Relieving Congestion in Albany - Resilient and Repeatable School Bus Infrastructure
To electrify New York's thousands of school buses, we need to find ways to minimize the new load strain on the grid, charge the buses with green energy, where possible, and identify ancillary value from the bus fleets. In collaboration with First Student, we propose a multi-tiered solution to replace 30 of First Student's school buses with electric buses servicing Albany School District and scaling in the near term. The deployment will include managed charging to reduce peak demand on an overburdened Albany-area grid, include solar as a distributed green site asset, stationary energy storage to further reduce grid constraints and serve as backup power. Furthermore, the project will aid the grid through Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) dispatch as well as the community by enabling dispatch so that buses can provide emergency mobile power backup to critical buildings. This improves air quality while demonstrating advanced methods to integrate productively.
By sponsoring a large project with equivalent financial support from Nextera Energy Resources (NEER) and First Student as private sector entities with large presences in New York State, we will establish a strong foundation to spring into continuous deployments in the short term. Establishing green energy assets and offering V2G capabilities for grid relief, future electric school bus projects might be able to generate vehicle-to-grid (V2G) revenue to improve economic feasibility. Grid congestion occurs when grid areas becomes overloaded with electric power due to high demand. Congestion can be a considerable adder to energy costs at times. Funding for this project can thus reduce costs of providing electricity for future electric school bus deployments.
We will measure success through overall load reduced from the grid through annual MW generated from the solar canopy, annual load sold to the grid from V2G functionality, and annual reductions in CO2 and particulate emissions.
One school bus carries the equivalent number of passengers as about 36 cars. As with other forms of public transportation, the school bus provides benefits to the entire community - not just to those who ride. Each year, school bus ridership saves over 20 million tons of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere. By converting school buses to electric, backed and powered by resilient clean energy, we can reduce annual CO2 and NOx emissions by over 250 metric tons and 0.2 tons respectively for all communities along the buses' routes in Albany County with a population of over 90,000 people, including thousands in Albany's disadvantaged communities.