When Ritu Narayan, CEO and co-founder of Zum, looks at the 74 electric school buses and chargers her startup has deployed at a former industrial site in East Oakland, #California, she sees a future where clean transportation and a clean and reliable grid come together.
“Today marks the next phase in our evolution,” Narayan said at an event last week marking the official launch of the country’s first all-electric school bus fleet,” she said.
By financing and installing thousands of electric school buses for the Oakland Unified School District, and tapping their spare battery capacity to support the power grid, the San Francisco–based, transportation-as-a-service startup plans to “become a fully fledged energy company”.
Zum already provides transportation services and technology for school districts across the country, including some of California’s largest districts, such as those serving #SanFrancisco, #LosAngeles, and #SanBernardino. It hopes to electrify 10,000 school buses over the coming years, a move that will cut #carbonemissions and reduce #airpollution from diesel engines that harm students, drivers, and communities.
The 74 electric buses in Zum’s Oakland fleet, which serve the district’s special needs students, will “eliminate 25,000 tons of harmful emissions, improving air quality and health outcomes for students and families,” Narayan said. Converting the roughly 500,000 diesel school buses in the U.S. could slash an estimated 8.4 million tons of #greenhousegasemissions per year.
But electric school buses are two or three times more expensive than their diesel-fueled counterparts. Though federal, state, and utility incentives help school districts and transportation providers like Zum cover those costs, as of mid-2024 less than 2 percent of the total U.S. #schoolbus fleet has gone #electric, up from just over 1 percent in mid-2023.
That’s where vehicle-to-grid (#V2G) technology comes in. Electric school buses can charge with low-cost power and discharge spare capacity at times of grid stress, when power is both more expensive and more likely to be generated by #fossilfuel-fired power plants.
That’s good for the economics of electric school buses. And it’s also good for the grid, said Patti Poppe, CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s biggest utility and owner of the grid that’s delivering 2.7 megawatts of power to the Zum site in #Oakland.
“PG&E was able to step up to the challenge and deliver the energy to power these buses — and we were able to do it a year early,” Poppe said at Tuesday’s event. That’s a quick turnaround for a utility that’s been criticised for not expanding its grid fast enough to serve its rapidly electrifying customers. In the case of the Oakland electric bus depot, PG&E gets not only a big new customer but also a resource to provide relief “for the grid’s most constrained days,” she said.
Sales Executive @Google Cloud; Silicon Valley
2moV2G!