Authored by Grace Leslie, Associate

Through a grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC), the Center for Transportation and the Environment (CTE) is partnering with Sage Consulting, The Mobility House, and Stockton Unified School District (SUSD) on a "blueprint" project to determine the lowest cost for SUSD to charge 100 percent of their electric school bus (ESB) fleet based on their current operations. In addition, the project will also evaluate the financial benefit and resiliency profile of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) opportunities for SUSD.

CEC's Clean Transportation Program funds "blueprint" projects that identify actions and milestones needed to accelerate the deployment of medium- and heavy-duty zero-emission vehicles and the related electric charging and/or hydrogen refueling infrastructure. Seven times larger than the transit bus market in the United States, school buses are the largest aggregate transportation fleet in the country. Electrifying school bus fleets offers tremendous opportunities to reduce school district's operating and maintenance expenses, create new green jobs, improve community health, and generate renewable energy storage through V2G technologies.

The SUSD project will be crucial to the electric vehicle and electric school bus industries by revealing the potential financial and environmental gains as well as the V2G impact on renewable energy storage. This project has officially launched and is expected to set the stage for future electric school bus transition projects across the United States.