Please note that the transcript provided below is AI-generated and intended for reference. It may contain missing words, misspellings, or other small errors. To request a correction or clarification, please contact info@theclimatecenter.org.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:01:00):
I’m Pooja. I’m the Community Energy Resilience Policy Manager at the Climate Center. And I’m really excited to be moderating today’s panel called Using Electric School Buses for More Affordable, Reliable, and Resilient Electrical Grid. I’m really pleased to be joined by these awesome speakers over here. So we have Matthew Belasco from Pittsburgh Unified School District, Annabella Corbitov, who’s an independent V2G regulatory and policy expert at the V2G Forum, and Michelle Levinson from the World Resources Institute. So I’m going to just start off with some kind of context setting and maybe just electric school bus 101. So electric school buses have a lot of benefits compared to diesel and other types of fossil fuel school buses.
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One of the big benefits is that electric school buses create cleaner air. They’re not polluting the air for kids and communities and at a time that’s really important for their health. So one of the biggest reasons we really talk about transitioning to electric school buses is to clean up the air and have healthier kids. Another big benefit is climate and emissions. So in California, 40% of our greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation sector. Electric school buses are one way that we can really help decarbonize the sector while also having all these other benefits. The third reason we talk about electric school buses is the grid benefits. And I’ll go a little bit more into this after this slide. And the last one is cost. Actually, over their lifetimes, electric school buses are cheaper than diesel, and there’s ways you can reduce their costs even more by upfront financing and incentives.
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And then also ways you can use your grid integration to actually lower the cost of operating these buses over time.
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So as promised, I’m going to dive a little bit deeper into the grid benefits of electric school buses. So we like to talk about electric school buses and electric vehicles in general as batteries on wheels. These are just huge batteries that are transporting students to school, to field trips, to all the places that kids need to go, but also there’s ways that we can actually use them more intelligently to support our grid. So one way we talk about this is managed charging, sometimes called smart charging, V1G. So electric school buses basically can charge when the electricity is cheaper, cleaner, and more abundant. And another kind of level that electric school buses can benefit the grid is through bidirectional charging. So that means electric school buses can both charge from, but also provide power to either a home, a building, the grid. There’s a lot of different acronyms we can use, but V2G is one that you’ll hear a lot in this field and during today’s panel.
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And lastly, we really see electric school buses as a key use case for transitioning to bidirectionality, which means electric school buses have a lot of benefits over other types of electric vehicles, which make them a really compelling way to test bidirectionality, which you might have heard earlier today. We see that there’s … It may be early in the market to talk about transitioning to electric vehicles and all their bidirectional capabilities, but we see electric school buses as an example that this is ready now. We have a lot of kind of pilots and case studies that we’ll talk about today with all of our speakers. And some of the reasons that we talk about electric school buses as this compelling use case is that the predictability, they have really predictable routes and schedules. There’s ways that they can actually earn revenues through exporting power if we have the right incentives in place.
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And there’s a really important resilience benefit that you can actually provide backup power to schools when you’re set up in the right way when connected to a school and a school bus project.
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And then finally, California is a leader in electric school bus deployment. A lot of this is thanks to funding programs like the EPA Clean School Bus Program, which is going through transitions as Trump has kind of put this program on pause. But thankfully at the state level, we have a lot of really important incentives as well, including ZESBI and HFIP, which have all been really crucial to expanding electric school buses and heavy duty transportation. When we talk about bidirectionality, so we have about 1400 electric school buses on the road today in the state. And we have evidence that at least a hundred right now are being used bidirectionally. So that means they’re actually feeding power to the grid or to a building or to a school. The biggest being in Oakland, which has the nation’s largest V2G school bus project with 74 buses, and we have at least 80 more electric school buses in the state that are planned to be used bidirectionally, which we’ll hear a little bit about the Pittsburgh project from Matthew today.
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So with that, I’m going to pass it along to Michelle.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:06:37):
Hello. Nice to see everyone. I hope you’ve been enjoying the day as much as I have. Thank you to the Climate Center for having all of us. I’ve never been so happy to be inside all day. I am with the World Resources Institute’s Electric School Bus Initiative. And in case you’re not familiar, the World Resource Initiative or WRI is a global research organization. We focus on improving people’s lives, protecting nature, and halting climate change. So why are we focused on electric school buses in California? We could work on a lot of different things, and yet we choose this, and that’s because we think they’re really important for people’s lives, people’s health, for the climate change transition. I wanted to expand a bit on some of the numbers that Pooja gave. In prepping for this, I was surprised myself at some of these numbers. So I want to just walk folks through 24,000, well, over 24,000 school buses on the road in California of every type of fuel.
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The state of California very generously responded to our FOIA request to help us get that number. And the most important number is below that. 42% of those buses are from 2009 or earlier. That’s a very old bus. Next year, it could drive. So these older buses are diesel and gasoline fueled, and we’re very excited about the opportunity for electric buses to be the replacement plan for buses that are ready to be replaced. Puja mentioned the buses that are already on the road. There’s a good number additionally that are committed in our calculation, which is buses awarded or ordered in some capacity, in addition to the ones on the road. So that’s about 3,000 a little over. My favorite number on this slide is the next one, 12.6%. That was the electric share of new school bus purchases. That’s the EV share of the school bus sales in the state of California.
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This is a really big deal.This is more than many states for light duty vehicles. California has been doing something right if you’re interested in the electric vehicle transition in the medium and heavy duty sector. So then we look at this last number. There were 33 districts that applied for funding from the California Air Resources Board last year whose demand was unmet, $200 million in demand. Folks that wanted to buy a new electric bus to replace one of these 10,000 really old buses and didn’t have the incentive dollars available to make that purchase. So I took you through the numbers. I’m not being strict about this five minute rule food job. I hope that’s okay. The other thing I wanted to highlight, we’re going to spend most of the time speaking about the opportunity for vehicle to building and vehicle to grid, and those are really important benefits, but the theme for this room is about affordability of electricity, and yet they stuck our school buses in here.
