Electric buses on their way after LPVEC gets federal grant

Date: 12/1/2022

WEST SPRINGFIELD – The fleet of yellow school buses in several Western Massachusetts towns will soon be turning a bit green.

The Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative (LPVEC), which provides busing services to the Agawam, East Longmeadow, Hampden-Wilbraham, Longmeadow, Ludlow, Southwick-Tolland-Granville and West Springfield school districts, recently received a federal grant to purchase 25 electric buses.

To the outside observer, the new buses will look like the diesel buses they replace, with a similar yellow paint job and capacity of 71 riders. Parents and students at the bus stop will hear the difference, however, said Roland Joyal, executive director of LPVEC.

“They’ll be a lot quieter,” Joyal said. “They’ll have, for the most part, close to zero emissions coming from them.”

LPVEC will buy the buses with $9,875,000 from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, part of the infrastructure funding law signed this year by President Joseph Biden. Joyal said this figure is close to what he would pay for 25 diesel buses of this size. He said the grant includes an additional $25,000 per bus to cover infrastructure costs, such as charging stations and power lines to serve them. Some grant funds may also be used for training of LPVEC staff to operate and maintain the buses.

Joyal said from what he has heard, these buses should cost less to maintain than the equivalent diesel bus, and the “fuel” cost should be less, as the increase in electrical usage will be more than offset by the decrease in the amount of diesel fuel the collaborative has to buy. These will be the first electric buses that LPVEC operates.

LPVEC buses handle morning pickups and afternoon drop-offs in the member school districts, as well as transportation for high schoolers to and from the Career-Technical Education Center vocational program in West Springfield, and transportation for sports teams and field trips.

Joyal said he isn’t sure yet how the electric buses will be allocated among the various bus yards serving LPVEC’s member districts. He said he would like to see some electric buses in each district – “we’d probably like to spread the wealth” – but acknowledged that there are some routes where electric buses might not work.

“We’re hearing these buses could range anywhere from 125 to 175 miles on a single charge,” he said, so “potentially, long field trips could be something” they can’t do.

He also said hilly terrain depletes the battery charge faster, which could rule out some routes.

Grants totaling nearly $29.6 million were awarded to five Massachusetts school districts in late October, and LPVEC was the only one in Western Massachusetts. In all, Massachusetts received funding for 76 electric buses.

“I am excited that five school districts across Massachusetts will be receiving nearly $30 million to replace existing school buses with clean, low-emissions ones,” said Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “This funding, provided by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, will help protect our children and members of the community from diesel emissions, reduce maintenance costs and work towards our climate goals.”

The state’s other senator, Edward Markey, agreed.

“Students shouldn’t have to breathe dirty air on their ride to school,” said Markey. “I applaud the EPA’s latest efforts to use funding passed by Congress to support the deployment of dozens of clean school buses to districts educating more than 30,000 of our commonwealth’s students. A safe, clean ride to school is critical for students’ health. Clean school buses will mean more learning and less fossil fuel burning.”

The EPA initially allocated $500 million to its nationwide Clean School Bus Program, but overwhelming demand from school districts prompted the agency to nearly double its funding to $965 million. Nearly 400 school districts so far this year have benefited from these grants.

Joyal credited Anna Bishop, the collaborative’s director of finance, for her work on securing the federal grant.

The 25 buses coming to LPVEC will not represent a growth in its fleet, as one of the stipulations of the federal grant is that after purchasing the electric buses, the collaborative has to take an equivalent number of old fossil-fuel-powered buses off the road.

LPVEC has not committed to any additional electric bus purchases, but will treat these 25 new buses as a trial run to decide whether it makes sense to go all-electric, or mostly-electric, in the future, Joyal said.