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April 26, 2022
It's the launch of the Beneficial Electrification Toolkit at EESI! This resource is a one-stop-shop for utilities to learn, plan, and implement a beneficial electrification program. To explore this kind of electrification in action, we travel to Durango, Colorado, a small rural town in the southwest corner with a big source of pride: the first electric school bus with vehicle-to-grid capabilities in the state. This bus, which first hit the road in January 2022, not only takes students to school every day, but also helps store excess clean power, distribute energy back to the electric grid, reduce local emissions, and provide better air quality. The Durango School District worked with their local rural electric cooperative, La Plata Electric Association, to apply for a grant to pay for the bus and a fast charger in this pilot program. Dan and Emma talk with Dominic May from La Plata and Karla Sluis and Daniel Blythe from Durango School District about how the bus has performed so far and where they hope to take the program from here.
Show notes:
Beneficial Electrification Toolkit
Article on electric school buses in Colorado
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello, and welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. It's another episode where I'm joined by my longtime cohost, Emma Johnson. Hi, Emma, great to see you.
Emma Johnson: Hey, Dan, great to see you as well. My energy is really high for this episode because we have an exciting announcement to share with you all today!
Dan: That's right. EESI has launched a brand-new online resource called the Beneficial Electrification Toolkit. It's a one-stop-shop for utilities to learn, research, analyze, plan, and execute a program to electrify their service areas and to do so in a beneficial way. Even though it's designed for utilities, there's a ton of useful information included, such as different types of electric vehicles on the market, how external stakeholders like nonprofits could support utilities creating beneficial electrification programs. And all of this information is free and available online to everyone. So we encourage everyone to go check it out at betoolkit.org.
Emma: And if you're unfamiliar with what beneficial electrification is, let me provide a little background. Our homes are powered by electricity, but not necessarily everything that can be operating with electricity is operating with electricity, such as your gas car or your natural gas stove. Going all in with electricity for all these appliances can be a key solution to help us break free from fossil fuels, reduce local air pollution and help low income households save money. This is what beneficial electrification is all about - making the switch to electric end-use applications that save money, reduce emissions, improve quality of life, or strengthen grid resilience. Examples of beneficial electrification in action are switching to an electric car or replacing your radiator heating system with a heat pump.
Dan: And in my case, I switched out my lawn and garden equipment for all electric and I'll never look back. The Beneficial Electrification Toolkit is designed for utilities, because those are the entities, the organizations that manage the electric grid and power sources for a designated area and that puts them at the forefront of the energy transition. Using the Toolkit, no matter at what stage in the process they are, whether they're just thinking about a program or whether they fully implemented one and they're looking to expand it, utilities can find the resources they need to guide their electrification work. And of course, our team here at EESI is also available to help every step of the way.
Emma: I'm now going to turn things over to Keith Dennis, who is the president of the Beneficial Electrification League, to talk more about beneficial electrification and how anyone can help support this work.
