Electric school buses are the future we deserve

Riding an electric school bus seems like it would be an uncanny experience. As a kid, I remember the bus being a loud and smoggy place that left me smelling like diesel. Today there are electric buses on the road that are not only emissions-free but comparatively silent. Kids can not only talk to their friends on the bus, they can breathe. 

The first all-electric school bus fleet to serve a major school district started ferrying kids to class in Oakland, California, last week. The 74 buses also act as giant batteries when they’re not moving: They’re plugged in and supplying enough electricity to the local grid to power about 400 homes. I don’t know about you, but my child self would have been thrilled by this futuristic reality and expected flying cars to be right around the corner. 

Electric school buses are here and can solve so many problems: prevent diesel pollution from damaging kids’ health, release fewer greenhouse gasses that are warming the globe, and provide energy storage where you wouldn’t expect it. 

The roadblocks preventing every kid from stepping onto an electric school bus aren’t going away however, even as the federal government pours billions of dollars into electrification efforts. Replacing the roughly 480,000 school buses already on the road in the United States is a big enough expense, but the bigger challenge is upgrading the power grid so that it can support the charging infrastructure to keep these fleets on the road. 

Figuring out this problem is more than worthwhile. Diesel exhaust, a known carcinogen that can also cause asthma and hurt academic performance, disproportionately affects Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income communities, who ride the bus more often and also tend to lack access to health care. Children are especially vulnerable to being harmed by air pollution from diesel school buses, not only because their bodies are still developing but also because they can spend hours inhaling fumes on longer routes. Electric school buses are also much quieter, which is good for the ears of both the kids and the drivers. Cleaner buses have even been linked to higher school attendance.

With more than 26 million children riding every year, school buses make up the nation’s largest mass transit system. For every school bus on the road in the morning and afternoon, there are fewer cars. Nevertheless, as 90 percent of the nation’s school buses are diesel-powered, the fleet’s carbon footprint is significant. Diesel- and natural gas-fueled buses emit about 9 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses a year, which is about the same as the emissions produced by generating the electricity for a million homes annually. Electrifying all of those buses would be the equivalent of removing 2 million cars from the road.

So electrifying this fleet is a no-brainer. Not only would it cut down on massive amounts of toxic emissions, filling the streets with electric school buses would also save a ton of money. School bus manufacturer Blue Bird says that its electric school bus costs 14 cents a mile to operate versus 49 cents for diesel buses. 

That’s not counting the revenue that school districts can generate by using these buses as giant batteries. Because they operate on a set schedule, electric school buses are uniquely suited to sell extra energy back to the grid during peak hours, when they’re not being used. In Oakland, the grid needed an upgrade to accommodate these two-way chargers and the 2.7 megawatts required to charge the fleet of buses. While federal funding helped pay for the buses themselves, PG&E, the local utility, covered the grid updates.

But not every school district is like Oakland, sending dozens of new electric school buses out on routes all at once. It’s happening all over the country, too, with school districts committing to electric school bus purchases in 49 states as well as US territories and several tribal nations, with 200,000 students currently being picked up and dropped off by electric school buses. The transition is happening in spits and spurts, as old diesel buses get phased out and school districts bring in electric buses one or five at a time, according to Sue Gander, director of the Electric School Bus Initiative at the World Resources Institute.

“At this stage, we’re in a transition period that’s about replacing your old buses that are wearing out with the new electric versions,” Gander told me. “There’s still a lot of capacity on the grid available to do that.”

The transition to electric school buses is ramping up at an impressive rate thanks, in part, to a surge of state and federal funding to support the effort. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law established the five-year, $5 billion Clean School Bus Program, which is operated by the Environmental Protection Agency, to help local school districts purchase electric buses. Some states have their own rebate programs, while New York has gone a step further by requiring all new school bus purchases to be electric starting in 2027 and provided $500 million to help pay for it. 

Many states are also using money from the $2.9 billion trust fund that came out of the Volkswagen diesel settlements in 2017 and 2018 to buy electric school buses and upgrade their charging infrastructure.

With an upfront cost of about $350,000, an electric school bus costs three times as much as a diesel one. Some of that difference can be made up by savings on fuel and maintenance savings, not to mention the public money that’s available. That surge in funding has led to a spike in the number of electric school buses. While 485 new electric school buses hit the road in 2020, the number of new buses in 2023 was 3,267. If you count what school districts and private operators have committed to, there are over 12,000 electric school buses on the way. That’s about 2.5 percent of the total number needed to replace the nation’s fleet of diesel school buses.

Despite what you may have read, all of this money does not make electric school buses free. An EPA internal watchdog report last year said that school districts don’t have a problem buying electric buses, but they do have a problem finding enough power from the grid to charge them. The available federal rebates for electric school bus purchases typically do not include the cost of upgrading the local utility infrastructure, including new transformers and more transmission lines, which can take nine months to two years to install. 

Still, by the end of the decade, you can expect to see thousands more electric school buses on the road. The big question then is whether kids will ride them. 

While nearly 40 percent of kids rode to school on a bus as recently as 2009, ridership has been on the decline for a number of different reasons, including a bus driver shortage and increasing suburban sprawl pushing schools to the edge of town instead of the middle where children can walk to school. 

That’s turning school pick-up lines into a hellscape of idling cars and SUVs spewing their own emissions onto the sidewalk, where the kids wait for their parents. Just imagine if they could spend that time talk to their friends on a quiet, new electric school bus breathing fresh, clean air instead.

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