CABARRUS COUNTY, N.C. — North Carolina is trying to expand its electric school bus fleet. These buses could save the taxpayers millions of dollars in future fuel costs and help protect the environment.
Students in Cabarrus County are riding on one of just a handful of electric buses in the state.
"We're going to take the electric bus and we're going to use it on our city routes. Our city routes are smaller, more compact, more urban," Art Whittaker, Cabarrus County Schools Director of Transportation Services, said.
While the electric bus is both energy efficient and environmentally friendly it also does something else -- something you may not have even thought about.
"When the vehicle is stationary, and it is not drawing power, that battery that's in that vehicle can actually supply power back to the grid," Whittaker said.
The electric bus at Cabarrus County School is made by the North Carolina-based bus company, Thomas Built Buses. The electric buses are equipped with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. The technology allows electricity to be supplied back to the power grid from the batteries of electric vehicles.
The power grid is an interconnected network for electricity delivery from the power companies to your house.
"During its off times, [it can] offload supply that electrical access to the grid system in order that we don't continue to sit here and pull power," Whittaker said.
This concept of electric school buses, essentially serving as battery backup, to help power up the grid, was the basis of a study out of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, with the help of Assistant Professor Noah Kittner.
"If you were to use all of these school buses together, you could shave about 10% of the total peak demand for electricity at any given time," Kittner said. "And so that could potentially save utilities money, or save ratepayers money in different ways."
The study found using school buses to store electricity works well since they’re only on the road for a few hours a day.
"While they're parked in parking lots for days, as energy storage, that can supplement the power grid and because these buses have much larger batteries than your typical electric vehicle like a Tesla or something," Kittner said.
The study also found that winter would be the most beneficial time for the school buses to be valuable to the grid.
"One reason is that school is typically out on the weekends, so the buses would be able to interact with the grid," Kittner said. "And another reason is that we're seeing more electricity demand in the wintertime, and increasingly year over year in North Carolina."
In 2022, during the Christmas holiday, Duke Energy shut down parts of the North Carolina power grid, many localized to Charlotte. Rolling blackouts ensued and they were supposed to stabilize energy usage during bitter-cold holiday temperatures.
The buses could be vital backup to potentially prevent things like the rolling Christmas blackouts of 2022.
"Having more electricity storage in the form of batteries is going to make our grid more resilient to storms and outages and avoid some of those high-cost events where everyone wants electricity at the same time, and utility is scrambling to find ways to provide it," Kittner said.
Currently, the state doesn’t have many electric school buses on the road just yet.
Through a multi-million-dollar investment, there are expected to be at least 40 electric school buses in the state over the next few years.
Contact Shamarria Morrison at smorrison@wcnc.com and follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram.