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EPA Awarding Nearly $1 Billion To Schools For Electric Buses (apnews.com) 163

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Nearly 400 school districts spanning all 50 states and Washington, D.C., along with several tribes and U.S. territories, are receiving roughly $1 billion in grants to purchase about 2,500 "clean" school buses under a new federal program. From a report: The Biden administration is making the grants available as part of a wider effort to accelerate the transition to zero-emission vehicles and reduce air pollution near schools and communities. Vice President Kamala Harris and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan are set to announce the grant awards Wednesday in Seattle. The new, mostly electric school buses will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save money and better protect children's health, the White House said.

As many as 25 million children ride familiar yellow school buses each school day and will have a "healthier future" with a cleaner fleet, Regan said. "This is just the beginning of our work to ... reduce climate pollution and ensure the clean, breathable air that all our children deserve," he said. Only about 1% of the nation's 480,000 school buses were electric as of last year, but the push to abandon traditional diesel buses has gained momentum in recent years. Money for the new purchases is available under the federal Clean School Bus Program, which includes $5 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law President Joe Biden signed last year.
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EPA Awarding Nearly $1 Billion To Schools For Electric Buses More

EPA Awarding Nearly $1 Billion To Schools For Electric Buses

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  • It wasn't that long ago that cities were updating to CNG-powered busses, I remember DC Metro investing something like $60m to $70m to retire their Diesel fleet. Those were "clean energy" advertised buses. I'm not sure however that creating a grant demand curve with BEV busses will pan out for school districts. Electric rates aren't zero cost either at the KWh quantities they'll demand and while those costs will be offset by lower maintenance costs, you still have to get the charging current from somewhere.

    • Re:It wasn't that long ago (Score:5, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:00PM (#63000863)

      Diesel is close to $6 a gallon here. Last time I did the math it would cost me $8 to fully charge a Tesla. Buses get terrible mileage as they do nothing but stop and start.

      • Buses get terrible mileage as they do nothing but stop and start.

        This is exactly the reason that milk floats [wikipedia.org] have long been electric when nothing else really was. With regenerative braking I can imagine this could end up being pretty power efficient.

      • Re:It wasn't that long ago (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:26PM (#63000975)
        You're correct; the regenerative braking would be a big win on a bus! Also, busses have a well-documented route, so the range requirements are well known ahead of time. Then only need slightly more range than the length of their route.

        • I'd agree, except when I was in school, the school buses were used for taking field trips too. Often, those were to destinations a lot further away than the homes of the students attending classes.

          It wouldn't surprise me if the new EV buses turn out to be fine for their primary application, but they decide they need the traditional diesel ones to do everything else like the field trips.

          • Agreed, they would still need to charter a diesel bus for longer trips. There is no sense is spending tens of thousands of dollars on battery capacity this is only going to be used a couple times a year. Sports teams might still need the longer range too, although I used to drive my daughter to all her cheerleading and gymnastics events myself.
        • Also school busses tend to run a pickup schedule in the morning, sit idle for several hours, and then perform the evening drop off which means that the battery can be charged while kids are in school so the busses only need enough batter for half of their daily mileage.
          • Seems like quite a few of them are hooked up to the grid when parked back at the depot and feed the grid if required and this earns them money.

      • The perfect application (Score:5, Interesting)

        by XXongo ( 3986865 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:54PM (#63001097) Homepage

        Buses get terrible mileage as they do nothing but stop and start.

        Yes, school busses are pretty much the perfect application for battery electric vehicles. They have a known route, a lot of starting and stopping (for which regenerative braking is useful), and they return to their home base overnight, so they can charge at night when the electrical power rates are low.

        Good idea.

      • Yes, and power costs are relatively stable were as gas/diesel can unexpectedly spike probably messing up the whole school district budget. 20 busses, each one like 100 miles a day ? (many busses do more than 1 route, 6:00-7:30am Highschool, 7:45-8:30 elementary, then again in the afternoon) 2000 miles a day at 8MPG=250 gallons x $6 a gallon is $1500 per day in gas. First bus I found on google - 155KW battery 120 mile range. Assuming they still do 100 miles and use 120KW per day, at our power rate of .089

    • Re:It wasn't that long ago (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:12PM (#63000905) Journal

      Of course, all this new demand will create more demand for electric power, further straining grid resources.