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And I think that’s really important. I pulled one number that I think is really important, which is that Synapse Energy Economics put out a report looking retrospectively. So now we’re not talking about projections based on estimated load profiles. We’re talking about what has actually happened. If we look back to 2011 to 2024, which is a fair amount of time, a lot of time, EV drivers contributed almost $9 billion more in utility revenues than their associated electricity system costs. This is a little wonky, but it really matters because when revenues are more than the costs go up more than costs go up, rates come down. And if you’ve been in the rooms throughout today, you know that that is certainly a theme, well, not just in the rooms, but like at everybody’s kitchen table. So we’ve heard about grid utilization. Electric vehicles have been a key, a cornerstone of the argument for the rationale for how we can increase utilization of our fixed system assets and drive down rates for everyone.
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So a little wonky, but I’m very passionate about this point and I think I have no more slides. So we will be going next to Matt, who is totally an awesome leader in this space and looking forward to questions later.
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:11:45):
Thanks everybody. So glad to be here today. I am Matt Belasco and I’m with the Pittsburgh Unified School District. So we’re a school district that’s in the East Bay of California. If you’re not familiar, we’re about an hour from San Francisco. Our district is made up of about 11,700 students. About 80% of those families qualify for a free or reduced meal. So we’re considered to be in the lower socioeconomic bandwidth, but we still try to really focus on improving our community health standards and making sure that our scholars are always placed number one as we’re making decisions on how we purchase vehicles and other equipment. Focusing today, obviously, on the electric school buses. We started our electric school bus journey back in 2017. We bought our first two e-lion buses. They were the first buses that were approved to be on the road in California.
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There’s lots of regulations with school buses such as CHP, DMV, and lots of other regulatory agencies that inspect the buses and ensure that they are the safest vehicles on the road. So we took some of our own money from the district, which oftentimes can be looked at as an extreme challenge or opportunity on the journey. Thank you for that nice positivity. But oftentimes spending revenue outside of what can be perceived as the classroom is very difficult to get your boards or your cabinets to agree to, but we were fortunate enough to have our board and cabinet approve about $650,000 to purchase those two buses. So I was so excited about getting those buses on the ground that I forgot about the other importance piece of that, and that’s infrastructure. So we had two buses on the ground, but we can only drive them every third day.
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So we were plugging them into a 120 Charger.
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And I just say that just because being an early adopter, oftentimes you can make those errors, but I’m always very proud of the accomplishments that the district made. And I encourage others to come out to the district and actually see it in action, see it on the ground and see how the operation works. We currently have about 27 total EVs in our fleet that’s made up of school buses, our white fleet. We’ve converted our riding lawn equipment over to zero emission. We estimate that we got about $100,000 a year in ice or internal combustion engine fuel savings. We do have a solar and wind farm on site that provides some of the power that goes into electrified, or excuse me, to power the batteries in there. And we’re extremely proud of the fact that we were able to build a solar and wind farm on our property.
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We have a bioswell in the back. If anyone knows what that is, it’s where the wastewater goes to filter back in their requirement from California. And we really didn’t have a use for that because as it has to be a living, growing a piece of land. So we had about an acre and a half. Well, I came across at a conference just like this, some agro panels that we were able to install over there. So we took a space that was unusable and added about 400 KW of EV, excuse me, of solar power. And then we also have four wind generators that are 40KW wind generators on that property that help power the facility. I’m at the site support service center and we are the biggest, second largest consumer of electricity in our school district, second only to the high school. We have a drive-in refrigerator and freezer for our child nutrition team, so it really helps offset those costs.
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One of the other things that some of the benefits beyond just the cost avoidance is Pooja mentioned earlier about them being more environmentally conscious, but one of the big things that the superintendent, when I took her on her first ride was she noticed that it was very much quieter. And so the behaviors in the bus, you got this nasty diesel bus that’s loud as heck in the back of the bus. And so the kids are loud and they get excited and they’re screaming at each other and get agitated. So that’s an additional benefit that sometimes isn’t perceived is just the quietness of the buses. So we’ve been extremely fortunate to take advantage of lots of different grant funding opportunities. Our current opportunity that’s really related to what we’re talking about here today is the V2G project that’s been funded by the CEC. We have about a $1.7 million grant to develop … So we have supposed to be seven.
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We’re now fortunate enough to be able to have 10 ports of bidirectional charging. They’re at a location right next to our site support services center at a school site, and we will earn a little bit of revenue. I think one of the key components to remember is no one should really get into this thinking that they’re going to have a big budget windfall. Really, it’s about cost avoidance and environmental stewardship. And to support that, we developed a, we call it our bioswell learning center where we actually bring scholars in the electric buses out to the site so that they can see how the photovoltaic process happens. I did a survey right before COVID about how does solar work. And we have a pretty decent deployment of solar throughout our community. About 40% of our homes at that time had solar. The school district has solar at all the places at all of our school sites.
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And one of the biggest responses is, “Oh, well, you plug the refrigerator in and then the sun keeps it going. ” So we actually created a learning center where scholars can walk through there and see how that process happens. In addition to the V2G project that’s taking place there at the yard for the buses that are going to power the facility. We also have a school site where we’re having a discharge only facility. We’re calling it a climate emergency center in case there was a long-term or extended power outage. We could pull the bus up, plug that in and then power the multipurpose room so that we could provide services for our community or folks that are unhoused in our community, provide them with an opportunity to be in a safe environment where we could provide food and other things. So I’m very proud to be part of this team.
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We have been early adopters and have made some great progress and we’ll continue to do that along with, as we develop very strong partnerships and have a lot of help from folks in this room and this organization. So thank you and we’ll be open. We’ll have some more questions here soon.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (00:18:56):
Thank you. Yeah. Thank you to the Climate Center for having me here again. I was here last year talking about V2G and ESPs. Happy to be back again. I’m going to be talking about a project that Nuvi is working on in partnership with the Climate Center. I have been in the V2G industry since 2017, so working with the earliest of early adopters. I started with Vermont Energy. Vermont Energy was acquired by Nuvi, so I’ve been working on these projects with Nuvi and the Fermata energy team. So I’ll get into it. So the focus of my talk today will be about Reschool, which stands for Resilience Energy Solutions for Schools Project. This is a Nuvi project that is funded by the California Energy Commission. And I’ll just maybe back up very briefly about who Nuvi is and what they do. Nuvi is a provider of intelligent electrification services, including EV charging, VGI, or V1G, V2G, battery storage, both standalone and integrated into microgrids and the software optimization services to enable the interoperability between all these pieces and the grid facing functions.
