500,000 school buses could become a source of electric vehicle power to power the grid | Wilnesh News

Nightlife on the school bus is about to get even more interesting.

Zum, which provides student transportation services including electric buses to 4,000 schools across the country, is working with the Oakland Unified School District to begin selling electricity stored in electric vehicle batteries back to the California utility grid.

Oakland, the first all-electric school district in the United States with 74 buses, will now be the first to test the V2G (vehicle-to-grid) bidirectional charging concept. In effect, school buses will be able to send battery power back to the grid via Zum charging infrastructure, rather than charging the vehicle in one direction.

Zum estimates that 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy can be delivered from the batteries to the California grid each year. The company aims to add 10,000 bi-directional electric school buses in the United States, providing 300 gigawatt hours of power to the grid annually. San Francisco Unified and Los Angeles Unified, regions much larger than Oakland, are expected to follow, Zum said. It is also associated with California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, Utah, and Virginia school districts collaborate.

Zum ranks No. 31 on the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 list.

There are already pilots testing V2G business models for school buses across the country, but Zum said it’s time to move beyond the testing phase.

Ritu said: “Zum firmly believes that now is the time to move beyond pilots and deploy sustainable solutions at scale. Converting Oakland’s unified school bus fleet to 100% electric vehicles with VPP (virtual power plant) capabilities is a step in this direction. The right move.

In an interview with CNBC later Wednesday, Narayan called the school bus the “biggest battery on wheels,” with a battery capacity four to six times that of a Tesla.

According to Zum, the nation’s largest public transportation system carries 27 million students across the country twice a day. The approximately 500,000 school buses, mostly diesel, contribute to emissions. Zum aims to become a net-zero transportation provider.

pacific gas and electric co.The Auckland-based company has partnered with Zum to enable two-way charging stations for electric buses in Auckland.

This concept is considered a strong one given that school buses are not used during peak energy demand hours (eg 5pm to 10pm). The mission is to move students when energy prices are lower and feed battery storage back to the grid when utilities pay more per kilowatt hour. As the owner of the buses used by Oakland, Zum will be the one who gets the revenue from the grid deal, but in other cases where school districts own buses, they can generate revenue. Revenues from electricity sales may be split under certain circumstances.

Narayan told CNBC that school buses are an “ideal asset for electrification” because they are equipped with batteries and can predict local off-peak usage patterns.

Ram Ambatipudi, senior vice president of business development at EV Connect, which provides electric vehicle charging solutions, said the school bus model is one of the most promising models in the field of bi-directional electric vehicle battery storage. One of the biggest challenges, he said, is getting utilities to create predetermined rate schedules that allow for arbitrage in electricity markets, creating revenue opportunities for battery owners.

“There’s not a lot of set rate schedules,” Ambatipudi said. Additionally, there is a lot of work to be done to make the model work, and it is still being tested. “This is more of a pilot level because there has to be an interaction between the vehicle charging station hardware, the charging station software management, the feedback to the grid and the economic benefits being paid by the utility company. Come on,” he said.

Electric school buses today are two to three times more expensive than traditional school buses, and the V2G model of selling energy back to the grid is part of an economic plan to make transportation technology more cost-effective for owners over time. – The cost of electric vehicle batteries is increasing while their efficiency is decreasing.

The idea is similar in some ways to how owners of rooftop solar systems can feed power back into the grid in certain markets, but there has been pushback against these “net metering” relationships in recent years, especially in California. However, for buses, there is a key difference: buses are not used during the most important times of the day so that more power is available to the grid, and buses can be charged during off-peak demand times. Many rooftop solar owners sell their energy supply back to the grid when demand is low.

The economics of arbitrage make sense: bus owners charge their vehicles during times when costs are lowest, allowing them to allocate excess battery power to sell back to the grid when economic value is highest.

There are many applications for harvesting the power stored in electric vehicle batteries and using it as a power source, such as Ford pitching its F-150 Lightning EV as a backup power source for homes in the event of a grid failure, which it says has shown surprising consumer traction. But the school bus model may be the largest and most effective.

“The most low-hanging fruit I’ve seen is the school bus model,” Ambati Pudi said. It’s not just a cycle of dropping the kids off in the morning, then idling at the station at noon, then riding again into idling in the afternoon and evening. During the summer, buses are largely idle. “Buses can essentially be used as an arbitrage tool, charging when electricity is cheap and discharging when needed,” he said.