Keith Dennis: Any type of electrification could be seen as beneficial to a certain group, for example, anything that helps reduce carbon productions could be seen as beneficial to an environmentally minded person. But if it comes at a really high cost to a consumer, the consumer might not see that as beneficial to them. So beneficial electrification itself is a term of art, it's really describing a subset of electrification that's going to be beneficial to a wide variety of folks. If you're able to electrify a vehicle, that's one thing, maybe you get some cost benefits, maybe you get some environmental benefits. But if you're able to time when you charge that car to better times in the grid, you actually improve those benefits. So by working on all of these different pillars, you're able to make it more beneficial. And in that way, you're sort of finding new places, you're going to be able to find new places where other electrification that might not have been beneficial in the past might become beneficial. Electrification in general, has really improved quality of life immensely and we forget about that. Now, there's all sorts of different tools out there that can be done with electricity instead of instead of fossil fuel. And when you do that, you reduce combustion. And that just reduces exposure to the harmful fumes. So I think especially if you're talking about someone who's maybe cooking inside or has a lot of fumes associated with their work, if they're in garages, if you're mowing a lot of lawns, if you're out on boats with a lot of a lot of diesel emissions, you're not going to be smelling that, you're not going to be you're not going to be exposed to it. And kids are riding on school buses, for example, with diesel fumes. And I think until you kind of realize that it's an option to not have that, you don't notice it as much. But once you start noticing it, you're like, Yeah, you know what, if this was quieter, if there wasn't the smells, if there wasn't these fumes, that would be better. And you know, until it's an option, sometimes it's not even in your mind, but the fact that we could have that option will improve people's lives as we as we're able to advance this technology. Electrification is at its heart, something that consumer has to be involved with, and it's often in the United States, there's freedom of choice and you can choose what type of product you want. So being able to educate folks on the newest products, the benefits of them, being able to make compelling cases of why this might be the product for somebody is going to be incredibly important. Without that, you know, the consumers might just choose the easiest option, and maybe not the optimal option. So I think it's going to be across all different fronts. One is, you know, just making sure that it's a policy option to provide an incentive for something that switches over to electricity, a lot of times, that's not an option, it's not seen as something that necessarily is a traditional energy efficiency measure. So just figuring out you know, how to transition things from like, when we used to change old light bulbs out to LEDs, you know, those types of programs could be shifted to hey, you know, maybe you could shift your lawn more from gas to electric. And that comes with all up and down the supply chain from starting to talk about changing the rebate to actually talking to the consumer and everything in between. I think the Toolkit is going to be something that will give people a resource to look at for each stage of that. And that's going to be an important tool going forward.
Dan: Well, it's great to hear from Keith, he's been a great partner to us here at EESI, who are looking to get beneficial electrification programs out in rural areas in particular, and we're so grateful that the League is a partner on the Toolkit and has helped support our work so far, and we look forward to what's to come. Now Emma, let's talk about an example beneficial electrification in action.
Emma: To do that we are taking listeners out to Durango, Colorado in the southwest corner of the state. We're going to hear about how the Durango School District is turning towards beneficial electrification through piloting an electric School Bus program with help from their local electric cooperative, La Plata Electric Association, also longtime partner Co-op with EESI. The electric school bus, which is the first of its kind to be used in Colorado, hit the road in early 2022. We're thrilled to have three guests on to talk about how this new initiative came to life.
Dominic May: I'm Dominic May, the energy resource program architect at La Plata Electric Association or co-op in southwest Colorado last serving La Plata County and Archuleta that worked on innovative projects here, mostly beneficial electrification.
Karla Sluis: My name is Karla Sluis, and I am the Public Information Officer for Durango School District 9-R. And I helped manage internal and external communications for the district and the district office in Durango.
Daniel Blythe: I’m Daniel Blythe, Director of Transportation for Durango School District.
Emma: Thank you all for being here. Let me start off by asking how did this electric school bus pilot program come about? Was there an event or instance, that made you all say, ‘Now is the time for us to get an electric school bus’?
Daniel: So Dominic with La Plata Electric approached me about looking into getting an electric bus. And so we worked together to research it and see what the benefits were. And then we worked on the grant that was available for it together. And that’s how we kind of got it.
Dominic: From our side, the opportunity kind of came along when the grant funding arose, and I saw that come through from the Regional Air Quality Council, RACQ, here in Colorado, and that was going to fund a significant portion of it at that time. Also, from the technology side, I was able to research and see that the very, very first options for real vehicle-to-grid in the field were with school buses, and specifically with conveniently with the school buses that 9-R uses. So the stars kind of aligned on doing this as both a pilot project and trying to get one of the first school buses in the state on the road for 9-R as electric. As Daniel mentioned, all those health benefits, the electrification, all of those were the reasons behind it. But the timeliness of the opportunity, I think was driven in large part by that grant and the technology happened to come online was ready just in time basically for us.
