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These Electric School Buses Are on Their Way to Save the Grid

Loaded with ever more renewables, the grid will need to store a whole lot of energy. Enter: a new kind of magic school bus—one that can both charge and give power back.

This August, though, 1,300 special-needs students in the Oakland Unified School District will start riding into the future aboard 74 fully electric buses, operated by a startup called Zum. “There’s no uncertainty in terms of the use of the bus,” says Patricia Hidalgo-Gonzalez, director of the Renewable Energy and Advanced Mathematics Lab at UC San Diego, who studies the grid but wasn’t involved in the project. If people can fully charge their EVs at work, they might have a good amount of power left when they park in their garage at the end of the day, making their battery available to the grid as demand spikes.

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