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So this project, as I mentioned, is funded by the California Energy Commission. We’re currently working on it. It’s going to conclude at the end of 2027, and the goal is to work with two Southern California school district sites to develop a V2G integrated micro grid. So basically we’re going to be deploying V2G chargers or using existing V2G chargers using existing bi-directionally enabled school buses that these fleets already have and we’ll be bringing them a stationary battery to create a micro grid to provide backup power to a critical building or some sort of critical infrastructure on site. So these two school district sites are new these customers that they’ve been working with over the years and kind of helping them through the transportation electrification journey. So this is the next step. Yeah. So the first school district they’re working with is Porterville Unified School District, which is a school district in Tulare County, California.
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And so what we’re going to be doing with Porterville is backing up their cold storage facility. So they have a very large cold storage facility on site. They’re actually in the process of upgrading that and expanding it. And this cold storage facility keeps all the food refrigerated for the entire school district. So when the power goes out, the potential financial impact of losing all that food is quite significant. So this district identified a need for backup power here. They already have bidirectional school buses and some bidirectional chargers. We’ll be bringing them a stationary battery and the optimization software to create a micro grid. And this is a first of its kind test bed. So this will be a proof of concept, a technical proof of concept to see how this works and how we can scale this to other communities. And the goal eventually is to find sites within school districts or other public entities that can serve as community resilience hubs.
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So a place that’s centrally located and meets the electrical feasibility requirements to provide backup power. And I think what’s really exciting is that even for Nubi and Vermont, we’ve been doing this for a long time. This is pretty unique in the V2G space. We heard from Puja that in the state of California, there are 1400 ESBs on the road today, and only 100 of them are consistently actively doing V2G or providing grid services. So that’s only about 10% of the electric school bus fleet is doing V2G. So there’s still tremendous untapped potential for grid flexibility and grid revenue and savings for these school districts. And so here we’re taking it kind of to the next level. These charters and buses are already or would have already been participating in a demand response program and earning grid revenue. Now, they’re also going to be leveraged to provide supplemental backup power.
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And so without getting into kind of the super wonky details of how the system works, but essentially when the grid goes down, the battery will kick on and establish the grid voltage, and then those bidirectional chargers will follow that grid voltage and provide supplemental backup power. So it’s really a fully integrated microgrid. And importantly, solar and storage can displace fossil fuel backup generation. So that’s really what we’re bringing these school districts is an alternative to dirty diesel gen sets and a way to use their ESPs even more efficiently. So I touched on this earlier, what’s needed for a V2G resilience hub and what might you find at a resilience hub? So importantly, you need, at a minimum, the electrical feasibility. So the site should be suitable for installing backup power systems. That means there needs to be enough space for a backup power system, a stationary battery, and the charging equipment.
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And then you need community readiness. You need the location to be accessible and at least somewhat centrally located so that community members can access it during the event of an emergency. And what might you find at a resilience hub? You’re going to find a place for people to go during a power outage or natural disaster to charge medical equipment, to get air conditioning, to be able to charge their devices like their phones and computers and just ensure very basic safety and that basic needs can be met during the 12, 16 or 48 hour power outages that some of these communities are facing due to public safety power shutoffs and climate related power outages. Yeah. And so importantly, this is a topic I think we’re all going to be touching on in the panel is how do we scale V2G resilience hubs, what’s standing in the way of this model scaling?
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So this is one of the questions that this project is going to answer. We’re working with a company called Energetics to help develop a VGI blueprint for projects like Reschool. So we’re going to be looking at the compensation mechanisms and other barriers on the policy and regulatory and technical side. But working in this space for almost 10 years, I think it’s safe to say the technology has been validated. We’ve already seen so many utilities and pilots like ours testing the technology. We know ESBs, if they’re electric school buses when they’re paired with a bidirectional charger and some kind of control software, can be used to discharge to the grid reliably in response to some kind of grid signal. What we really need now is reliable and adequate compensation. We’ve heard from so many panels about the need for some kind of compensation mechanism like DSGS and other virtual power plant programs, which we see are actually spreading across other states in Colorado and Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey.
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I’ll touch on that in the panel, but we need to get the prices to the devices, as we like to say. We need better standardization to ensure seamless interoperability. Nuvy and other electrification services providers like Highland and Mobility House and First Student, that’s what we work on. That’s first and foremost, our priorities to make sure these systems work. If they don’t work, we lose trust with our fleet partners and utilities. It’s really hard to convince a fleet partner to do a V2G pilot or utility to pilot some sort of rate or program for V2G if the equipment’s not interoperable. And we’ve made great strides here. CEC and CPUC have done a lot also to ensure more standardization to ensure interoperability. And then lastly, support from utilities. We work with customers very closely on interconnection and energization and make ready. We need utilities to create more streamlined processes to accelerate the ability of these fleets to get energized, to access make ready funding, which is basically funding for infrastructure upgrades and to get interconnected.
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So the lead times for all of that are still too long and remain a barrier to this scale adoption of B2G. So yeah, I think that’s it. Thank you.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:27:16):
All right. So thanks everyone. We’ve gotten some really interesting perspectives from across this electric school bus, V2G ecosystem. So actually Annabella’s last remarks are a really good segue to my first question, which is we’re here at a policy conference. So obviously there’s tons of tchallenges to transitioning to more bidirectional electric school buses in the state would love to kind of kick off the discussion of what are some of these other policy challenges and what are some of the solutions? So we heard from Annabella that compensation is a big one. Working with utilities is another one, but would love to hear from all the other panelists and from Annabella as well. What are we seeing as some of these big policy challenges, but also pairing with solutions because we want to end on a hopeful note today.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:28:10):
I can … Oh, it’s on. I’ll jump in. Compensation for your V2G isn’t very helpful if you don’t have an electric school bus in the first place. So we definitely need to make sure that there is funding available for folks when they are ready to replace their old polluting school buses. As I noted, there’s a lot of demand. One of the reasons that there is insufficient funding is because the prices are too high. I was in a panel earlier about a refinery competition and there are some through lines you would be surprised to know. And the punchline is we need competition from OEMs and we need price transparency and we need programs that are designed to ensure that our incentive dollars are used effectively to maturate markets. So we need more funds and we need to hold the feet to the fire of both the OEMs and our really wonderful program administrators that are trying to design programs.