Karla: And I would say to that this electric bus represents a lot of the super exciting work that our superintendent Dr. Karen Chesser is doing around our sustainability committee, and we just celebrated Earth Day in our community. But we all know that Earth Day is more than just one day, protecting our planet has to extend beyond just that one day. And this ethos runs throughout the school year. It's a symbol of our commitment to that sustainability every day.
Dan: So getting projects like this implemented requires a team effort. We have people from the utility, we have people from the school district, people who work in facilities, people who, you know, it takes a lot of people to get on the same page to make something like this happen. And I'm curious how the decision to start this program was discussed among different stakeholders across the school district. Was everyone on board right away or, or were there reservations that were out there? And how did La Plata Electric Association work with the school district to address those concerns, and help get everybody on the same page and realize that this electric school bus opportunity was a good thing and would be a good thing for all the different stakeholders.
Dominic: I will say from my perspective, when I was able to take this in front of the school district, Daniel was extremely receptive, actually tried with few school districts here and 9-R was unique and that they were just, Daniel was ready to go on this, we collaborated on the grant itself, we were able to mostly do this project just between the two of us, we kind of worked in a silo and I got to do the big reveal. And I think even internally, a lot of people were surprised that we were so far along. And it was, although obviously, for us to require collaboration across a lot of teams to actually make it real and in the ground. We had put in all the infrastructure, so we put it in a new transformer, we had stakers involved to do all that, contractors do trenching for three more additional chargers. So ideally, we keep going with buses down the row. We had people all across the board, basically just doing the electrical work on that and planning and whatnot, then we've actually had to rewrite a new policy with our G&T tri state. So our lawyer has been involved in this process and put a new contract in front of 9-R. So really, it's been one of those kind of trailblazing processes where we've had to touch a lot of people along the way. Daniel has done a lot of work after the fact with the fleet drivers. That's part that, you know, now that it's out there in the wild, it's been, it comes up my road, I see it almost every morning, taking kids. And I know that working with drivers, making sure that familiarity exists, has been something that's largely on Daniel side to coordinate with that.
Daniel: I definitely agree with Dominic, things just seemed to fall into place. When it was brought up to me, I took it to the CFO and the superintendent about the opportunity to do this. And they were completely on board from the beginning. Just the opportunity for it. And working with like LPEA and the people that came in, everything just seemed to fall right in place for us. Right along the way, I mean, I think the thing that took the longest was just getting the bus here.
Karla: And I would say it's kind of a no brainer for anybody driving by any gas station anywhere. And looking at the sticker shock of those prices, that this is a huge financial benefit for our district, I think there was an estimate that we could save up to $5,000 per year on the use of gas and all of that money can be funneled back into the district for use by teachers and, and all the great programs that we have in place, because education is pretty cash strapped. So we're excited to funnel that money back into our education.
Dan: So speaking of timing the charging, one of the cool things about an electric school bus is it's a clean source of transportation. But another very cool thing is that it's basically just a battery on wheels. And it can function as a stationary battery, when it's plugged in, provides a grid resource a demand resource. How did that change how the school sort of uses and charges the bus? And what benefits does that bring?