      Who fed you that one? Because this article [scientificamerican.com] says that not only will electric vehicles not strain the grid, but "experts see EV batteries as part of the solution."

    • At the 9.12 cents/kWh rate here in Oregon, electricity is much cheaper per mile than gas or diesel. At the 40 cents/kWh they charge in parts of California, it might not be.

      • Oh yeah, out here in Texas we have a small coop power grid that suffers its share of service interruptions from trees, storms, bad/drunk drivers and fires. They are shutting down their Coal based mainline plant and building out Solar based generation and storage. That's good but the rates are going from 14 cents/KWh to 25 cents/KWh next year and then up to over 40 (est.), just like California. Why? it's to pay for the Bonds. The entire governing board is facing a recall. For a time, I owned an inherited hom

        • Bonds? Oh right, it's the good ol' US of A where they can't do anything useful without giving huge donations of public & the population's money to already very rich middle-men. This obsession with neoliberal capitalism is bankrupting ordinary people. It's why the USA has similar rates of wealth inequality to Russia.
      • While CA may be $0.40/KWh (and sometime higher), it is not that high for most BEV drivers. If you charge at the correct "off peak" time, then the rates are still way under gas/diesel costs. Buses have even more "opportunities" for the grid. The bus "knows" what range it needs the next day, sits idle most of the time, and the grid itself can help schedule when and how fast it charges.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mspohr ( 589790 )

        Your average Tesla gets 4 miles per kWh. At (California) 40 cents, that's 10 cents a mile. (Most people in California don't pay that much for electricity to charge.)
        California gas prices are $6/gal which takes you about 20 miles... so 30 cents a mile. Three times as expensive.

    • Mmm... I wonder what all those busses sitting around all day, while they're not ferrying kids around, will do? I wonder if perhaps there were some ingenious way to charge them using the energy from daylight?

      • Scale that to a school district of say 500 busses. Let's say they have 100KWh batteries and are at 20% charge upon going back to the depot. The busses need to be 100% charged for the afternoon run and for the morning run, so that's twice/day. The 100% charge is to assure parents that the kiddies will get there with a good margin for safety, delays and bad weather, they need their heat and A/C.
        70KWh * 500 = 35000KWh * 2 times/day = 70,000KWh per day to run that fleet. That's just a rough estimate of about $2

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Goonie ( 8651 )
          Industrial customers whose demand is outside peak times don't pay anything like 40c/Kwh.

          • According to this [electricitylocal.com]
            up to about 35 cents. I don't know where but that sounds like the north east.

            • I can't speak for anywhere else. Residential electricity in Florida is $0.11/kwh right now but will go up to $0.14/kwh next year. We get 84% of our electricity from methane.

        • Scale that to a school district of say 500 busses.

          Okay. Now the school district has a parking lot large enough to hold 500 buses.

    • ...Of course, all this new demand will create more demand for electric power, further straining grid resources. This will be fun to watch.

      Exactly the opposite. Busses will charge at night, when the grid is nearly idle, and electricity is cheap. This is an application that fits well with the existing electrical grid.

      Maybe some time in the distant future, when solar power is ubiquitous, it may be advantageous to charge during the day. But by that time these busses will have long since past their end of life.

      • I just went through the math in another response. Mind you, that was back of a napkin thought and most busses have route that's done one time and most busses do multiple routes daily, one for Elementary, Middle etc. They then wind up parked or back at a depot. Yes, they'll have to charge overnight but depending on capacity it would be better to take into consideration mid-day "downtime" too.

        This overnight "low energy demand" thing will go out the wayside if we all have to have electric furnaces.

        • Average miles per day of a school bus is 60-80 miles (depending on what source you chose), but even at the larger number, if they start their route at 6:30AM and return to the charge station at 6:30pm, their charge rate needs to be only 6.75 miles per hour of charge time to charge overnight, which is no big deal.

          This overnight "low energy demand" thing will go out the wayside if we all have to have electric furnaces.

          If that's really the limiting factor, it's not hard to design to that spec. Nothing is easier to store than low-grade heat. Put 12 hours of thermal ballast into the system.

          • Around here it's about 150 to 175 miles/day. The drivers use staggered times/routes and reuse the same busses for multiple pickups and drop-offs, elementary, middle, high school, special needs, and career schools. Then you have traveling sports teams too.

