PNNL

Abstract

Once the nation’s school bus fleet is fully electrified, electric school buses (ESBs) are estimated to provide as much as 61.5 GWh of stored energy capacity. One of the major benefits of school buses is their availability during summer months. This is important because recent studies showed that most “medically relevant” 8+ hour outages happen during the summer and that heat has become the primary weather-related cause of death in the United States. However, most school districts have yet to purchase one ESB and face many challenges with fleet electrification alone. Therefore, this paper examines some functional concerns when planning to use ESBs for energy resilience and provides an example case study of a hypothetical emergency shelter using ESBs as a backup power supply. This paper estimates emergency shelter loads in the Pacific Northwest for 100 persons and calculates the number of ESBs required to meet this load. The results highlight use of critical loads and infrastructure design considerations when planning to use ESBs for resilience applications and the need for further study to arrive at least-cost, least-risk solutions.