Big bus batteries boost the grid

How cool is this? In Massachusetts, parked EVs will start feeding the grid this summer.

The three [electric school buses] will charge up their nearly 200-kilowatt-hour batteries overnight, when the power supply is at its cleanest and cheapest, then send energy back to the grid from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. on days when the grid is strained. The district will earn revenue for the power it shares, perhaps even enough to cover the costs of charging up during the school year, said Kate Crosby, energy manager for the Acton-Boxborough school district. Plus, the strategy will help lower the emissions and cost of the region’s electricity supply.

It’s a pilot program, being used to find and work through whatever barriers there are to deploying this kind of approach more widely. But surely just that paragraph quoted above shows the potential wins here! And it’s almost a footnote at the end of the article, but shuttling kids to and from school without gassing them with diesel fumes is huge.

One of the hurdles is, of course, the cost: “a long-term, reliable compensation plan is needed to get any meaningful number of EV owners to make the leap”. And that can get complicated with the structures currently in place, as the article details. This is why sci-fi energy/climate solutions are so frustrating: stop blowing money on nuclear or geoengineering or “carbon capture” boondoggles! Spend it on stuff like this! Even if it didn’t pay itself back – which these absolutely will – it would be worth it. We have the technology. Right now, today. We just need the will to make it work.