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Power Education Transportation

US Schools Can Subscribe To An Electric School Bus Fleet At Prices That Beat Diesel (canarymedia.com) 100

Posted by BeauHD from the electrifying-America dept.
Companies including Highland Electric and Thomas Built have fleet-as-a-service offerings for U.S. school districts that struggle with the high upfront costs of electric school buses and the charging equipment needed to keep them running. Jeff St. John from Canary Media writes: On Thursday, the Massachusetts-based startup and the North Carolina-based school bus manufacturer announced a plan to offer "electric school bus subscriptions through 2025 at prices that put them at cost parity with diesel." This is essentially a nationwide extension of Highland Electric's "turnkey solutions provider" business model, backed by a big bus maker as its partner. Highland provides the buses and charging infrastructure, pays for the electricity to charge them, covers maintenance costs and manages the other complexities of going electric. The school district or transit authority pays an all-inclusive subscription fee, one that's structured to be lower than its current budget for owning, fueling and maintaining its existing diesel fleets.

Highland, which has raised $253 million in venture capital funding, has projects in 17 states and two Canadian provinces, including one of the largest single electric school bus deployments in the U.S., in Montgomery County, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C. While most of its projects have started small, CEO Duncan McIntyre sees the Montgomery County project -- now at 25 electric buses and set to expand to 326 over the next four years -- as the model for the future. "We are in the business of helping communities that want to complete a full fleet-electrification effort," McIntyre said in an interview. "They don't have to commit to that upfront -- but there's usually an interest in going beyond a few-vehicles pilot."

Other companies are also pulling together private-sector financing to tackle this public-sector market. Nuvve, a publicly traded EV-charging and vehicle-to-grid provider, has formed a financing joint venture that's teamed up with school bus manufacturer Blue Bird Corp. to offer similar electric bus leasing and infrastructure offerings with school districts in California, Colorado, Illinois and other states. And Canadian EV maker Lion Electric has teamed up with Zum, a San Francisco-based startup offering transportation-as-a-service for a number of school districts, in a project aiming at replacing half of Oakland, California's school buses with electric models in the coming year. Such large-scale electric bus projects remain the exception rather than the rule, however. Out of the roughly 500,000 school buses in the U.S., only about 0.2 percent -- just over 1,000 -- were electric as of the end of 2021, according to data from the World Resources Institute's Electric School Bus Initiative. And of the 354 U.S. school districts that have committed to buying electric buses, only 28 plan to deploy 10 or more, according to WRI data.

This relatively low rate of adoption is bound to accelerate as the economics of electric school buses grow more attractive, however. A 2020 study (PDF) conducted by Atlas Public Policy for Washington state indicated that falling battery costs and rising manufacturing volumes should bring electric school buses within total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) parity with fossil-fueled buses by 2030. Total cost of ownership -- a metric that bundles long-term fueling, operating, maintenance and insurance costs and a vehicle's residual value into one single figure -- can be brought down with structures that reduce costs or open up revenue-generating opportunities for the fleets in question, Nick Nigro, Atlas Public Policy's founder, said in an interview. The right combination of structures could allow electric buses to come into TCO parity with diesel buses as soon as 2025, he said.
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US Schools Can Subscribe To An Electric School Bus Fleet At Prices That Beat Diesel More

US Schools Can Subscribe To An Electric School Bus Fleet At Prices That Beat Diesel

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  • The prices are probably being kept artificially low to bring in new customers.

    School districts learn this the hard way when they sold off their fleets and switch to a rental model. Once they had completed the switch the company's massively jacked up the rates because they knew the school districts wouldn't have the cash to fire them and just haul off and buy new buses. Voters weren't going to approve a bond for that.

    What this meant in practice is that the districts slashed the number of routes and s

    • I spent a few minutes Googling, and I was unable to find a single incident of what you describe actually happening.

      Do you have a citation?

      • I think he forgot to switch accounts.

      • I spent a few minutes Googling, and I was unable to find a single incident of what you describe actually happening.

        I think he's been taking too many naps [slashdot.org] lately. On completely off-topic discussions he's launched into rants about how he can't afford a house, and then on his other rants about the potential of cryptocurrencies crashing the economy, I've pointed out that a market crash would likely create a great opportunity to score a deal on a house. I'm starting to understand why he has his own troll "fan club" at this point.

        Personally, the only huge waste of resources I've witnessed relating to kids getting to/from sc

      • I spent a few minutes Googling, and I was unable to find a single incident of what you describe actually happening.

        Government contracting out services for a low price and then having the price jacked up once the cost of re-entry becomes untenable? I'm thinking there are few jurisdictions where this does not happen.

        • Yet you provide no citation either.

          • The sun also rises.

          • Just search for- school contractor cost overruns

            You will find lots of examples. I doubt it would happen with these busses because generally there are provisions built into construction contracts that allow for increases that likely wouldn't apply to a service contract. However, most schools will not be able to get rid of all their fossil fuel fleets because of field trips and certain spoors events and so on.

