This post is about a major school district (Oakland Unified School District) that just acquires a large fleet of Electric School Buses through a partnership with Zum, a company that provides the full infrastructure around electric buses.
Early on, I heard or read that Zum uses the fleet of School buses as a Virtual Power Plant (VPP) to help companies displace peak power pricing. Zum’s website is very good, but as is the case for all good sites, it is totally focused on their primary customers (school administrators and school-age children’s parents). Thus, it took me a while to find some text on the VPP, but I finally did.
Imagine if the nation’s fleet of school buses could serve as batteries, providing power back to the grid. School buses have predictable daily schedules and are typically used only a few hours each day, sitting idle during peak power usage times—making them an ideal resource for communities. At Zum we’ve recently partnered with AutoGrid’s Virtual Power Plant technology (VPP) platform to deploy 10,000 electric school buses in the next four years to create over one gigawatt of flexible capacity—the equivalent of powering more than one million homes for one to four hours—when the electricity grid is overloaded. When fully deployed, this is expected to be one of the largest VPPs in the world. If we collectively build on this critical infrastructure, student transportation can play an even deeper and more important role in our communities.
