Clean Energy Works and Jobs to Move America, in collaboration with and in support of the Alliance for Electric School Buses and their advocacy goals, have prepared an estimated breakdown of how much it would cost to establish a federal program to replace half of the 500,000 fossil-fuel-powered school buses in the United States with zero-emission electric school buses.
Such a program should provide funding for the incremental costs, the difference in cost between a diesel bus and an electric bus, as well as the cost of installing electrical infrastructure. One of the main goals of the program would be to spur large-scale production, which should result in significant reductions in cost over time. In addition to capital cost, the program should also include funding for the running effective programs including training, deployment assistance, and resources to deploy new technologies such as Vehicle to Grid (V2G) integration.
These calculations estimate that it would cost approximately $30 Billion to replace 250,000 school buses with electric models. The full explanation of the annual costs and assumptions is provided here. Ian Elder, author of the Jobs to Move America report on electric school buses in New York, and Margarita Parra, Clean Energy Works’ Transportation Director contributed to this research.
