The Oakland Unified School District is the first district in the U.S. to have a fully electric school bus fleet, with vehicles provided by Bay Area transport company Zum.
Zum and and the district also will pilot a new program in which the power stored in the batteries of those 74 buses will be sold back to the California electrical grid just like customers do with the excess power generated by solar panels at home.
When the buses are plugged in back at their base, instead of the one-way charge into the vehicle, the battery's leftover power is sent back to the grid through Zum's charging infrastructure. Zum estimates that 2.1 gigawatt hours of energy can be sent from batteries back to the California grid annually.
The company’s goal is to add 10,000 bidirectional electric school buses across the U.S., with 300 gigawatt hours of energy available to power grids each year.
A Zum spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that school buses aren’t keeping up with what famiilies want, according to an annual survey of parents. The survey also found that parents want improvements in other areas.
"We want tech-enabled solutions," parents are saying, according to Meaghan Murphy, Zum's mobility ambassador. "Eighty percent of parents said we want an app. Why can I track an Amazon package or my Uber but not my children? That lack of technology really impacts reliability. Fifty-three percent of parents said my kid missed school because we didn’t know if the bus was coming."
Zum says San Francisco Unified and Los Angeles Unified also are expected to participate at some point.
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