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It’s not an easy job, but those are my … So more money, bring the prices down. We probably need more competition between OEMs to do it. Is that kind of solution-y?
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:29:38):
Yeah.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:29:38):
Right.
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:29:40):
Definitely. And as the end user here in a school district, I’d have to echo the majority of those. Funding definitely is a challenge. An electric school bus is about double what a traditional internal combustion school bus is going to be. So you’re talking close to half a million dollars as compared to 250. So in our extremely challenging budgetary climate that we’re in here in California and everywhere, but particularly in California, when you’re looking at replacing those 2009 and older buses, sometimes people are going to … Districts have been kind of, let’s call it backsliding a little. Maybe they’ve got plans to electrify their fleet, but the need is there. You’ve got to replace a bus, you’ve got to get kids to school. So sometimes you have to make those difficult decisions. So definitely funding consistently. We’re very fortunate in California. Funding in California has been more consistent than in some other states, but funding is definitely one.
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Compensation would be fantastic. If we could get the utilities to recognize that indeed compensation is going to be something that’s going to help school districts and other municipalities be able to make this a sustainable operation. Not just providing that funding to get everything started and then that’s it. But compensation down the line for the V2G. In the CEC project and negotiated an additional $2 per kilowatt hour that we discharge, we estimate that’s going to be about $30,000 a year, not a huge windfall, but it’ll help pay for, help offset the cost for our charge management systems so that if nothing else, those projects are remaining cost neutral on an OPEX basis. The utilities themselves, we’re still struggling. We’ve deployed about 3000 kilowatt hours of batteries at our other school sites. Started that project in October. I took it to the board October 2020. And here we are in April of 2026, and I’m just getting my first three online.
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So regulatory schools have an additional layer of regulatory called the DSA, Division of State Architects that are … Actually, they’re a fantastic organization. They’re really working towards improving the design and building of schools. They, in 2023, adopted California Green Code that requires photovoltaic systems at all schools, electric vehicle chargers for the staff at a percentage for the community, as well as adding additional infrastructure as the needs grow. So the organization is really forward thinking. The challenge is they’re not exactly sure how to manage those things. So they’re putting those regulations in there, but the challenge is still that their staff that approve those projects on site are struggling a little bit to get the projects approved and through the regulatory system. So I think those are some opportunities for improving the journey, but I definitely think that they’re not insurmountable. And as we continue to move through this, particularly early adopters, I heard 2017, we’re coming up on 10 years now.
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So hopefully that the economies of scale are going to begin to flip into be a little more favored towards the consumer and the end user.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (00:33:23):
Thank you. Yeah. I mentioned VPP bills or virtual power plant programs as a solution. What’s been really interesting is that it seems legislation is actually what’s going to get us that compensation. I’ve participated in a lot of CPUC proceedings on demand response on BGI and the regulatory process moves really, really slowly, but legislation can help catalyze new market opportunities a lot faster. And we’re seeing that right now. In Colorado, in 2024, there was a VPP bill called Powering Up Colorado. And now in Colorado, Excel of Colorado, and stakeholders just reached an agreement to set up an aggregator BPP that’s going to establish compensation up to $238 per kilowatt for … And it’s technology agnostic. So it’s open a V2G, it’s open to batteries, it’s open to solar. So that’s really exciting. We’re seeing the same in Maryland. Maryland’s had a bill called the DRIVE Act, which actually was about creating a VPP for residential V2G.
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And Virginia has a VPP bill. New Jersey has a VPP. They’re going to be moving forward with a VPP bill. Pennsylvania is exploring that. Illinois just passed in Illinois. There’s a bill called SERGA that was just passed in January. It’s also going to be establishing a technology agnostic VPP bill that’s going to enable V2G to participate and get compensated for discharge to the grid. So it seems like legislation is going to get us to where we need to be faster on the compensation side than the regulatory process. These bills still have to be implemented through the regulatory process, but there are deadlines and milestones that the commission and stakeholders and the investor and utilities have to meet. So it’s really pushing the investor and utilities in the direction of setting up these VPPs that they might not be inclined to do otherwise. So that’s one, I think, solution or kind of positive development we’re seeing.
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And so we heard from everyone about SB 913, the resource adequacy bill. And then last session, there were three VPP bills that were not successful in California. So I think we need to continue to focus on legislation in California. And then flexible service connection. Someone mentioned this in the previous panel. I think that’s a really also interesting and innovative framework for getting large fleets, including school bus fleets energized faster. So, and that is California is leading in that PG&E has a flexible service connection pilot. We’re seeing that model also be piloted in other parts of the country. And it’s a great way for fleets to be able to get all their equipment energized faster as long as they agree not to use it all at MaxPower at the same time. And providers like us can help ensure that they can work with their utilities to comply with some sort of dynamic import and export limits.
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So you know exactly at what time you’re allowed to discharge up to what power, but it enables fleets to get fully energized instead of like waiting for years to energize their equipment. So I would say those are the two kind of positive developments we’re seeing in this space.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:36:43):
Awesome. So I think that’s, again, a good segue. I think we love to hear about all the successes here in California, and it’s also really helpful to hear what other states are doing. So Michelle, I would love to go to you and hear if you have any case studies or examples of V2G electric school bus deployment in other states, especially through your work with the Electric School Bus Initiative.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:37:08):
Yeah. So I have some case studies and I’m going to plug one more thing, not specifically VTG, but then I’ll do the VTE stuff. When I was pulling the numbers on the electric sales share for school buses, 12.6% for California, very exciting. California was not at the top. I don’t know. Does anyone want to test their knowledge? Do you know which state has the highest sales? What’d you guys?
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:37:36):
Illinois.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:37:38):
No, but good guess. Colorado. Colder.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (00:37:42):
Massachusetts.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:37:44):
Okay. I’ll let you know. It was New York. Ding, ding, ding. New York state. Probably not coincidentally. Half a billion dollars in state bond money directed to the school buses in that state for electrification. Anyways, so just to note on things to learn. Pardon? What percent of New York? Oh, sorry. 16%. 16% salesia. Yeah. But there are other things to learn specific on V2G. I think the first V2G project I got to go on site to was in White Plains. Folks have probably heard, folks in the space have heard of it. It was a pretty early project in New York State. And one of the things they were pitching about the project was that the vehicles during the summer when they are not … And it depends. Plenty of schools use their school buses all year round. There’s a lot of summer school and things like that.
