D
uring the first week of April, Ken Martinez, transportation director for the Salt Lake City School District in Utah, received a text message alerting him to a problem with
one of his electric school buses. The text identified the bus by its unit number, its location, and the fault code that indicated a battery pack issue. Soon after, the bus driver called via the radio to
report that an engine warning light was on and requested instructions. “I told him to pull over and shut her down, and
we’ll get another bus to you,” Martinez recalled. “We did, and then he went on to pick up the kids.” No students were on the bus at the time of the
incident. The key was that the text message Martinez
received was from Nuvve, the district’s electric vehicle service provider (EVSP), located in Califor- nia. Martinez said the text even notified the bus manufacturer of the problem. The incident is indicative of the evolving tech-
nology that is available to support school districts seeking to electrify their school buses in a terri- tory that is largely unchartered for many student transporters.
“I think the [electric] technology is great,” Mar- tinez added. “It’s got some issues that need to be worked out, but this experience proves to me it will get a lot better. There are a lot of valuable tools that are coming out of this. Everybody is learning so much. Things used to change yearly, now it seems things are changing weekly if not daily.” Martinez explained that the alert was made possible by some forethought when the chargers were installed. “When Nuvve commissioned these chargers, the gentleman who activated them asked if he and I could converse through our cell phones. So, we shared phone numbers, and when I plugged one of our buses into a charger, he would watch it on his computer and tag it by its unit number. They can use that when conversing with me. I gave them access to the Cummins telematics that I have. When he’s monitoring our buses, he is able to identify them through our unit numbers and telematics.” Martinez has been running 12 ESBs for the past
two years. Eight are 81-passenger and four are 22-passenger. He said the initial charging process was fraught with missteps until he went shopping for an electric vehicle service provider that could develop a charge management plan to optimize the process. “Our first chargers had such problems. The
chargers would stop charging, and we would not know until we came in the following day,” Martinez said. “As we reviewed the whole system, we knew we had a problem and we needed something that would alert us if there were any charging problems and that would charge on non-peak hours.” For research, Martinez visited two school districts
in Southern California that ran the same type of buses to see what chargers they used. Both dis- tricts had partnered with Nuvve. “We’ve had Nuvve installed for three months, and I can already tell the difference,” Martinez said. “They’ve equipped me with a mobile app that provides me with the bus number and the charge rate, tells me whether it’s actively charging or not and gives me the per- centage of charge. I can access that app from my phone anywhere. I can tell it to stop charging or to re-initiate the charge. I haven’t used it yet, I’m still learning.” John Sides, transportation director for the North
Kitsap School District in Kingston, Washington, said EVGateway, his district’s EVSP, provides simi- lar technology. “EVGateway has an app that allows us to monitor charging overnight and I will get an alert if a bus will not be ready the next day,” Sides explained. “I can contact EVGateway, and they can [restart the charging]. I don’t have to get out of bed, I just have to dial a number 24 hours a day on weekdays, when school is in session.” As of this writing, the North Kitsap School
District had not received the three ESBs it has on order. But the district is prepared to take delivery. Sides said the district has installed three chargers and has the plans and designs drawn up for 16 additional chargers in anticipation of obtaining 16 additional ESBs with EPA grant money. Sides add- ed that the district had even worked out a charge management plan with Puget Sound Energy to
Listen to Episode 152 of the School Transportation Nation on “Pluses and Minuses: Honest Considerations for Electric, Clean Fuel Buses,” at
stnpodcast.com.
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