The grid was melting down in last week’s heat – until EVs came to the rescue
SkimNews Take
School buses make ideal V2G anchors precisely because their predictable operating schedules create the long idle windows that align directly with peak grid demand — turning depreciating fleet assets into revenue-generating storage.
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- World Resources Institute's Electric School Bus Initiative reports that ~230 V2G-equipped electric school buses can deliver 8 MWh to the grid — enough to power roughly 1,600 US homes for up to four hours — and helped utilities shave peak load during last week's heat dome
- Oakland Unified School District runs the nation's largest V2G school bus project, with 74 buses returning an estimated 2.1 GWh of clean energy to California's grid annually
- Vehicle Grid Integration Council senior advisor Steve Letendre called school buses a "critically important backbone of V2G capacity," while cautioning it remains "very early days"
- Glades County School District transportation supervisor Angie White-Banda said her buses can double as emergency power hubs during hurricanes — letting residents charge phones and cool off in air conditioning when the grid is down
- San Francisco Unified School District is launching a new V2G project next month with 104 buses returning ~3 GWh annually during peak hours, scaling to more than 238 electric buses by 2028
- Scaling just half of the ~6,700 electric school buses already in US service to V2G would unlock more than 100 MWh of flexible off-peak energy, reducing utilities' reliance on expensive wholesale peak-power purchases and potentially lowering ratepayer bills
Why it matters: V2G school buses deliver a two-sided win: scaling the current 230-bus V2G fleet to half of the 6,700 electric school buses already on US roads would yield over 100 MWh of peak-shaving capacity, cutting utilities' emergency wholesale power costs that flow through to ratepayers. For districts like Glades County, the same batteries pull double duty as community emergency response assets during hurricanes.
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