- The first school district in the U.S. to use all electric buses will be Oakland, California
- The buses, bidirectional chargers, and software management platform will be supplied by Zum
- The buses will feed up to 2.1 gigawatt-hours per year of power back into the grid when not being used
Zum, a transportation-services company that provides electric buses and charging stations to school districts, claims to have launched the first 100% electric school bus fleet in the U.S.
The company said that it is providing 74 electric school buses, bidirectional chargers, and a software management platform to the Oakland Unified School District of Oakland, California. The EVs will replace all internal-combustion buses in the district's fleet, and will be able to feed up to 2.1 gigawatt-hours of energy per year back into the grid when not transporting students, according to Zum.
While electric school buses are not a new idea, more than 90% of the nation's nearly 500,000 school buses are still powered by fossil fuels, releasing 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, according to Zum. Most of those buses have diesel engines, creating an additional health hazard to students regularly exposed to exhaust fumes.
Electric school buses with Zum bidirectional charging stations
Use of electric school buses to support the grid, known as "vehicle-to-grid" (V2G) applications, requires extensive support from regulators and utilities, Zum noted. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), whose service area the Oakland Unified School District is located in, also provided 2.7 MW of load to charge electric buses, the release added.
Zum aims to put 10,000 school buses capable of bidirectional charging into service, a fleet that could supply 300 gigawatt-hours to electricity grids annually, the company claims. It's currently working with the San Francisco Unified and Los Angeles Unified School Districts—which have bus fleets three and six times larger Oakland's new electric fleet, respectively—to electrify their school buses.
Zum provides the vehicles but does not manufacture them. A handful of companies make electric school buses, including Lion Electric, which in 2021 announced plans for an Illinois plant to build them and other commercial vehicles. And in 2022 the EPA announced nearly $1 billion in grants for school districts looking to purchase these buses.