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But if you’re not using them, this could be a mobile battery asset. But stationary battery storage, also very important for resilience structure, but like you have an overloaded substation, you can physically drive the school bus over and it can do V2G and be a mobile temporary while you’re waiting for substation upgrades, right? So that was a really cool proposal. And frankly, they didn’t have a great success, but I think it goes to this point, it was pretty early and I think there were some technical challenges. So that’s a model that definitely I think deserves more exploration. And another example that our team is really excited about relevant here in California, but our colleagues have worked in Florida where they’re using electric school buses to serve as mobile cooling stations. So the idea being, in addition to these V2G, explicit V2G for resilience at a critical facility, for example, you can also move the vehicle and have it running its AC and providing wifi to provide some resilience to community.
(00:40:02):
So those are some lessons from around the country I wanted to share.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:40:09):
Yeah. Anabella, do you want to share any more while we’re at this topic of other pilots or case studies from other states?
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (00:40:17):
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, we’ve done a lot of pilots with utilities, including with ComEd in Illinois, with Piget Sound Energy currently in Washington State. I mean, I can highlight the ComEd project. That was a one year pilot that ComEd issued a competitive RFP for, so everyone responded and they selected Nuvi as their implementation partner. And so Nuvi brought three school district partners into this pilot that they were already working with. And what was really interesting about it is it started off as a technology validation exercise for the utility. They really just wanted to understand how does this equipment work with a fleet duty cycle? Can it work? Will these schools be able to actually respond to a signal, a grid signal in discharge? Will they be available? Will they be there? What does the state of charge look like? So that was a very interesting exercise.
(00:41:20):
One takeaway is that obviously in the summer it’s a lot easier to participate in a V2G program and we saw our performance across these three school districts was much better in the summer. Some of these buses are still operating the summer, taking kids to camps or summer school or games, or they’re still active in the community, but they’re not doing a daily duty cycle. So that was really interesting. I mean, probably an obvious takeaway for us, but for the utility, they were interested in that. And then they were also really interested in not just leveraging school buses for system wide peak shaving, so to help with their system wide peaks, but they were starting to test out local congestion relief, which you touched on, which is a really interesting use case. So if you have electric school buses located where there’s congestion on the distribution system, where there’s congested circuits, you can actually send a signal to them to have them discharge at maybe 10:00 AM at these odd times that don’t coincide with the classic 4:00 to 9:00 PM system-wide peak.
(00:42:25):
So it might be like in the morning or in the mid-afternoon, but that’s the direction they’re going in, is looking at not just system-wide peak shaping, so not just like bulk system benefits, but also local distribution benefits. And that is going to be the next phase of the pilot. There’s a phase two that they’re going to be going out to bid for right now. So that’s a really interesting use case is a utility taking the initiative and wanting to study this because, and phase two is going to be an anticipation of the virtual power plant that they now have to administer. So it’s actually coincides really well with this. When they established this pilot, there was no VPP bill. It was just, I guess, an idea, but this just is an example of how real world demonstration projects actually can help inform program development, program design and policy.
(00:43:17):
And we went out to meet our customers and they reported some really interesting findings from the community around noise and just perceived benefits that these buses are a lot quieter and in turn the kids are quieter. So that’s just one project I would highlight.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:43:37):
Awesome. So I think this is a really, again, good transition to the next question, which obviously we want to hear more of these case studies and these pilot projects. And also, as Anabella said at the beginning, scaling these projects in the state. So I want to turn to Matthew now. Obviously Pittsburgh USD is an early adopter in electric school buses, sustainability initiatives as a school district. So I’m curious what you think, how can we get more school districts aware of, but also excited about the opportunity for V2G electric school buses and what do you hear from your colleagues when you tell them about your work on V2G electric school buses?
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:44:23):
It’s really interesting because you get such a wide array of responses in our county, we’re kind of regarded as the kind of driving the bus. How did I come up with that? But we’re kind of moving the agenda forward there for us and you get really interesting responses from the other folks. Some are interested but are kind of on the sidelines waiting for others to kind of, or for districts to make the first move. You have others that are excited as we are and are trying to figure out how they can build that political momentum with their board and their cabinet to get them to kind of see how things are moving along. Then you have the others that can be some pretty significant naysayers, right? I’ll tell a quick story. So my predecessor, she was in the industry for 40 years and I came from a completely different industry.
(00:45:23):
I had no previous notions or inclinations about how a modern school transportation department should work. I just know when you get in there and turn the key, the bus should go. But my predecessor was there for 40 years and so she was very, very set on traditional fuels. And one of her parting statements to me was, “If you start, I know you like to always try to do everything technology driven and if you try that electric buses or any of those alternative fuels, I’m going to go to the board and have you fired.”
(00:45:54):
And this is my colleague that I worked with for eight years before taking over the department. So there is just such a vast range of what those responses are. But I think just as a whole in California, we’re continuing to see the momentum going. I did mention at the conference, a CASBO conference that was in San Diego last week or the week before, it really felt like the energy level was waning a bit with our current administration nationally, but the folks that are really focused on this and are leading it have good examples. And that’s why I always encourage people to actually come to the district. I know it can be a journey or kind of just to get out there, but to see it in person, because sometimes just trying to conceptualize that in your head can be extremely difficult. How exactly is that going to work?
(00:46:46):
How is it going to be disruptive to my system when I’m digging up my bus yard to put in electric chargers? Am I going to be able to still maintain that level of quality and consistency that the school districts that are, our bosses, our board, our cabinets are looking for us to continue to supply to our community? So there’s just really this range. But one of the things I’m trying to do in our community or in our county when we have our quarterly meetings with the other transportation teams, some of the feedback is, great, you’ve got electric charging infrastructure, but we don’t, and many others don’t. So how can we take our field trip buses over to go to other districts when they’re having those games when there’s nowhere to charge? So I’ve been trying to get them to band together to get a grant maybe with our air district to help support that.
