School buses are a perfect candidate for mass electrification with relatively short planned routes and ample idle time for recharging. Chicago’s utility provider is exploring ways to utilize that idle time to help its grid meet demand during peak periods, potentially reducing electricity costs for customers. Commonwealth Edison announced last month that it would partner with three Northern Illinois school districts to trial a vehicle-to-grid charging program.
ComEd’s V2G pilot relies on collective bidirectional charging. According to Nuvve, the pilot’s charging vendor, electric fleet vehicles can be grouped together to form a virtual power plant. School buses will be charged at night when electricity costs are at their lowest, but will be used as an extension of the grid during the day between runs. The battery capacity will stabilize the grid and reduce the chance of a blackout. If an outage does happen, the chargers themselves would store enough energy for the school buses to top off their batteries. Cristina Botero, ComEd’s senior manager for beneficial electrification, told Ars Technica:
“School buses in general tend to be stationary during times where normally the grid is at its biggest strain. [When] the grid is most loaded, that happens to be the time where many of these vehicles are not in use and happen to be connected and fully charged. This offers the possibility of using some of the energy in that battery to send back to the grid to support grid congestion.”
V2G would be great, if existing electric school bus issues get ironed out
The V2G trial is expected to return its initial results by the end of the year. While the effort is part of a $231 million beneficial electrification effort by ComEd, the River Trails, Troy and Wauconda school districts were chosen because they already had electric school buses in service. Well, “in service” is a relative term. Wauconda’s transportation director claims its two electric buses have a tenth of the use of their diesel counterparts due to technical issues.
Despite the issues, the potential benefits of electric school buses are hard to ignore. They reduce students’ exposure to diesel exhaust as well as reduce harmful emissions for the environment overall. However, the most significant barrier to adoption is the cost of procuring the buses. Electric buses can be twice as expensive as diesel buses. However, the lower running costs and selling electricity back to the grid would result in savings over time.
