MOVER, Resiliency and Electric School Buses

Please join me in being nerdy here. I’m as far from being an engineer as a person can be, so if the MOVER microgrid concept can make sense to me, it can to you, too. If you’ve watched my TEDx talk, you’re already familiar.

Pretend you’re with me at Wy’East Middle School in Hood River County, Oregon. We can see a startlingly huge mountain in the middle distance, still partly covered with snow: Mount Hood, called Wy’East by some Native American tribes. The school gymnasium is steadily used for school and general community events, and the county fairgrounds next door serve as a staging area for firefighters, since this rural area is prone to wildfires, like much of the arid, drought-ridden West.

Right outside the gym, we’ve got an electric school bus with a DC fast charger equipped to be bidirectional; our RIDE Achiever battery holds about 150 kWh of power. We’ve got ground-mount solar panels that were installed earlier this year. And here’s a big battery (as in battery storage) that looks like a white box; it sits on a concrete pad and can store 250kWh.

After school lets out in June, we’ll do trenching to run wires and conduit between these things and the gym’s microgrid, painstakingly designed and built by electrical engineers. In August we’ll be testing the ESB and charger for their ability to discharge. Unlike the nation’s leading vehicle to grid (V2G) project in Oakland, CA, that has 74 ESBs discharging nightly into the enormous PG&E grid, our locally-scaled project is vehicle to building (V2B). V2B is about local resiliency for a community. It’s far less costly and far more accessible than V2G. Here’s the run of show, so to speak:

• ESB discharges into battery

• Battery discharges into microgrid

• Solar panels feed into both the battery and microgrid

• Microgrid powers the gym during a power outage, for community to use as refuge

Think of MOVER’s microgrid-equipped gym as a self-sustaining island of energy if the usual energy goes out. Islanding is the verb the engineers actually use. A single kWh of power can charge about 50 cell phones simultaneously. The hundreds of kWhs pulsing into the Wy’east gym can cool triple digit days down to temperatures that can keep people alive who would otherwise die.

MOVER’s solar power, battery storage and ESBs are called distributed energy resource (DER), in utility-speak. DER’s have been growing for years; solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, because it’s so cheap. DER’s are small energy sources located near where people will use them. That sounds ho-hum, but with a microgrid, DER’s become transformative, letting a community sustain itself in a crisis instead of, say, waiting for FEMA (federal) help that may never arrive.