electric vehicles, for example. Then they can learn from the rollout to add more buses and decide if fast chargers make sense. They can see if diesel heaters are needed to warm buses on especially cold days and evaluate how many conventional buses should be kept as backup. “We don’t want to scare people away from getting started
because it’s difficult or expensive, but we do want people to be appropriately ready for what’s coming,” Bigelow said. WRI’s Kresge added that districts should make sure their charging infrastructure is more than sufficient to meet their needs, especially in the early days, since a rocky electric bus rollout could lead to finger pointing and waning enthusiasm. “Regardless of what charging infrastructure you put in place, there needs to be some redundancy,” Kresge advised. “No charger will work 100 percent of the time. Even if you have 98 percent uptime, you’ll get something like 12.5 hours of allowable downtime [during a school year]. That downtime might happen at the absolute wrong moment.” Another reason for starting slowly, even while think- ing ahead, is so an electric fleet can grow in tandem with the sector’s advances. “You don’t want to sink all your eggs into the technolo-
gy of the moment. Technology is very quickly evolving,” noted Kresge. Technologies adjacent but crucial to electric buses will
also keep changing. “You need to think about futureproofing your commu-
nications to the charger,” Kresge said, whether via Wi-Fi, cellular, ethernet or otherwise. “The ethernet is one of those technologies that was the greatest a while ago, and everybody is going to cellular now. You need to be aware. Do you have good cellular reception at your site? If you are basing it on Wi-Fi, do you have the bandwidth or do you need to upgrade?” Even though electrification usually means major fuel
savings, electricity is not free, and utility charging struc- tures can vary greatly and change over time. “We’ve heard horror stories of districts installing fast
chargers and getting slapped with demand charges” Kresge noted. He said it’s crucial to communicate with a utility about their rates and build enough flexibility into charging plans to be able to adapt. Utilities are among the partners that districtts should start strategizing with well in advance of electric bus acquisitions, and throughout the process of fu- ture-proofing and scaling up. “Definitely do your research and pick the right part-
ners. You want to do your homework because you’re going to be with them for a long time,” said David Pearson, senior solutions manager of Zonar Systems. Pearson noted that data collection and management
46 School Transportation News • APRIL 2023
related to charging is “a new piece that you’ve never had to worry about before” for many districts. “When I have a couple buses, no big deal,” he contin-
ued. “But these deployments are now in the dozens or hundreds. You have to have those buses running, and as you expand out, that charge management solution is super important and can save you a lot of money.”
Lessons Learned Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland has a
highly ambitious plan to convert about one quarter of its fleet to electric by next year, and the whole fleet of over 1,400 buses in a decade. The district has 86 electric buses already running, logging more than 3 million miles total, with 120 slated to arrive this year and another 120 next year. The partnership with Highland Electric Fleets, which owns the buses and provides them to the district at the same cost as diesel service, has made the district a national leader in electrification. While the savings and environmental benefits of this
rapid acquisition are significant, new Transportation Di- rector Gregory Salois said the district should have perhaps moved more slowly and is learning lessons along the way. “In my honest opinion, this is kind of a large contract
to dive right into especially with the data that’s not there yet on the reliability of the buses,” said Salois, who start- ed the job last summer, two years into the electric bus contract. “The way the technology stands now, there’s no way we’ll be able to be 100 percent electric. The range is not there. The folks we’re working with have been fantastic, very responsive to any issues, but they can’t increase the range of a bus and make it do what we want it to do until the technology is there.” He said the district has “slowed down on the decom-
missioning of our diesel fleet so we will have that spare ratio if we need it,” especially over concerns about frigid days that electric buses might not handle. “The drivers, the depot manager, the entire staff have to be fully into this and support it, otherwise you’ll just have the [electric] buses sit and you’ll be driving the die- sels,” Salois added. “We spend a lot of time with the new drivers on the buses, getting them accustomed to it.” All the buses are vehicle-to-grid ready, an important
future-proofing move that means the district and High- land can benefit from agreements with utilities once V2G arrangements become available. “If they’re able to utilize that stored power and sell that back to the grid, it’s a win-win,” said Salois. “In a perfect world in 25 years everything is electric, and you have this massive amount of power being stored in buses across the country that districts can sell back to the grid. That’s ideally eventually what everybody’s looking for.”
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