Case Study of Proposal for 100% Biodiesel School Buses

March 25, 2021

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by Ahmed Abdellah* (Advanced Biofuels USA) This video presentation compares the carbon footprint of school buses retrofitted with a system to enable use of 100% biodiesel with electric buses. It uses a case study of a proposal for 100% biodiesel school buses for Howard County, Maryland, public schools using the Optimus Technology system.

Versions of this presentation were given to the Howard County Public Schools student mobility staff and contractors and also to the Frederick (Maryland) County and City Climate Emergency Mobilization Work Group subgroup on Energy, Buildings and Transportation. Thanks to Ahmed Abdellah, the Howard County High School student who created this excellent, sophisticated study, for allowing us to share it with a broader audience. WATCH VIDEO

*Ahmed Abdellah (Advanced Biofuels USA) is a current senior at Howard High School and a rising freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. His main project over the past two years has involved planning for the integration of biodiesel in Howard County’s school bus system. At his internship at the University of Maryland, he conducts research on Microbial Fuel Cell usage and its applications for space energy. He hopes to continue to spread awareness on the use of biofuels and waste-to-energy technologies to help mitigate climate change.

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Excerpt from Los Angeles Times: In California’s vast northern rural school districts, with their mountain passes and long, snowy winters, the typical electric bus’ range is not nearly enough. West Valley is one of Lassen High’s nearest athletic opponents. One of the farthest, Yreka High, is 169 miles away.

Yet California is pushing schools to get rid of their air-polluting diesel buses and swap them for battery-powered ones.

In October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation requiring all newly purchased or leased school buses in California to be zero-emission starting in 2035. Rural school districts can have up to 10 additional years to fulfill the requirement, if they can prove the vehicles are impractical for their routes and terrain.

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But here in California’s conservative northern reaches, residents say that urban Democrats like Newsom are failing to acknowledge the limitations of electric vehicles in rural areas.

Anyone who objects to electric vehicle mandates, they say, is dismissed as a climate change denier.

Going electric will be tough for all rural residents, considering the long distances they drive on lonely roads. For the humble yellow school bus, the hurdles are even greater, as are the consequences of running out of juice in the middle of nowhere.

“Would we all love electric buses? Absolutely. That would be great. But they just don’t work for us,” said Assemblywoman Megan Dahle, a Republican from Bieber, a Lassen County town of 260.

Dahle, vice chair of the California State Assembly Committee on Education, pushed for the rural schools’ deadline extension, which was not in the original version of Assembly Bill 579. But even that, she said, is not enough time for bus technology to improve or enough chargers to be installed.

But even that generous time frame is unworkable unless electric bus technology significantly improves, rural school leaders say.

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“The technology is going to have to improve a lot before we would consider switching” to electric buses, said Tom O’Malley, superintendent of the Modoc Joint Unified School District.

O’Malley said his district recently was offered a $2.3 million federal grant to purchase electric buses — and turned it down.

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At the Lassen Union High School District, officials say their four battery-powered buses can go at most 93 miles on a full charge in peak weather conditions. The buses mostly stay parked.

For longer trips, Smith (Britton Smith, president of the Blue Bird Corporation) said, Blue Bird recommends its propane-powered school buses, which have a range of about 400 miles and “generate ten times less NOx [nitrogen oxide] emissions than the current EPA requirements.”

That type of bus will not be allowed under California’s new law. Nor will hybrid buses with a fossil fuel option, Ting (Assemblyman Phil Ting, the San Francisco Democrat who wrote the school bus bill) said.

Another issue: public electric vehicle chargers, which are few and far between in rural California, are not practical for school buses, Smith said, because of their size and the locations of the chargers at places like grocery stores or strip malls.

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Buses either need to make a round trip on a single charge, or campuses will have to install enough chargers for visiting schools.

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The first Blue Bird electric bus, which arrived in summer 2020, sometimes sped up too quickly when the motor surged. Other times, it went into “limp mode,” where it crept along but wouldn’t accelerate.

It has been repeatedly hauled away — on a flatbed trailer pulled by a diesel truck — and has spent months undergoing repairs, according to Remley (Todd Remley, the school district’s director of maintenance, operations and transportation).

Bishop Unified’s second electric Blue Bird came a few months later.

“The second bus worked a lot better. Until it caught on fire,” Remley said.

The cause of the fire, which started while the bus was plugged into its charger this August, remains under investigation, according to the Bishop Volunteer Fire Department.

Remley said security camera footage shows the bus slowly start smoking, then an arcing flame, “then more sparks and sparks.”

The district’s insurer, the vehicle manufacturer and the dealer are wrangling over who will pay for the charred bus, which remains out of service, Remley said.

Despite the troubles, Remley believes in electric school buses. The district uses the first bus — when it’s out of the shop — for in-town routes, charging it between the morning and afternoon drives.

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Eastern Sierra Unified School District in Mono County also has two electric buses. Supt. Heidi Torix said charging equipment has caught fire with both.

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For years after the Lassen district bought the four Blue Bird electric buses with grant money in 2019 and 2020, it had just one portable charger, which takes 14 hours to fully charge a bus.

The district now has three BTC Power charging systems, in addition to the portable one, after an arduous, years-long installation process that included upgrading the electrical grid and connecting the chargers to Wi-Fi to track usage for carbon credits.

The new chargers, which now await software programming, are not yet functional.

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The money would be better spent, he (Lassen Union High School District Supt. Morgan Nugent) said, on forest management.

It feels small, he said, to be talking about carbon credits for electric buses when the amount of greenhouse gases released by California’s massive wildfires in recent years has wiped out decades of air-quality gains.

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Asked about electric school buses, (Cheri) Lorenz started laughing.

“The school would have to invest heavily in diesel generators. Kids would be stranded,” she said.

The school district tried a few times to drive an electric bus to Milford. Last spring, a bus died six miles outside Susanville.

The district hauled out a diesel generator that ran for hours while the bus charged. READ MORE