- The first school district in the United States to use all-electric buses will be Oakland, California.
- The buses, two-way chargers and software management platform will be provided by Zum
- These buses will provide up to 2.1 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year back to the grid when not in use.
Zum, a transportation services company that provides electric buses and charging stations to school districts, claims to have launched its first electric bus 100% electric bus fleet serving schools in the United States
The company said it is offering 74 electric school busess, a two-way charger and software management platform for the Oakland Unified School District of Oakland, California. The electric vehicles will replace all internal combustion buses in the district’s fleet and will be able to providing up to 2.1 gigawatt-hours of energy per year back on the grid when not carrying students, according to Zum.
While electric school bus While not a new idea, more than 90% of the nation’s nearly 500,000 school buses still run on fossil fuels, emitting 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gases each year, according to Zum. Most of these buses have diesel engines, creating an additional health hazard for students who are regularly exposed to exhaust fumes.
Zum electric school bus with two-way charging station
Zum noted that using electric buses to support the grid, known as a “vehicle-to-grid” (V2G) application, requires broad support from regulators and utilities. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), whose service area is the Oakland Unified School District, also provides 2.7 MW of charging capacity for electric buses, the release added.
Zum aims to put 10,000 school buses with bidirectional charging capabilities into service, a fleet that could providing 300 gigawatt-hours into the grid every year, the company claims. It is currently working with the San Francisco and Los Angeles Unified School Districts—which have bus fleets three and six times larger Oakland’s new streetcar fleet will electrify school buses.
Zum supplies the vehicles but does not manufacture them. A handful of companies make electric school buses, including Lion Electricin 2021 announced plans to build a factory in Illinois to build them and other commercial vehicles. And by 2022, the EPA announced nearly $1 billion in funding for school districts interested in purchasing these buses.