Dominic: Yeah, I can speak to that because we manage the charging as a part of this agreement entirely. And it was actually a big part of the reasoning behind how we made this project possible. And when I did the ROI calculations and whatnot, going to V2G was a big component of that. And the vehicle-to-grid allowed the dispatches during our peak time to perform really significant energy arbitrage. So we'll kind of get into the details on that. But starting off with the simple part, it was it's good for 9-R, the school district, because they're on our large commercial time of use rate. And the way we will charge that the bus and during the hours will always be on the cheap part of the time of day rate, which is half price charging basically from what they would have had otherwise, around six cents a kilowatt hour and makes for extremely cheap operation of the bus. So from their side the charging, they should basically, they'll never really know that dispatching is going on in the background. Typically, there'll be some kind of incentive because 9-R does own the bus. They own the charger, in this case that we're doing donated by us. And that's why in this agreement, having the bus entirely free of charge and all that fully through donations. The agreement was 9-R’s and you can use the battery indefinitely. Basically you'll run that and we agreed you always have 100% charge. First it'll be a bus and second we'll do the energy arbitrage off of it. So we run those time of use hours basically and our commercial time of use aligns very nicely we're an evening, peaking winter peaking utility, as many utilities and high elevations are in cold climates are across the United States. And so when the bus goes out morning route that's during one of our peaks, and so that's off the peak right then and that early morning, six to nine, and everybody wakes up and starts running all their appliances, and then it's out on its route, comes back at about 9 or 10 charges up in the middle of the day, which is off peak and a great time to charge for us, we have excess solar, all sorts of cheap, clean power going. And then it goes out on its route on the second part and comes back. And we actually did a 60 Kw fast charger, which I'm very glad we did for a number of reasons, that lets us basically top it off to the point where during that evening, we usually peak between 7 and 9pm. And so during that time, we can dispatch at 60 Kw for those two hours, and leave even dispatch can start getting one of the financial nuances to that is G&T Tri-State we pay a coincidental peak demand charge once a month. And it's pretty significant. It's $20 per kW. So that actually influenced a payback that if I were just making this six cent time of use off peak energy as the utility, our margin on that is something like two cents, and it was going to take literally something like 400 years to pay the $180,000 back. However, with the vehicle to grid, when I successfully pull the trigger on dispatch, I can make $1,200 to $2,400, between my shifting down every month, and that shift within and 8 or 10 year payback. So that was a significant piece of how we actually made it feasible, and how it helped us get all the projects going forward to keep doing these and be able to give out free infrastructure, leveraging that peak avoidance. And then after that 9pm hour, we wait a little while to be safe, and we top the bus back up to 100%. So it's ready to go in the morning. So ideally, all this happens in the background. And that kind of allows LPEA to pay back its infrastructure and hoping to prove this out in such a way that the next 3 buses And going forward all over the community, we can say well put in the transformer, we'll cover your line extension we'll put in the charger, you just have to let us do this.
Karla: I just really love the fun fact that when the bus is fully charged, it can power I think it's 30, is it 30 homes for up to two hours. And that's a really interesting little math problem for all of our kids that are that are on the bus there that they can think about this battery on wheels, charging up 30 homes. You know, it's just an interesting little fact.
Dominic: Yeah, and for our region, it's actually closer to 60. When we flip the switch during our highest use period it will effectively turn off 50 homes off our grid. And if we were to extend that across the bus lot, it's non-trivial. A bus will actually alleviate over well over twice its weight in carbon every year.
Emma: Dominic, you said this earlier, but you see the bus going down your road every day. And of course, it's still doing its primary job of ferrying kids to and from school from their homes. But it's obviously doing it in a way that's quieter in a way that's cleaner because of cleaner interior and exterior air. And I'm curious to know how has it done handling Colorado's cold weather and mountainous geography? I think that could be a concern that some people have perhaps about electric buses. And I'm also wondering about if you've heard testimonials from students, parents, other people around the bus who can say what it's been like to either ride in it or see it every day.
