In cities big and small, electric school buses are coming to the roads of Texas. Here’s why.

The largest institution in Martinsville, an unincorporated logging and farming community in rural East Texas, is its school district. Area landmarks include a log-cabin post office and a Dollar General store; a gas station and a doughnut shop opened last year.

“We’re growing,” said a grinning Will Cauthen, associate superintendent of Martinsville Independent School District, which serves 320 students from preschool to 12th grade.

The newcomers that have drawn the most attention to Martinsville, population 1,400, from across the state and beyond are the four electric school buses Martinsville ISD added in October. The district is the first in Texas to have an all-electric fleet shuttling children to and from school every day. 

In cities big and small, electric school buses are beginning to hit the roads of Texas. Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District added 10 electric school buses to its daily bus routes this school year, while Houston Independent School District plans to add 15 electric school buses to its routes next school year.

The electric versions don’t look that different from the classic yellow school bus. If people notice a change, it’s the lack of noise: Without the roar of the diesel engine, kids no longer have to shout to be heard, with drivers reporting an unintentional improvement in student behavior, according to Albert Burleigh, vice president of alternative fuels for Blue Bird, a major school bus manufacturer that has been offering electric models since 2018.

“They’re so quiet we actually have to add a noise generator so that when they’re going really slow, like 20 miles an hour or less, it emits a sound so kids can hear it coming,” Burleigh said.

The school districts cite a variety of benefits, from air quality improvement to savings on maintenance and fuel costs, made possible by government grants that cover much of the cost of the buses and chargers. With more federal and state funding on the way, electric school buses could soon become a more common sight in Texas, industry players say. 

Transportation is the greatest share of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. Electrifying school buses, which make up the largest segment of public transit in the country, has the added benefit of “normalizing electric mobility for an entire new generation,” said Jessica Keithan, co-founder and director of the Texas Electric School Bus Project.

“It’s such good low-hanging fruit, such good testing ground for the expansion of fleet electrification,” she said. 

HISD just broke ground in the northwest part of the city on a new charging station for its incoming electric school buses, said John Wilcots, the district’s director of transportation. It’s a pilot program to see how well electric school buses work for HISD’s needs, he said. “The whole goal is to see how we could reduce our carbon footprint.”

HISD received a $6.2 million grant from the Biden administration’s Clean School Bus Program last year and is using the funds to purchase 15 electric buses, 10 propane buses and build six charging stations for almost $7.3 million, Wilcots said. The 25 new buses, which would allow the district to retire 25 older diesel buses, comprise just a sliver of HISD’s fleet of 700 buses.

One major consideration for Wilcots is range: The buses are able to drive about 120 miles per charge, he said. Wilcots envisions the electric buses will be used primarily for students in densely populated areas all going to the same school, rather than picking up individual students who attend schools across town. 

According to Wilcots, the district was “sought after” by the EPA to apply for the program, which prioritized funding for communities overburdened by air pollution. Houston is among the worst U.S. cities for air pollution, with impact disproportionately falling on the city’s Black and brown residents. 

Martinsville ISD was another one of 11 school districts in Texas that received Clean School Bus Program funding. For the district’s Cauthen, the decision to go electric was driven by economics. 

The district was shopping around for new buses when a vendor told them about the EPA program, from which Martinsville ISD received nearly $1.6 million, Cauthen said. That funded the purchase of four electric school buses at about $375,000 each; five chargers, more than $4,000 each; and installation. The only out-of-pocket cost to the district was $5,000 to install a new electric pole and meter, he said. 

The district anticipates an 82% reduction in fuel costs when comparing electricity to diesel prices, as well as saving tens of thousands of dollars annually on maintenance costs. Its diesel buses were “constantly breaking down,” Cauthen said.

With the savings, the district is pondering reducing class sizes, he said. “It’s a win-win for us. We were able to take those (diesel) buses that were not reliable to get kids to and from school and replace them.” 

Like at HISD, range is still a concern. The electric buses have no problem running daily routes, the longest of which are about an hour drive round-trip, but Martinsville ISD still has four diesel buses on deck in case of longer field trips or sporting events, Cauthen said. 

Though not a focus of school districts, electric school buses could also be a boost to the Texas power grid. 

Electric school buses can serve as “big batteries” that could help with grid stability and even provide emergency power to buildings in the event of an outage, said Gregory Poilasne, CEO of Nuvve, a San Diego company specializing in electric school bus charging and consulting. Electric school bus batteries range from 105 to 300 kilowatt-hours in size, while grid-scale batteries range from 40,000 to 200,000 kilowatt-hours, he said. 

School buses can charge during the overnight off-hours when power is cheaper and soak up excess solar power during the early afternoon. They sit idle when not driving routes, making them especially good candidates to sell power back to the grid during the late afternoon – another potential revenue source for districts – when solar power decreases at sunset, Poilasne said.

“A parking lot of 50 school buses literally becomes the same as a power plant,” he said. 

But the main barrier to electric school buses becoming a grid solution is the same barrier to their widespread use: cost. Vehicle-to-grid chargers are about $55,000 each, more than 10 times the price of a basic charger, according to Nuvve data. More complicated chargers may also require more infrastructure upgrades, thus increasing districts’ expenses. 

He said Texas was a “late adopter” of electric school buses. But that could soon change: There are $1.8 billion in grants and loans set aside for backup power sources, specifically including electric school buses, in the Texas Energy Fund, a constitutional amendment approved by voters earlier this month as part of a $10 billion bill primarily to spur construction of natural gas power plants. 

In anticipation of the wave of new funding, Blue Bird, which had already been seeing “exponential growth year over year,” scaled up the production capacity of its factory earlier this year to be able to build up to 5,000 electric school buses a year, Burleigh said.

“We’re having trouble keeping up with demand,” he said.