            • > Just search for- school contractor cost overruns

              So I did exactly that and was unable to find any examples in the first three pages of results Lots of results about construction cost overruns though, but that's not the same thing. Since you seem to be familiar with the issue, why don't you actually provide an example?

              > However, most schools will not be able to get rid of all their fossil fuel fleets because of field trips and certain spoors events and so on.

              Well I'm willing to hazard a guess that mos

      • I was unable to find a single incident

        Strange, your UUID is 739463, but you talk like you were born yesterday [google.com].

        (responses ignored and unread)

        • Repeating that an assertion is "obvious" and "common knowledge" is a lot less convincing than providing an example.

    • I certainly wouldn't sign such a lease unless I was able to get a long enough period that I wasn't worrying about whether it made sense. Also, I'd want the lease to specify that I get to buy the buses at fair market value before/during bankruptcy if the company goes under.

    • Yes, you never see real world worked examples. And dumb schools just recycle fictional PowerPoint slides supplied by the subscribe-gotcha-by-the-throatT carpetbagger companies. My daddy said buy - never rent, never sell. That seems to work for the ultra-rich. The magic of compound price increases keeps the poor poor is the other lesson. I also bet the electric buses cannot pack in and drive overloaded, like a diesel one can.
    • This is a real possibility if the current prices are loss-leaders and there's no competitor to offer competing bids. However, it's not clear that either of these are true. And more importantly this is a business model that can be replicated. It's something that should be examined. But it's not a reason to automatically dismiss the idea.

    • Yes, just get rid of all subscriptions, and move the cost as a payment over time.

  • Do the students who ride them have to sit through ads on the screens in the front of the bus? can schools districts pay more for an ad-free experience?

  • The key here is to ignore the virtue-signaling selling points of electric power, and just focus on the straight-up business case. An electric vehicle's power train is just flat-out mechanically simpler and better than a fuel-based engine and transmission. Period. Fewer moving parts. Easier to fix. More robust. Safer.

    If the cost is the same, then electric wins hands down as an engineering solution.

    It won't "save the planet" (whatever the heck that means), but it doesn't need to. It's just transportation, not

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      school busses are an ideal use case as well, 2 or 3 relatively short trips a day with a long break in between to charge up.

      • Yep. Blue Bird was first to market with the electric school bus as we know it in 1994, and they worked then but the pricing was not as favorable as it is now. Now they're not only technically viable, but also economically.

    • Sure but let's test it in a poor district to see if the batteries explode.

    • It's funny that it's even called a "subscription". I thought we already had a word for that, it's called leasing.

      Strip away the virtue signaling and the 'rah rah go green' and I think you're absolutely right - It's all about the business case. A school bus is something that can be (or at least predictable portions of the fleets) used for a relatively predictable amount each day. A predictable portion of the fleet doesn't need to do freeway speeds, so they don't need a real high powered motor, and they're ba

      • It's funny that it's even called a "subscription". I thought we already had a word for that, it's called leasing.

        I'd guess they're trying to differentiate it from a bus lease because the subscription costs more because it includes more. According to their home page, [highlandfleets.com] the Highland subscription includes "all your buses, chargers, and depot improvements..." "We train your team to use and maintain your fleet..." "We charge the school buses during off-peak hours, ensuring a "full tank" before each trip." "We p

    • All that is irrelevant when you're leasing, all you care about is what's cheapest that does the job. If those advantages translate into an attractive lease then sure, why not?

  • Switch to remote learning. I hear all the kids these days are constantly glued to their devices anyway, so nothing would change for them. Besides, this will only help them get used to today's work-from-home culture. If they complain about lack of socialization, have them log on to WoW or Fortnite or the Metaverse for five minutes to recharge their brains. Heck, maybe they can even mine some Bitcoins or produce some NFTs while they're there, to offset the cost of the psychiatrist's bill they'll be paying in

  • Parity (Score:2)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    On Thursday, the Massachusetts-based startup and the North Carolina-based school bus manufacturer announced a plan to offer "electric school bus subscriptions through 2025 at prices that put them at cost parity with diesel."

    The PLANNED offer from this bus manufacturer matches (parity) the cost of diesel buses, it doesn't BEAT the cost.

    I'm doubtful that over the long haul leasing buses will maintain any cost advantage over outright purchase of school buses. If leasing a bus were cheaper than buying buses, EVERY school district would lease, rather than purchase their school buses.

  • If... (Score:2)

    by kenh ( 9056 )

    If this company can lease EV buses and build the required infrastructure for the same or lower cost than current ICE bus fleet, why can't a school district do the same thing themselves for even less?

    There's a reason most school districts own their own school buses, and it's because it's cheaper than leasing or hiring private contractor buses.

    • The summary says the school districts don't want to deal with the upfront capital cost of buying a new fleet. They should anyway, but they don't want to.

      • It's called a bond issue, it spreads the 'up front cost' over the next decade. It is EXACTLY what the lease holders will do, and add a mark-up to provide them with a profit.

      • Where do the ICE school buses go? Do school districts just 'write off' the loss so to speak (since school districts can't actually 'write off' losses)?

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