(00:47:42):
So you can start to see those things happening. And then my hope is that they’ll see that it is a possibility and then that’ll continue, that momentum will continue to build.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:47:56):
Thanks, Matthew. Yeah, I think it’s really interesting to hear about wanting people to visit schools. So I think actually next year we’re going to host the Policy Summit at Pittsburgh USD. Well,
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:48:08):
You’re well welcome. Come on out.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:48:09):
So we can all see those electric school buses up close and
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:48:13):
Personal. Absolutely.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:48:14):
Okay. So my next question, I think we have been talking a lot about funding and financing and resilience. So I think we hear in California, again, we do have a lot of funding for these types of projects, but also there’s alternative financing pathways that when we don’t have these bucket of cash available, what are some other ways that we’ve seen in California, but in other states that school districts can be financing electric school buses, but also V2G projects. And I’ll turn to Michelle for this question.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:48:52):
I am born and raised in California, California resident, but I’m, for some reason, compelled to really bring a lot of competition nationally to compel folks to feel like there is more to be done. So I want to raise up my friends at the Connecticut Green Bank who have been developing and sealing financing deals for electric school buses. And it’s really important because these incentive dollars are finite and we need to start investing them in other medium and heavy duty vehicles that also need to transition, right? Our electric school buses are like the tip of the iceberg. They’re very important and they’re just the start of this transition. So as the sector match rates, I’m really excited about what I’m seeing not just from Connecticut. Folks in Maryland are active, New York state, as you heard, it’s an active state for electric school buses in general, but I’ve got like almost 20 state and local green banks that come to a meeting with me every month to talk about financing products and it’s the marriage.
(00:50:12):
While as we transition away from reliance on whether it’s state or federal or local grant funds, which are essential right now, but I mean, that’s not how we’re going to scale this market, right? We heard about the operating savings. It’s really exciting. The V2G revenues, once we get these VTP bills locked down and stuff, there’s definitely a lot of potential to stack these revenues because, and we’ll get the prices down as we scale. Everything’s coming into place, but a piece of it is certainly finance because we’ve got a much bigger upfront capital cost.
(00:50:50):
My best hopes still have the electric bus be more expensive than a diesel upfront. That’s how we expect this to operate and it will save us money over operating over the lifetime, right? We’ve seen it. That’s the case in light duty. It’s what we’re going for, but that’s a perfect use case for finance. And so getting the California Infrastructure Bank, if you know them, we like them, getting projects that school districts are not super used to … I mean, there’s precedent in the energy efficiency space, but it’s a new muscle to be using these financing products for your school bus procurements. So that’s a big cultural shift. I don’t want to minimize it. And it’s really important for program designers to be thinking ahead, how can we design our incentives to marry with financing so that we can kind of encourage that part of the ecosystem to take more and more of the cost of the project on?
(00:51:58):
So yeah, I get very excited about it. If you want to talk more about it, let me know.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:52:03):
Anyone else want to jump in on financing?
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:52:05):
Yeah. There’s also other revenue stream, or excuse me, not revenue, but funding opportunities that school districts have. Pittsburgh has taken advantage of a product called a COP certificate of participation. It’s a very low rate. You use one of your school sites as collateral, and that’s how we funded our first initial solar projects in 2010. And when I did my first bus flip, or when I first took over and before my predecessor didn’t get me fired, we changed our entire fleet. 100% of our fleet was updated in 2017, 18, and 19. So we used a funding mechanism called COP, Certificate of Participation. There’s also bond dollars that are available that can be used for capital projects so long as it’s built into the language. And one of the things that’s important is work with, if you’re our school district, but work with your campaign folks to ensure that that language is in the initial 60 word statement.
(00:53:10):
And then also reference to the community how those capital dollars that are being funded long term by the community are going to help your operating dollars and reduce the overall operating expenses we can clearly show the amount of cost to operate that electric bus after you’ve got that capital expense is significantly lower than a traditional ICE bus or vehicle, period. So you can definitely build a case into the campaign when you’re meeting with community members on how those dollars can get lowered and go right back into the classroom. That’s some of the things that I’ve said when meeting with the community, that the dollars that we spend from these capital expenditures will go directly back to the classroom with lower operating expenses.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (00:54:08):
Thanks, Matthew and Michelle. So this is going to be my last question. So if you have questions, please start preparing them. So my last question, I think just bringing us back to, our track is called the affordability benefits of distributed energy. And we know that specifically when we talk about school buses in particular, and then grid issues in general, we think of communities of color, low income communities, rural communities as being disproportionately impacted by air pollution from school buses, all these power outages. So we really need a more resilient, reliable, affordable grid. And how can we think of electric school buses and bidirectional electric school buses, particularly as a solution to this, and how do we ensure that these types of school buses are reaching the communities that really need them the most and providing all these multiple benefits that I started with at the beginning of the session.
(00:55:04):
So open question for anyone.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (00:55:10):
Well, I guess I just want to note that we did some numbers and I should have pulled them ahead of time, but to date, more electric school buses are going to, what in California, we would be calling disadvantaged communities, but we’ve seen this actually across the nation and it’s due to program design, which is prioritizing buses going to places that are most burdened by air pollution, which are most reliant on school bus transportation for school transportation. As you noted, rural communities are much more reliant on school bus transportation. Those kids are sitting on the bus for a long time. And so I think we should just, I just do want to commend all of the program designers in the offices in the big buildings near and far that have really done a good job of getting buses first to the places that will benefit most from them.
(00:56:08):
But yeah, there’s a lot of old buses on the road still, so there’s a lot of work yet to be done.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (00:56:17):
Yeah. I want to echo what Michelle said about program design. I think if we’re going to ensure that electric school buses are going to be, sorry, can be an affordability solution, these programs have to design with affordability in mind as a key priority. And I can give you a couple examples. A lot of these programs and all the case studies we mentioned, many of them benefit from utility make ready funding, which I mentioned earlier, which is, this is part of these often rate payer funded programs to help fleets offset their infrastructure costs. So there’s different ways this is done, but there’s options. But if you’re pursuing a fleet electrification project and a DAC disadvantaged community, you can get more funding as opposed to a community that’s not disadvantaged. So there’s examples like that, but it’s when you’re creating the program design, when you’re designing the program, it has to be paramount.