Dominic: The cold climate has certainly impacted the range of the bus pretty dramatically. And that's actually circling back to one thing I mentioned earlier, one of the reasons I'm very, very glad I went with this 60 Kw DC fast charger here. If I were done a level two charger, which a number of school districts are doing and looking at doing with their utilities right now, I would be nervous, that on the coldest days during the middle period when the bus gets back maybe at 930 in the morning and maybe has to leave again about 230 in the afternoon. If I'm charging even on a fast 10 kW or 12 Kw level two charger, I might not get enough to finish the route in the afternoon. So that made me really glad we wanted to 60 Kw fast charger. And the other thing I've mentioned is because of dispatch, there’s a, it's better on the battery to dispatch right between 79% down to a certain low threshold, 20%, 15%, 10%. We've done even that you don't want to go destroy from all the way there. Cummins and Bluebird are working on alleviating this limitation right now. There they actually come down and they're working on this. Our bus feels very much like a first generation science project right now.. They'll get it up to where you can do it. 100% But that was even we were saying if there was enough range loss that I think it would have worked but there's a little anxiety because the bus drivers don't want to come back with 20% in the tank. So we actually have a workaround for that right now, where when we are giving rides back in the evening, it uses some of its energy into top off and only tops off to 79%, then we do arbitrage. And then after our dispatching, then it goes back to 100%. In that 20% was actually became kind of important because of the significance of the range loss on the absolute coldest days.
Daniel: Definitely on the cold days, when we're running the heaters and everything, it cuts the range down some. Dominic said we worked around it, where he goes out with full charge in the morning, even with loss of the heaters. Because you're losing at least 25% of your range, if not a little bit more. I know the parents and the kids that ride it, kids don't like it so much, because they can't, the driver can hear everything that goes on there. But I've heard a lot of people are asking more, and we're getting be getting more because they love that it is such a clean energy, and they enjoy it.
Karla: And I would just say I guess we're lucky that we're not Michigan or someplace like that with really, really cold weather, because our winters are still pretty mild. And the other thing I would say too, is that this is new technology, if we're the first in the nation doing this, it's okay that it doesn't work perfectly. It's okay that it's a pilot, and we're working through these hiccups. It's just really exciting that we can be in our little rural district in Colorado that we can take a first run at it. And from what I've heard the kids at the Earth Day event, they were crawling all around this bus and they felt really proud, especially on Earth Day, that we have this cool bus and we're the first in the nation to have it and it's just right here in Durango.
Emma: And as you all have mentioned, you're just in the pilot program stage. Is there anything you can say about how you're hoping to grow this in the future? And I'm also curious if through this process, trial and error, Dominic, you mentioned this felt like a science experiment, if there have been some key lessons learned that you think would be really helpful for other utilities and school districts to know if they were hoping to establish a similar sort of program?
Dominic: Sure, yeah, I speak to a lot of other utilities and school districts who have reached out, there are a couple of big learnings that we share. So when sharing, there's a lot of funding coming down some of it to the DOE, some of it from the state. And I'm trying to keep an eye on a number of different committees and whatnot, they pushed it out a little bit that was going to be available starting May now or later. But there's billions and billions of dollars dedicated to electric school buses. So really watching that, I think we're in a strong position to get another grant, we did scale our transformer project, we did the conduits with step outs to do three more chargers right down the road, we've kind of proved a project that's in the wild. We also just have a strong application: in the first round, we were one of seven selected out of 38. So I'm optimistic that we'll be able to keep scaling this with grant funding, and maintain the model where LEPA can contribute significant match to do basically all the charging infrastructure, and then in the future, hoping that they could basically as they need to replace school buses, throw in $150k, whatever it is that would normally be spent on a diesel school bus. I'd like to tell utilities though, that payback scenarios and some of the benefits of the electric school bus so often build our time of day rates and how conveniently they align. From the utility perspective, if they were ready to do it with the technology, I think, personally, I'm a bit of an evangelist for the vehicle-to-grid, as it has that potential to really drop the payback while leveraging the resource and turning it into a DER. I also talked to them as the school district side, always going to the main benefits that are that we've seen really cheap, the paybacks, the ability to actually get it for the same price as diesel with the grant funding, try to work with their utility to explain how they should throw in free charging and free infrastructure to make it easy for the school district to adopt. And then the big benefits are is going to air the health and savings.
