Exhaust-free electric school buses have not only improved school attendance in the United States but will also serve as a crucial emergency power source in Atlantic Canada, making them an essential tool for preserving child welfare, public health, and community resilience.
School districts where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) replaced older, pollution-spewing diesel buses with electric ones had greater attendance improvements than unselected districts, “resulting in over 350,000 estimated additional student days of attendance each year,” write the authors of a study recently published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
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“Extrapolating our results nationwide, we expect that the replacement of all pre-2000 model year school buses would lead to more than 1.3 million additional student days of attendance per year.”
That’s because “even relatively short commutes on school buses can dominate students’ daily air pollution exposures,” wrote the public health researchers from the University of Michigan and University of Washington who undertook the study. “This is of great concern given that exposures to traffic-related pollutants are understood to induce inflammation, reduce lung function, and increase asthma attacks, which can lead to missed days of school.”
The researchers monitored the impacts of the EPA’s US$7-million diesel-to-electric school bus lottery, which replaced old buses in randomly selected districts between 2012 and 2017. The EPA was responding to evidence that diesel exhaust is dangerous for the kids riding the buses, the drivers, and the communities where they operate, with more than 40 toxic air contaminants, carcinogens, and other harmful fine particle matter in their exhaust, reports Electrek.
“Several studies have even suggested exposure to the pollutants can be up to 10 times higher inside the bus, especially while constantly idling to pick up students.”
Now, a US$5-billion Clean School Bus program is setting out to electrify the entire U.S. school bus fleet by 2028, with funding from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Meanwhile, in North Rustico, Prince Edward Island, community leaders are concluding that the benefits of electric school buses extend beyond cleaner air and fuller classroom, reports CBC News. They can also serve as a fossil-free means to power emergency centres during extreme weather events, replacing the ubiquitous diesel generator.
When Hurricane Fiona hammered PEI last September, it was fume-spewing diesel generators that kept emergency centers warm, bright, and connected for those seeking shelter. Now, a pilot project in North Rustico (pop. 600) will see the local emergency shelter at the North Rustico Lions Club plugging in to electric school buses equipped with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technologies supplied by Saint-Jérôme, Quebec-based Lion Electric.
So far, two fully-charged electric buses can deliver three days’ worth of electricity to the centre.
PEI’s minister of environment, energy and climate action, Steven Myers, said the province is “the perfect test bed” for the project, with so many electric school buses already on the road. The province will have 82 e-buses in its fleet by the end of May, with plans for 125 more in the next five years.
“Electrification of transportation is more than transporting goods and people,” said Benoît Morin, Lion Electric’s Canadian VP of bus sales. “In this case, LionC school buses will be used as energy storage for the benefit of the population. It feels good knowing Lion vehicles could play an important role in the community.”