(00:57:24):
PG&E also has a really interesting commercial V2G pilot, which they designed, of which Zoom was probably the biggest uptaker. They are a fleet services provider that has a massive V2G project in Oakland, 74 school buses, electric school buses and 74 V2G chargers, which I think is still the biggest in the state of California, was one of the biggest in the country for a while, probably remains the biggest, still the biggest. It was the V2G project everybody was talking about for years, but they were deploying in a DAC area and PG&E has this upfront equipment incentive, which isn’t large, but it does provide more funding of V2G adder for lower income communities. So it’s really important just to understand that, as Michelle was saying, it starts with program design, affordability has to be part of it. We have to create incentive adders on the compensation side, on the infrastructure side for areas that need it for frontline communities, energy equity communities, and low income areas.
(00:58:30):
And yeah, I think that that’s key. I’m trying to think of any other, what else I was going to add. Yeah.
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (00:58:40):
Oh, really nothing to add other than just put, as you talk about program design, just putting together that plan. As I mentioned early on, I didn’t have a plan. I was new to the industry at the time. I didn’t really have a plan. And so the infrastructure and long-term planning, and I think strategic partnerships are something that are really key. Develop partners with folks who do have 10 years of experience in the industry instead of someone who had 10 months of experience. Those things can be helpful and they’re going to save in the long term. The most important part of, the most expensive part of a project is digging up that ground. Once you start bringing those tractors out and those excavators, that’s when your costs are going to grow exponentially. So think about trying your best to future proof. I know that’s a word that doesn’t really make sense as technology is moving so fast, but do your best to … It costs nearly nothing, 100th of a percent of what it costs to dig it up, again, as opposed to putting some extra pipes under the ground that lead to where your switch gear are, those type of things that we have learned.
(00:59:53):
And just making this part of the overall plan for decarbonization within the Organization doesn’t necessarily have to be schools. We’re focused on schools here, obviously, and electric school buses and how that fits in. But an overall decarbonization plan I think is really key. And I’m fortunate, I have 10,500 voices that are kind of repeating what they hear and what they see in their schools. The school district is the largest charging infrastructure in the city of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh has, I think, 14 chargers. Pittsburgh School District has 74 deployed throughout the community. So there’s lots of good plans. In a DAC community like ours, can practically get with some of the funding opportunities in Contra Costa County. A family that is in a lower socioeconomic bandwidth could get an EV for 3,000 bucks. The biggest question and the biggest pushback I get all the time is, where am I going to charge it?
(01:00:56):
So having that design plan comprehensive build out is I think extremely important as you look forward to the next three, five, 10 years out.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (01:01:10):
Yeah. Thank you. And I realized my second point there. Sorry. I think we all touched on this and the previous panel touched on it. Grid utilization. I think you mentioned the synapse energy economics study, which for energy nerds was a big deal. And it basically showed that we … EV electrification actually is putting downward pressure on rates. And when it’s done right, we can actually utilize our grid better. We can’t build our way out of this solution. We can’t keep building. We need to get EVs into virtual power plant programs. We need to get the prices to the devices. We can leverage these devices for local congestion relief. If you want to be really fancy and participate in a dynamic rate pilot, you don’t need to do it yourself. There are something called automated services providers like Nuvi and Fermata that will do that optimization for you so that the customer’s not exposed to the complexity of 24 different prices over 24 different hours.
(01:02:05):
So that’s just one example. But we have really interesting innovation on the rate side. We have virtual power plant programs. We have flexible service connections. I think we have to really think about all the above no regret strategy to ensure that we’re utilizing our grid better. And that will also help bring downward pressure on rates and help ESBs be part of this affordability solution. So I just wanted to end on that note.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (01:02:31):
Yeah. Thanks for closing us out. So yeah, now we’re going to move to audience Q&A. So if you have a question, please raise your hand, stand up, and we’ll bring a mic to you.
Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Hi there. Real quick, have y’all seen any impacts on bus usage by electrification? And then I feel like school buses have been kind of not being utilized as much as time has gone on recently. So I’m wondering if the shiny new toy has helped get more kids in school buses or maybe how it’s impacted public bus uses as well.
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (01:03:21):
In the school industry, as we talked about early on, these extreme pressures we’re having in our current fiscal climate are making districts make tough decisions. And if you look at overall, California has the least amount of students transported per capita per bus in the entire nation. So school busing unfortunately has not been as much of a priority as we focused on more on larger cities and less on rural. But I think that the buses that we do utilize, we’ve seen a definite uptick in the amount of riders that we do have with the electric buses. I think parents are recognizing the inherent health values and the improvements that they’re seeing on the bus with reduction in behaviors and things of that nature. And then biannually, we do a readout or a transportation plan that we meet. We invite parents to come out and take a ride on the bus or just some ideas to get them going so that they can see that it is a important part of getting to school.
(01:04:37):
With ADA being at such a low level right now, average daily attendance, and that’s how California schools are funded. It’s more critical than ever that we get those kids on that bus into school.
Speaker 6 (01:04:52):
I have a question regarding the cost factors. It’s quite a bit of a premium over a diesel ice bus basically, but is there a point in time where it will pay itself off? Have you calculated that out or is it … I mean, you figured the health benefits and everything into that as well, but just wondering from a pure cost perspective.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (01:05:15):
I’d love to jump in. Although I do want to caveat … Well, my colleagues did put together a national analysis of the health and climate impacts and accounting for those. And I’m really appreciative and value them. And when Matt goes in front of his school board, that’s not part of the math. And so I always try to really defer to the reality of these conversations and we need to win on the math that’s on the table. And I slipped in this point about prices needing to come down because that’s like my passion project really. So in the last five years, from 2020 to 25, electric school buses, when I adjust for inflation, we saw 1% price reduction year over year. That puts us. If we continue that trend, we get to total cost of ownership parity in like 2040. So I mean, I’m not even talking about price parity.
(01:06:25):
I’m talking about total cost of ownership parity. So we need prices to come down year over year on a much more aggressive schedule.
