Felix Middleton, an equipment service employee for the City of Oakland, fuels with renewable diesel. While not yet readily available for school districts, the fuel holds much promise for fleets wary of additional costs tied to transitioning away from traditional diesel. INSET PHOTO: Renewable diesel sourced from palm oil, as well as animal and fish fats, is a high carbon fuel and is readily available. Low carbon feedstocks, such as tallow and other vegetable oils, are going to California first due to the state’s low carbon fuel standard, enabling the producers to sell credits into the program.
Electric Baby Steps Hybrid and plug-in electric school buses
are represented in miniscule numbers. But there’s traction. A new report from Navi- gant, Transportation Forecast: Medium and Heavy Duty Vehicles, predicts that global annual electric and hybrid bus sales are expected to grow from just more than 9,000 vehicles in 2016 to 52,000 in 2025. “Tere are exciting things coming to school buses. Hybrid and electric will be- come increasingly popular over the coming years with battery costs coming down,” said David Alexander, senior research analyst with Navigant Research. Te industry has tried hybrids once
already with little luck, as IC Bus, Tomas and Collins Bus all encountered high vehi-
50 School Transportation News • JULY 2016
cle cost, power plants and supply-chain is- sues that caused the companies to abandon their respective projects. Since then, several OEMs have embraced an even cleaner alternative: zero-emissions electric. Trans Tech debuted the first facto-
ry-built, battery-powered electric school bus in Oct. 2011 at the NAPT Trade Show. While that initial model never achieved NHTSA certification for route service, two years later Motiv assumed the grant project and announced the new Trans Tech “battery agnostic” SST-e would hit the road in 2014 at Kings Canyon Unified School District in California. Te bus achieves a 50-percent charge in under an hour and is fully charged in eight hours. Lion Bus is the first to fill electric desires in the Type C segment with its eLion,
mostly in its home province of Quebec, though several initial orders in the U.S. are being filled this month. Some districts are opting to convert their diesel buses to electric through companies like ADOMANI, which offer all-electric powertrain conversions through partner- ships with dealers like A-Z Bus Sales and manufacturers like GreenPower Bus. “Te demand is clearly there as school districts are ready to add electric school buses to their fleets and replace older high polluting diesel buses,” said ADOMANI Chief Executive Officer Jim Reynolds. In California, where incentive grants are
sparking things, at least nine school dis- tricts in the South Coast and San Joaquin Valley air basins intend to eventually put a total of 25 GreenPower all-electric school
PHOTO CREDIT: PHOTO COURTESY OF NESTE
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