Grist / PerlAlexander / 3alexd / Getty Images In an asphalt lot just north of New York City, yellow school buses are resting their wheels until classes resume in September. But three electric buses at the depot in White Plains, New York, will be working overtime this summer break. Rather than transport students, they’ll mainly serve as a big battery bank, storing power and feeding it to the local utility’s electrical grid when demand is high. Starting this month, Con Edison will use the buses daily to help keep its grid running smoothly during the hot summer months. The demonstration project is among dozens of so-called “vehicle-to-grid” initiatives underway in the United States and around the world. As bigger vehicles like buses, garbage trucks, delivery vans, and even the Ford F-150 pickup truck ditch their engines and go electric, their batteries represent a potentially enormous source of energy storage and backup power supply. Although the concept was developed in the late 1990s , vehicle-to-grid is gaining traction now as automakers release more electric models, smart charging technologies improve, and millions of new electric vehicles, or EVs, hit the road every year. New York’s school bus experiment began in 2018 […]
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