(01:06:36):
Yeah. We can talk more about it later, but it’s really important and it’s part of … Yeah, we need more competition in the market. This is part of a broader challenge we have in the medium and heavy duty electric transportation segment, and there is work being done about getting more price transparency and disclosure around the prices that folks are paying, aggregating demand. There’s a new round of the EPA’s clean school bus program that will be opening up this summer, it sounds like, and that will be a big moment of demand. And I think one of the challenges is that right now, most of the demand is driven by these intermittent grant rounds, whether it’s from HFIP or the state programs or from the federal government. And so, a healthy market can’t grow in fits and starts. So we need long-term demand signals. And yeah, if you have any ideas on how to get there, let me know.
Speaker 7 (01:07:40):
Just curious, do you have any data on the health aspect of kids breathing diesel fumes? I always think they’re horrible fumes, and I’m just wondering if there’s any health data about that.
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (01:07:54):
Our county did a really in- depth health report about 10 years ago, seven years ago, something like that. I was doing a different … I was working more in the child nutrition realm at that time, and so we worked closely with them. One of the things that was really stark was that not just from bus emissions, but from heavy industrial, heavy duty trucks, things like that. And there was some industry in the community. Someone that lives in the community that I work and 30 miles away in a community called San Ramon, your life expectancy is seven and a half years less. Yeah. So those numbers are just like, that’s a real eye opener. So does Pittsburgh having electric school buses substantially change that number? Probably not too much, but if we all continue to do it, that’s why I go out and do these meetings, parent meetings, encourage them, take advantage of the incentives and get an EV.
(01:09:05):
And just as you’re saying, it’s going to help drive that demand up, and that’s when you start to see some of those costs goes down. Right now, that apex is not where it once was. If you just look at sales data and stuff across other industries, school buses is showing an increase, but some of the just EVs in general, you’re seeing that APEX is really going down. Some manufacturers or OEMs have abandoned their EV programs altogether, so that’s going to be a challenge, and it’s going to help hold those prices higher.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (01:09:44):
Okay. I found the report from my colleagues, so don’t give me any credit for this one, but new research from my colleagues. And Carlton University shows that the US would see an estimated 1.6 billion in health and climate benefits every year by using electric school buses. And they do have a California on here and annual benefits in California, health and climate would be 155 million. Yeah.
Speaker 8 (01:10:22):
My name’s Anthony. I work with Climate Action Campaign. We actually train students in high school to advocate at their board, to adopt electrification policies, solar battery, heat pumps, and also electric buses. That’s the hardest one to convince boards and facility managers to really buy into. I’m curious, outside of the health aspect, are there any other really interesting student outcome data points to speak about that would be helpful to equip our students with?
Matthew Belasco, Pittsburg Unified School District (01:11:01):
I’d love to spend some more time with you because I’d love to get more of our kids involved. We’re very fortunate at our high school level. We have a environmental club. It’s pretty strong. They’ve got about a hundred members, but we really like to get them more involved in helping gather that data. It’s not something that we’ve had the bandwidth to do to really get some hard data, but certainly we’re interested in expanding that and talking more about that because the scholars are the ones that could get the best outcomes, right? I’m going to come around and most of the adults or even the scholars are not going to really want to engage with me as much talking to their peers. I think that’s a really great way to gather some tangible data that could go into some really smart people’s spreadsheets and things. Yeah.
Anna Bella Korbatov, Nuvve/Fermata Energy (01:11:54):
This is somewhat of a related point, but an interesting trend I’ve been seeing is that we’ve been working with school districts and utilities for years on B2G pilots, but they’re now coming to us and asking us to help them develop educational materials for their students, which is a new thing. Like this just in the past year, there’s been interest in this, which I think means that there’s more really community interest and buy-in from community members and students and parents and faculty and staff to make these projects come full circle. So we worked with Baldwin Park Unified School District to do a very similar project. A V2G Integrated Micro Grid, they wanted us to kind of provide the technical information that they would then take and work with their teachers and staff to create some sort of curriculum for high school students. And same with Puget Sound Energy with whom we’re working on a pilot with right now.
(01:12:46):
And that’s really, I think, is very encouraging to see, although that’s not our specialty creating curriculum for students. We can provide the technical information and work with them, but there could be a need for this. There’s a group called Generation 180 with whom we’ve worked since 2017. They do fantastic work in schools. Maybe some of you have heard of them, but they work in … Their mission is to empower communities to take clean energy action. So educating parents, students, all sorts of stakeholders to advocate for clean energy solutions in their communities and at their schools. And so they can help, I think, produce educational materials. But that’s been a really interesting shift, is that the customers and districts we’re working with want to leverage their projects as kind of a living laboratory classroom, really take the demonstration benefits of these projects and ensure that it becomes part of the curriculum and so that students can go home and then tell their parents about it and parents can go to school board meeting and so on and on.
(01:13:50):
And so that this spreads throughout the community into surrounding areas. So, yeah.
Michelle Levinson, World Resources Institute (01:13:57):
I want to pile on. Well, we did actually develop a curriculum with Lego. So everyone loves Legos, so you should look into that. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities for citizen science here, whether it’s on the vehicle air quality measurements in vehicle and around and controls and all these things. We’ve done some really cool studies with school districts, like driving around with air quality monitors. And likewise, I think there’s under … We had some noise monitors. I think there’s a lot of space to really do more robust and I mean, and even like student led quasi robust science would be really awesome for the noise impact. And then another thing, another benefit that I hear when I speak with bus drivers is the … So I’ve got to imagine there’s job retention benefits. It’s really hard. One of the biggest challenges that districts have is hiring and retaining drivers, licensed drivers, when you could be making a lot more driving for Amazon.
(01:15:09):
And so if folks are driving a vehicle that is not shaking their bodies and giving them pains, I mean, that’s just anecdotal. So I think that connecting … Yeah, I love the idea of engaging students and having some opportunity for citizen science to kind of quantify some of these benefits in an even qualitative way, I think could be really good.
Pooja Agarwal, The Climate Center (01:15:41):
So this was an amazing panel. And just first, please join me in giving a big hand to all of our panelists for being here today. So that concludes the programming for the Policy Summit, the official programming of the panels, but now we’re going to be moving to a legislative reception, which is going to be taking place upstairs. So feel free to take a quick break and then we’ll meet you upstairs. You should have your drink ticket with your name tag. And yeah, thanks for being here.