electric school buses on the ….
electric school buses on the road through funding from the EPA grant -- so there is a lot for those first grant recipients to do to figure out their limitations, provide training and address other concerns with the new technology.
“Electric is a fairly new concept in the U.S.,” said Kuchta. “But what I’ve been seeing is that electric buses are the way of the future. Most companies now are producing electric vehicles. The government is subsidizing these programs and the EPA is giving us $2 million worth of charging stations and buses. All we need is a place to put them.”
Right now, finding a place to put the buses is the biggest challenge facing Granton. Unlike the rest of the schools in the area, Granton purchases its own school buses and has a garage on its campus to allow for maintenance and storage. However, the current garage has only two stalls to store buses -- not nearly enough room to house the seven buses the district currently owns.
“Our current bus garage can only hold two buses,” said Kuchta. “But these electric buses need to be stored where they can be charged and out of the cold. We will be getting $100,000 to use for infrastructure and we have some ESSER funds (federal money for pandemic relief) left over yet that we can use to build a new garage.”
Besides the bus garage, Kuchta said the question on most people’s minds will be related to the electric bus’s range and its ability to handle the cold of Wisconsin’s winters. Based on what they know, he said the electric bus has a 100-mile range on its battery, which takes between 4-6 hours to charge. If the buses are kept plugged in when they are not on their routes, he said there should not be any issues with buses getting stranded, as all bus routes in the district are less than 50 miles in length. For longer trips, he said there are options the district can use, but they have yet to discuss a course of action on what the protocol will be.
“There will be those who have some questions, such as will they work in the cold?” he said. “With the charging stations, we can keep them plugged in overnight for 13 hours and we have seven hours during the school day. It takes from four to five and a half hours to charge the busses and the battery packs can last for two days. All our routes are under 50 miles but for longer trips, there are things we can do for that. One is to use our electric buses and call ahead to see if there is anywhere that the bus can be charged. Two, we can keep our two diesel buses (the remaining two buses in Granton’s fleet that were purchased a few years ago and not eligible for the grant) and use them for longer trips or three we rent a charter bus like Progressive out of Spencer for those longer trips. If it’s too far, we simply can’t do it. Trips to Marshfield and back could be done with the electric bus, but I think Stevens Point and back might just be all the range it has.”
Due to issues with the supply chain, Kuchta said Granton is not expected to receive its electric school buses until late next year, which will give the district the time it needs to construct a new garage to house the buses. After they arrive, Kuchta said the district is required to keep and use the buses for the next five years, though the district will likely keep them longer as the batteries on the bus are warrantied for eight years.
“The batteries are warrantied for eight years, so if there is anything that happens to the battery it will be replaced,” said Kuchta. “A stipulation of the grant says that we have to use these buses for five years. The typical life of a bus is 12-15 years. In the Midwest, the buses get corroded. The engines don’t go bad, the bodies rust out.”
As the Granton School prepares for its electric buses, Kuchta said they will be working with the Neillsville School District to train drivers and mechanics. They have partnered for the past several years to provide school bus drivers for the Granton School District and are currently in the process of applying for their own electric buses through the EPA grant in its next round of funding. Already, he said a few bus drivers have gotten experience behind the wheel of an electric bus, and their positive response to the experience helps to show the benefits of going green.
“We work with the Neillsville School District for transportation with drivers and mechanics,” he said. “They will be applying for this grant in the next round and their director will be getting up to speed on how to maintain these buses. And there is actually a lot less to maintain on these buses, there is no engine or transmission to work with and there’s no oil to change. We had an opportunity last year to have some of our bus drivers go to Wausau to try and drive an electric bus and we had a few that went. They said that these buses have every bit of power as the diesel bus, but the biggest difference is that they are quiet. You don’t hear the diesel engine and they said that it was nice to not have that distraction. When changing over to the electric buses, it will be a little different for the drivers, they do handle a little differently. The accelerator kind of acts like a brake in that when you are not pressing it, you immediately start to slow down. That’s different from what you experience from a diesel vehicle. It will take a bit to get used to.”