            You're also forgetting mid-day back at the depot and you have heat and A/C to consider which means more electrical power utilization. Parents around hear scream if their kids don't have A/C on their busses in August when school starts. These are the same pa

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by XXongo ( 3986865 )

              There's a lot of possibilities but what I also don't like is that they're all grid-tied solutions. What's wrong with Fuel Cells? I mean the first HFC train is now in operation in Germany. [alstom.com] That's the kind of investment I would like to see more of.

              Notinng in particular, except that hydrogen is difficult to store. You need either high pressure tanks, very large volume tanks, or cryogenic liquid, all of which have problems.

              Batteries are simply simpler.

    • It wasn't that long ago that cities were updating to CNG-powered busses, I remember DC Metro investing something like $60m to $70m to retire their Diesel fleet. Those were "clean energy" advertised buses.

      5% of the new busses under this program are also CNG or propane, so I guess there is a niche where batteries don't provide enough range or the grid is insufficient or something.

    • I don't believe that this is so much about general environmental improvement as much as it is that diesel fumes tend to enter school busses more than one would think. Switching to CNG busses or BEVs means that the child passengers breathe better air during transportation.

    • It wasn't that long ago that cities were updating to CNG-powered busses, I remember DC Metro investing something like $60m to $70m to retire their Diesel fleet. Those were "clean energy" advertised buses.

      CNG was clean-ish. You still have emissions (as you still burn oil) but they are massively reduced, and you can ~double oil change periods because there's so much less crap in your blow-by (of which there is always some, which is one reason why there is crankcase ventilation.) And we used to not have to frack to increase natgas production. It's a much better fuel to burn in cities than either gasoline or diesel.

      Those same buses could also reasonably be converted from CNG to electric. There are EV buses with

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by armada ( 553343 )
      If you think that is bad, you better not image search “lithium mine”.

  • It's only going to take an additional 191 billion to replace the rest of them*.

    * - according to the price, and the number of school buses in the U.S.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      Replacing the full school bus fleet is not what this is for.
      This is to create market buzz and pump up stock prices for a handful of BEV school bus making companies.
      You know, so the congress-critters can "better themselves", since they bought last week.

    • School buses need to be replaced every 12 years anyway; they don't last forever. The obvious strategy is to replace the buses you would have replaced with diesel vehicles with electric buses instead over the next 12 years. You think the electric buses they are buying now are going to replace brand new diesel buses?!?!?

    • It's only going to take an additional 191 billion to replace the rest of them*.

      * - according to the price, and the number of school buses in the U.S.

      Sounds good to me. The US has spent $191 billion on much worse things.

  • This is good and all, but does anybody track the timing of purchases of stocks of companies that do busses or whatever?

  • Costs (Score:5, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @05:08PM (#63000889) Journal
    $1 billion for 2500 buses comes out to $400,000 apiece. Yup, that's expensive. By comparison, a new diesel school bus is in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 [google.com] - on the order of 1/2 as much.

    Cue the naysayers who will piss and moan that electric will 1) never work, 2) bankrupt us, while also 3) cause the grid to collapse.

    However...
    *The cost of electricity is vastly lower than for diesel (per distance traveled).
    * EVs have substantially lower maintenance costs.
    * EVs have no tailpipe emissions, which around a school environment is extra good.
    * EVs have lower well-to-wheel emissions, even if the local grid is 100% coal.
    * EVs' well-to-wheel emissions get lower as the grid greens; a diesel gets dirtier with age.
    * An electric bus can do a lot of recharging in the middle of the day when solar energy is most available.
    * An electric bus will do a lot less screeeeeching of its (mechanical) brakes.

    So what would be more worthwhile than comparing purchase price is the total cost of ownership. I don't have that at my fingertips, but my gut tells me an electric bus comes out even, or ahead. Plus they have all manner of ancillary benefits that, if you put most any economic cost to (as opposed externalizing it away), should put these buses way ahead.

    • $1 billion for 2500 buses comes out to $400,000 apiece. Yup, that's expensive. By comparison, a new diesel school bus is in the range of $200,000 to $250,000 [google.com] - on the order of 1/2 as much.

      They're probably figuring in the cost of the charging infrastructure as well. I suspect that a battery large enough to push a bus around all day is going to need DC fast charging in order to finish charging before morning.

      • Why would they need fast charging? They are only driven an average of 30 miles a day. My RAV4 Prime can do that without ever turning the gas engine on; it takes about 4 hours to charge.

