark, and what it means
Lion Electric, the Canada-based, first-to-market manufacturer of the largest number of ESBs on the road in the U.S., has today announced that it has received protection from its creditors. See that and all Lion’s news releases here (note that 19/12/2024 means December 19, 2024, different from U.S. date-stamps).This typically signifies upcoming bankruptcy, along with other things like mass layoffs and stock prices falling to less than a dollar.
What does Lion’s failure mean for school bus fleets with Lion ESBs? Much is unknown, or may change and then change again. According to the AESB as of December 17th, existing orders for Lion buses are expected to be fulfilled, and no changes are yet expected to Lion’s warranties. Craig Beaver stated today he expects to receive his Lions currently on order, just delayed by six months. From another angle, First Student is offering, for a fee, to take responsibility for keeping Lion buses in operation, whether or not a district contracts for service with First Student, according to Kevin Matthews, electrification lead at First Student.
What Lion’s failure does not mean is failure of electric school buses. Other manufacturers of ESBs are going strong, including BlueBird, GreenPower and RIDE (formerly BYD) .Overall demand for ESBs is strong and growing. 18,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. in 2023, many of them in the construction industry, and the construction industry is flourishing, regardless. Some survivors of multiple bankruptcies even succeed in politics.
Context: companies like Lion that only make electric vehicles are disadvantaged by lack of easy profits from fossil-fueled buses. The big three school bus OEM’s — BlueBird, IC and Thomas Built — make some ESBs, but have long amassed much capital via strong profits from fossil-fueled buses. Those buses are safe for children, crash-wise, but unhealthy for them, due to toxic, carcinogenic emissions. That’s an elephant in the room.
Even though diesel emissions have been lowered in recent years, the costs of children’s asthma attacks, emergency room visits, lowered attendance, lowered test scores, etc. that are caused by diesel emissions are externalized to schools, society and especially to the children’s families, who have lower incomes on average. There’s a moral problem in all that, one that is systemic, and not the fault of any particular company. It’s the reason that ESBs have advocacy and volunteer groups supporting them, while fossil-fueled buses do not.
Financial support for this newsletter is provided in part by the World Resources Institute. While the World Resources Institute may engage as a partner on content, it does not control, nor does it necessarily endorse, the contents of this newsletter.
Warmly,
Alison Wiley (she/her/hers)
I am on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Chinook and Cowlitz peoples.
Whose land are you on?
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