Relieving Congestion in Albany - Resilient and Repeatable School Bus Infrastructure

To electrify New York's thousands of school buses, we need to find ways to minimize the new load strain on the grid, charge the buses with green energy, where possible, and identify ancillary value from the bus fleets. In collaboration with First Student, we propose a multi-tiered solution to replace 30 of First Student's school buses with electric buses servicing Albany School District and scaling in the near term. The deployment will include managed charging to reduce peak demand on an overburdened Albany-area grid, include solar as a distributed green site asset, stationary energy storage to further reduce grid constraints and serve as backup power. Furthermore, the project will aid the grid through Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) dispatch as well as the community by enabling dispatch so that buses can provide emergency mobile power backup to critical buildings.

This project will replace diesel school buses with electric and install onsite resources to deploy energy assests, including bi-direction charging, solar PV, storage, and managed charging.