        • Your RAV4 Prime also weighs a hell of a lot less, and has a hell of a lot less battery. Comparing the charge time between that and a full size school bus is ridiculous.

          Do you really think that a school bus loaded with 30+ kids is going to only use 250 Wh per mile? I would personally bet it would be about 4x that if not more, which means you'll need 4x the charging time at the same rate as your Toyota to recover the same range, all charging efficiencies being equal.

          • The school bus is a massive thing, even the diesel might well weigh ten tons. But they also tend to have very smooth, hard tires that do not deform very much (which is part of why buses do so much road damage, besides just the mass) and pickup trucks literally have higher output engines than buses do. We've got a 10-ton Blue Bird transit bus and it has an 8.3 liter Cummins (ISC) but it only puts out 250HP, and has about 660lb-ft torque. The current 6.7 liter Cummins ISB in the Dodge Ram 2500 and 3500 diesel

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        A quick bit of research suggests that 150kWh batteries are common for school busses. Seems about right, they travel at low speeds.

        The bus will be idle after taking the kids home in the afternoon, so it's say they can charge from 6 PM to 6 AM, a total of 12 hours. That would only need a 12.5kW charger to completely fill the battery. In practice it will be less, because the battery won't need a full charge every day, and there will be some buffer so the usable capacity will be lower.

        Anyway, that can easily b

    • So then why is a subsidy needed?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by necro81 ( 917438 )

        So then why is a subsidy needed?

        Although the finances probably work out well on paper, it still carries risk. Most school districts probably aren't going to take a flyer (especially with local taxpayer money) on this new technology without some serious prodding. So, here comes the feds with money to alleviate the risk. I doubt any district will get anything close to the money to replace their entire fleet - probably only 1 or 2. But if those 1 or 2 can demonstrate their worth, then that'll make the di

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by XXongo ( 3986865 )

        So then why is a subsidy needed?

        In the long run, if it proves out to be cost effective (and it looks like it should be): it won't.

        In the short run, early adopters are needed to shake the technology down and demonstrate it works and fits the needs.

        • Also, with a basically guaranteed market of $5B in sales, there's incentive for EV bus manufacturers to expand their capacities which will drive costs further down.

    • It would be great if we can just pay double for everything, reduce our order by half, but with the benefit it reduces our carbon footprint. It's still up for debate if electric actually releases less carbon overall when accounting for the energy production sources and battery and power line requirements (lithium, copper, etc.). How often has your phone battery died or stop holding a charge that can make it through the day, every 5 years? Now imagine the cost of replacing something 1000 times larger every 5

      • > It's still up for debate if electric actually releases less carbon overall when accounting for the energy production sources and battery and power line requirements (lithium, copper, etc.)

        No, it isn't [iop.org].

        > How often has your phone battery died or stop holding a charge that can make it through the day, every 5 years?

        I don't know why anyone would need this explained to them at this point, but a car is not a cell phone. The way the battery is designed, managed and used is vastly different. Increasingly,

      • Re:Costs (Score:4, Informative)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Wednesday October 26, 2022 @06:42PM (#63001281) Homepage Journal

        It's still up for debate if electric actually releases less carbon overall when accounting for the energy production sources and battery and power line requirements (lithium, copper, etc.).

        Those studies have been done before, and they consistently show that even in areas with a high-coal mix, EVs are still cleaner — a lot cleaner. And the cleaner the energy mix, the greater the advantage.

        How often has your phone battery died or stop holding a charge that can make it through the day, every 5 years? Now imagine the cost of replacing something 1000 times larger every 5 -10 years, Tesla replacement batteries are the cheapest on the market and sold with zero mark-up on cost and they are still around $20K, and much smaller than a bus would need.

        That's really not a credible fear unless the battery was designed wrong. The average lifespan of a Tesla battery is several hundred thousand miles. For a bus that goes double-digit miles per day, you would expect the average battery to last 27 to 46 years, which is way, way longer than the bus will last.

        Will they have premature failures? Sure. But there are premature failures of ICE engines, too, not to mention fuel pumps, fuel filters, vacuum lines, sensors, 12V batteries, etc.

        The entire process of mining, crushing, chemically extracting, and treating the minerals for high capacity batteries might have greater carbon output than the entire lifetime of exhaust from a diesel engine for a bus.

