Using school buses as grid storage is pretty genius, surprised this isn’t more common
When you have the buses as batteries, they can not be used as buses. Most places use buses as a general public transport network and not just for school children. Hence they run through the entire day and need to be recharged over night. Students then just use the general public transport to go to school.
This is not a genius idea, but a waste of resources.
It’s never really occurred to me that the US is quite unusual in having fleets of buses dedicated to getting kids to and from school. I wonder why that is?
Because yeah, here in the UK kids either go under their own steam, are dropped off by their parents, or take regular public transport (or a regular bus that’s chartered for the school run twice a day).
Because us doesn’t have public transit, and is pretty spread out, so walking isn’t always feasible. A lot of people do drop kids off though, but it leads to huge traffic jams.
Why can they not just use the school buses to create a simple very basic bus based public transit system?
Probably liability? And maybe they only pay the drivers part time? Plus, the school buses are absolutely the cheapest money can buy. The seats are too close together for adults to use, and they still might not have seatbelts?
Likely has to do with population density.
Would it help that much on weekdays? It looks like peak loads are right about when the buses would be busy driving. But it would still be usefull for weekends I’d think.
Edit: looks like it changes quite a bit seasonally.
Edit 2: here’s solar and wind supply
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268074971_The_New_Hybrid_Model_of_Compressed_Air_for_Stable_Production_of_Wind_FarmsEvs are nice, but not a solution. Walkable bikable cities are the way we get out of this climate mess.
Electric buses are a positive though, as transit is still going to be needed.
What we should not be doing, though, is making laws that require EV buses instead of improving bus service in general.
Yeah. Good point.
I guess a thought I had is that instead of school busses, what if we used a public transit option for everyone? But then everyone would need to use it and we’re not there.
School busses are def better than everyone driving their own students to school and back. So that was something I missed in my initial post.
Im just over the whole “ev revolution” but taking that out on busses is silly.
If you live where it’s nice and warm year round sure. I personally have no interest in an eight mile commute to work in the snow and ice when it’s below freezing for months.
Agree, but you’d need a lot more schools for that since currently they’re too big right now to walk/bike to from all points within the district.
They can recharge mid-day when generation is highest, which helps balance supply, and in theory they could still help in the afternoon after they finish their routes say 5/6pm
Yeah you’d definitely charge mid day, but you don’t need reverse charging for that. I’d think you’d size the battery just large enough for your route. So there wouldn’t be much energy left over to put into the grid. Maybe when the bus is new or when they don’t need to run the AC or heading you’d be able to put more energy back into the grid?
