Photo: Jeff St. John | Canary Media
When Zum CEO Ritu Narayan looks at 74 electric school buses and chargers at a former industrial site in East Oakland, California, she sees a future where clean transportation and a clean and reliable grid come together. The 74 electric buses in Oakland, the country’s first all-electric school-bus fleet, will eliminate 25,000 tons of harmful emissions, and swapping out the roughly 500,000 diesel school buses in the US for electric buses could slash 8.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. Electric school buses can charge with low-cost power and discharge spare capacity at times when power is more expensive and likely to be generated by fossil-fuel-fired power plants. Each bus can discharge up to 50 kilowatt-hours on a working day and up to 111 kilowatt-hours — 80% of battery capacity — on a nonworking day. Zum has been able to combine federal grants and state and utility incentives so Zum’s five-year, $11.2 million contract with Oakland Unified School District is priced at “the same cost they have been paying for a regular bus.”
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