Electric school buses are an ingenious solution to help utilities build more battery storage

There are 480,000 school buses on the road in the U.S., more than any other form of mass transportation. Despite the climate and health risks, most still run on diesel. While some school districts want to switch to electric buses, the costs can be very high for cash-strapped educational systems. But in Virginia, a local utility company wants to help foot the bill and make use of the batteries in the buses to store power for the grid. Dominion Energy , an energy-service company that operates in eight states, plans to help all of the school districts in its service area in Virginia go electric, with 50 school buses by the end of 2020, a total of 1,000 by 2025, and a fully electric fleet by 2030. It’s already the largest deployment of electric school buses in the country. [Photo: courtesy Dominion Energy] “One of the things we’ve been focused on is not just improving our efficiency and our own operations but also on decarbonization,” says Mark Webb, senior vice president and chief innovation officer for Dominion Energy. “The greener the electric grid is, the more opportunities there are for folks who use that grid for different purposes to […]

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