By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
If you only paid attention to social media, you might think the school board recently sunk a ton of money into electric school buses that are breaking down left and right, ready to burst into flames at any moment.
The facts, however, are quite a bit more nuanced, and the district has been discussing these new buses for more than a year now. For one, there was absolutely no cost to the district, superintendent Paul Green explained. The buses – 23 in total – were awarded to the district at no costs, thanks to an EPA grant.
“This application came out in the summer of 2022,” Green said. “We were notified that we won the award in November of 2022.”
The district was actually shocked to see they’d been awarded all 23 buses they’d applied to replace.
“We were thinking that with 23 opportunities we might win one or two buses,” Green continued. But instead of pulling individual buses from the pool of applicants, they pulled by the district. When the Carter County school district was selected, he explained, “since we had 23 applications in, all 23 were funded, and they were fully funded.”
That amounts to more than $9 million; around $8,600,000 for the buses and another $400,000 for the high capacity charging stations. That’s $9 million that the district can now put towards other projects and programs instead of toward replacing buses, Green noted, and hundreds of thousands in savings every year for buses they would otherwise have to replace.
“Typically, we have a rotation where we try to replace our bus fleet every 12 to 13 years,” Green said. “So, we are on a four to five new buses per year rotation.”
Because of this award, however, “we anticipate that for the next three to potentially five years, we won’t have to purchase any buses other than maybe specialty buses.”
The buses in the award were all standard buses, he said.
“We do have specialty buses for handicap accessibility, those types of things. So, like, this year I think we’re going to purchase one bus that is a specialty bus.”
But the award still frees up the money that would otherwise have been spent on standard buses, which can run as high as $150,000 each, or more.
“So… we anticipate $500,000 to $600,000 a year of savings to the district,” he said, which he hopes the district can stretch out over the next five years before they have to start replacing more buses. That gives the district plenty of time to figure out if the electric school buses are more cost effective than standard diesel buses, without making that big up-front investment. It also means that, if the buses turn out to be cheaper and more efficient to run, they’ve already got the charging infrastructure in place. If they aren’t as reliable and cost effective, the district can replace them with diesel buses as they need replacing without any local tax funds invested in the electric bus experiment.
“That gives us a lot of time to really experiment with these buses and see how well they work,” Green said. “The good thing about this is it’s a zero cost to us. So, I know there’s been a lot of conversation about the cost of upkeep, or what happens if the buses break down, or what happens if they repair a bus. Well, if the (electric) buses don’t work, then we don’t have to use those buses anymore. We just continue and go back to our old strategy of purchasing new buses.”
They are required to keep and maintain the buses for five years as part of the grant agreement, but the district still has a fleet of diesel buses as well, and Green noted, “if there are significant issues, and they don’t work out, then we’ll do the best we can. But it’s really a no-strings attached type of
grant. It gives us a great opportunity to see how they do.”
So far, he said, they’ve been performing well, even with the cold weather and its impact on battery life. The district has also been very conservative in the lengths of the routes they allow these buses to be used on, so they don’t run into issues with low batteries while they determine what the range per charge actually is.
“The safety of our kids is the most important thing,” Green said. “So, we’re careful. We are doing this very slowly. Currently we have all 23 buses out on routes, but they’re not out every day. We’re rotating buses. So, for instance, we may have a route that they’ll use one bus in the morning, and one bus in the afternoon.”
For the longer routes, on the edges of the county, they are still using their existing fleet of diesel buses.
“We’ve been told by the manufacturer that these buses should get somewhere between 150 to 160 miles per full charge. We’re not pushing that yet. We’re driving them 40, 50, 60 miles, seeing how they do charging up, and making sure the readings are okay.”
He said there have been some software issues, but most of those are of the type you’d have with any new vehicle. Much like it takes some driving before the computer in your gasoline automobile can figure out an average number of miles-per-gallon, it will take a while for the onboard computers on the buses to determine exactly how far they are averaging per charge.
“A lot of our buses are fully charged, but they’re only showing that they’re 80 miles to empty, when they should show 150 miles to empty. What we’ve been told is the technology in the buses will learn, and as you drive them longer distances, the miles to empty will decrease.”
These issues, however, “have absolutely nothing to do with the performance or safety of the buses,” Green said.
So far both drivers and students love them, he said. They have more horsepower and more torque than a traditional bus, Green said, but there are some differences that drivers have had to get used to – like with the braking system.
“They have an engine braking system which feeds back into the battery system to recharge the batteries. So, when you let off the gas, it will actually serve as almost like a brake. So that’s a little bit different for drivers. It’s an adjustment.”
But it isn’t an adjustment that’s been hard to adapt to.
The other thing that they’ve had to get used to is how quiet they are. The buses are so quiet, in fact, that until they get enough speed for the sound of the wheels and air displacement to alert other people of their presence, they have an artificial sound creation system.
“It’s a safety feature because if a kid can’t hear the bus, they’re more likely to step out (in front of them).”
Once the bus reaches 25 MPH, “there’s enough wind and tire noise that you can hear the bus,” Green said. “But it’s interesting, when you hear them, and they’re driving around the parking lot, you can hear that audible buzz or hum that the bus makes, and that is an artificial noise that’s coming from the bus.”
He also noted that these are the second generation of electric buses from Blue Bird, so they have more efficient batteries than the first generation and a lot of those initial bugs already worked out.
And, as noted, they are still using diesel buses for their longer routes.
“We have 51 routes, we will have around 75 buses (running those routes). So, if we took all 23 of the electric buses off the routes, we would still have enough buses to run all the routes in the district.”
By the time they are ready to begin replacing buses again, and getting back into the cycle of regular replacement, Green is confident that they’ll have more information about the costs to charge versus the cost of diesel fuel, how far they can get on a charge, on whether they want to replace the older buses with more diesel buses or if it’s more efficient to replace them with more electric vehicles.
“Yes, our electric bill will go up,” Green conceded. “However, our diesel bill is going to go down significantly.”
Right now, he said, it looks like that for every dollar they spend to charge an electric bus, they’d have to spend four dollars on diesel fuel. However, those numbers are bound to change as they compile more data. The actual savings could end up being even more.
“When you’re talking about a diesel budget of over half a million dollars a year, if our electric bill goes up $200,000, we’ve still saved $300,000 for the district.”
That means even more money they can take from the general budget and put toward other programs or salary increases for staff.
He said he’s also heard the safety concerns surrounding battery related fires. But he said in most of the instances where electric vehicles have experienced fires, it’s been when they were charging rather than when in motion. In the off chance there was a fire while on the road, he noted, all of our local fire departments have had special training in how to deal with the type of electrical fire they’d encounter. Starting with how to shut off the power supply before fighting the fire. Once that power is cut, it’s not really any different than fighting any other fire, he noted.
“They (the local fire departments) were all included in the training. Blue Bird came in and did that training for them,” Green said.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
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