This School District Has Switched to an All-Electric Fleet

• Oakland Unified School District has turned to an all-EV bus fleet provided by transportation solutions company Zum that also features bidirectional charging tech.

• The 74-bus fleet can provide energy back to the grid when needed, with Zum teaming up with Pacific Gas & Electric to build the needed charging infrastructure for the buses.

• A number of states are providing grants to school districts to purchase battery-electric buses, but progress in this field will still take years even for half of the nation's school bus fleet to go electric.

It's that time of year again, when school buses expel thick clouds of diesel smoke into the cars behind them during the morning commute.

While most of the nation's school bus fleets will still be rolling coal this fall, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) will have the country's first fully electric school bus fleet, with battery-electric models provided by transportation solutions company Zum.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company collaborated with Zum on connecting the buses to the grid, with the 74-bus fleet also being able to provide 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy to the grid each year, at least in theory. The buses themselves will charge overnight at Zum's specially built charging facility.

"This is a landmark achievement, especially in Oakland, where families are disproportionately impacted by exposure to air pollution and high rates of asthma and other respiratory ailments," noted Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell of the OUSD.

The bidirectional charging aspect of this fleet debut deserves a special mention as well, with Zum teaming up with PG&E to launch an AI-enabled Virtual Power Plant (VPP). Each bus has a bidirectional charger, with the fleet designed to support the grid during peak hours.

This makes the OUSD fleet one of the largest V2G experiments under way at the moment, even if the economics behind the concept remain to be fully worked out in the coming years.

School buses are particularly well suited to going electric as they operate during very rigid hours, and they also have a lot of downtime after completing their afternoon runs until the next morning.

This makes their daily mileage easy to predict, allowing for battery packs that make commercial sense, and it also allows them to charge at slower speeds, avoiding the need to use faster chargers that would place a heavier load on the grid and heavier costs on the fleet.

But turning every school district in the country electric is easier said than done, despite what has been achieved in Oakland and a few other places.

The state of California has recently launched a Zero-Emissions School Bus and Infrastructure (ZESBI) program that will award a total of $500 million to school districts within the state to replace old school buses, with part of that total due to be distributed via a separate program for charging infrastructure for new electric buses.

"By converting Oakland Unified's school bus fleet to 100% electric, we are showing that sustainability solutions are here—and can positively impact an entire community," said said Ritu Narayan, Founder and CEO of Zum.

In the longer term Zum wants to electrify some 10,000 school buses, spanning several states, while also connecting these buses to the grid via bidirectional charging.

This is an ambitious target even without the V2G charging aspect, which is still an emerging technology whose potential is not well mapped out when it comes to the business and practical side of things.

But not all utility companies are ready or able to take advantage of V2G tech in the coming years, for starters, and the benefits of such systems given the hardware costs are not universally accepted. EV bus fleets currently appear more interested in getting electricity into buses, and with the lowest infrastructure costs.

For now, just getting rid of internal-combustion engine buses is a difficult enough undertaking that will take well over a decade at the current nationwide rate, absent some sort of coordinated state government mandates for electrifying school bus fleets.

Should school districts prioritize purchasing battery-electric buses in coming years, or is this tech ultimately not that important when it comes to issues facing public schools? Let us know what you think in the comments below.