        And will be melted down and reused for the next bus, and the next bus, and the next bus. Metals are infinitely recyclable, unlike the exhaust from a diesel bus, which comes from burning matter that can only be used once.

        Until the entire process, most importantly including energy and battery production, is climate neutral we are not preventing carbon release by simply using electric cars. The focus at this point in time should be on climate neutral energy production, not end point electric vehicles - we are doing things completely backwards.

        The two problems are orthogonal. There's no reason to do one first and then the other. After all, even with the current energy mix, EVs are cleaner. So why not start the move to EVs now and let power production get cleaner over time on its own schedule?

        I would also mention that recharging in the middle of the day is actually the worst time as that is when energy demand is at it's highest, especially in summer.

        Actually, no, in many parts of California, charging in the middle of the day is the ideal time, because there's often more solar power than they can use, and they end up curtailing solar power production. But either way, a bus that travels double-digit miles per day very well might need to be charged only once per week, which could be done on weekend nights, when power use is at its lowest.

    • add to this that electric vehicles are much easier to drive. The FC semis in testing at the LA port are loved by their drivers. No shifting, plenty of power, and smooth.
  • Why do schools own their own busses? Why don't they contract the local bus company to do the school run instead? It will cost them a whole lot less and the busses can be in use for the rest of the day when the school doesn't need them.
    It makes no real sense, except for maybe country schools that have no other option.
    • If the bus does not have a "use" outside of the school system, then the contract approach will always cost more. Just another layer of profit. The idea that private business is always more efficient does not always work. Consider electricity coops and healthcare as two prime examples.
      • Possibly. The school my kids went to looked at buying a bus for their own use but found it to be a stupid investment once all the costs were calculated.
        A friend of mine is an accountant and did the numbers for them, but I don't live in America so maybe costs are different there. In fact I'm sure they are.

  • 2500 out of 480,000 will not make a dent. Seems they could better spend that billion on manufacturing technology Research and Development. That would translate into cheaper buses which in turn would make it easier to buy electric busses and that could make a real difference.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      2500 out of 480,000 will not make a dent.

      It's not intended to "make a dent". It's intended to demonstrate a use case.

      Seems they could better spend that billion on manufacturing technology Research and Development. That would translate into cheaper buses which in turn would make it easier to buy electric busses and that could make a real difference.

      Both.

    • You don't think that a guaranteed $1B in bus sales won't spur some R&D on electric buses?

  • Wow, if my maths work out, thatâ(TM)s $400,000 PER BUS.

    • A typical diesel school bus is at least $200k. You might get it a little lower by really scrimping on equipment, but probably not. A well-equipped ~40' model with underbelly storage, air con, a decent chair lift, and the better of the engine options (used to be an ISC or a Cat 31something, now I'm imagining ISX or ISL) can get up to $400k. It's also expected to last for at least a decade with minimal maintenance costs beyond changes of very large amounts of fluids.

  • These busses cost about $400,000.

    According to https://electrek.co/2022/03/29... [electrek.co]
    "a new diesel school bus, which, according to the A-Z Bus Sales representative, costs around $200,000-220,000"

    According to https://thomasbuiltbuses.com/r... [thomasbuiltbuses.com].

    A current diesel bus costs $63,154 in fuel costs over 15 years

    So total cost for bus + diesel is 263,000 - 283,000

    Even assuming the electricity is free these electric busses cost 120,000 -140,000 more than the diesel one

    • Sure, if you assume that the price of diesel is never going to go up over the next 15 years.

      Speaking of assumptions, I would assume that some of this money will be going towards charging infrastructure, not the buses themselves. So future electric buses will work out cheaper, because they chargers are already bought and paid for.

  • Not a single school has an electric charging station for their busses. if a school has a fleet of 20 busses, level 2 charges cost $5K and install costs $10K, that's $300K just for the charging stations so they can charge their busses overnight. The next question is power availability. And, do they have any automotive techs who can repair this stuff. but... lets not worry about a years worth of construction, let give them busses to sit for a year.

    • No, they don't. On the other hand, they don't have fuel pumps either. Where I live, the county has several bus yards with maintenance facilities and fuel pumps. I would expect the chargers to be installed in these locations, not at schools.

  • Otherwise borrowing billions of dollars to directly inflate the money supply would be a terrible mistake.

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