Karla: Well, I love that Dominic says he's an evangelist because I feel the same way on the on the PR side of this. It's really exciting that Durango can be put on the map. And our school district in particular can be put on the map as starting this program. Because our kids are really lucky to grow up here with tall trees and flowing rivers and our fresh air and they intuitively understand why it's important to protect it. And we're just really proud to be a part of this. And we're I think one of our plans is to have the bus in the Snowdown Festival, which is a big winter festival in January. And the entire town can get a sense of why this bus what it represents and why it's important to the district and why it's important for our planet.
Daniel: Like Dominic mentioned, a lot of funding is coming down right now and there's going to be opportunities for us to do get more of these and keep going and as he mentioned we can put what has been installed already, we can put three more buses on the line. And I know that's what our goal is.
Dan: Well, Dominique, Karla, and Daniel, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, it was very cool to hear about how things are going with the new bus, and great to hear that the kids take pride in it. That's very cool. EESI has been lucky to work with La Plata for about five years now. And the utility is doing really great stuff. And it's really great to hear how utility is helping the school district, and all the various, you know, members of the community, you know, make a really positive impact on the lives and the health of the kids who ride the buses and who work around the buses and who walk around the buses when they cross the street. It's really great to hear. So thank you so much. And congratulations on a really successful pilot. And we're really looking forward to seeing where it goes next.
Daniel: Thank you.
Dominic: Thank you for a great conversation.
Dan: Well, that's a great example of beneficial electrification and action. And it really, really great to hear want to hear from Keith at the start, but then also to hear from Dominic, Karla and Daniel. I think one thing that really stuck out to me, and I think a major driving force behind how we organized the Beneficial Electrification Toolkit, the resources that are in it, how it's structured, how you navigate through it, is one thing that came through is how many people how many stakeholders in the community in Durango has to be involved or had to be supportive of the project, you heard about the superintendent, you heard about the transportation department, the facilities department, the utility, the public affairs team, and of course, the students. And getting or getting pilot programs like this off the ground is not easy. And for intrepid utility program managers like Dominic, for forward looking transportation departments like Daniel represents, and the school district that Karla was here for three of the really important stakeholders that had to really become aligned very early on in the process to make this happen. It's a lot easier not to do a program than it is to do a program. And I hope our listeners takeaway is really great example of how all of these, you know, varying interests and responsibilities and priorities can come together. And it's great to see beneficial electrification in the middle of that. Last thing I'll mention is, we mentioned during the end of the interview that we've worked with La Plata for a while. EESI actually works with lots of rural utilities and electric cooperatives in particular, and one of the things we do is help them access resources, like the Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy Savings Program. We had a briefing on that back in February, called the Financing Inclusive, Clean Energy Investments in Rural America. And we heard from great panelists, including the one of a kind Representative Jim Clyburn, who's a member of the House of Representatives, and is a huge leader on rural clean energy issues, how these federal resources and how utilities can really be at the forefront of the transition to a decarbonized clean energy economy had beneficial electrification is absolutely one of the best ways to do that, in part because it delivers benefits to the utility to the school district, in this case, to the grid, and of course, to the environment.
Emma: You are so right Dan, those are really great thoughts about connecting all this together from Durango to the national level and all the work we do in between. One of the things that really stuck with me, Karla’s comments about the community building that's happening around the electric school bus, I think in when we talked in the beginning about what beneficial electrification can do for a place, you know, I've mentioned save money, reduce emissions, improve quality of life and strengthen the grid. Well, you know, strengthening community bonds, it wasn't really included in any of those things. But it just goes to show that there are even more benefits beyond those four that I listed that can come about that can be really exciting and provide more support and excitement, enthusiasm for this kind of work that will hopefully only continue to grow. And to build off of that, you know, electric school buses, as we said, it's just one piece of a huge network that is possible through beneficial electrification and going to the Beneficial Electrification Toolkit at betoolkit.org is really the best way to learn about everything that you can do with beneficial electrification and everything that's possible for utilities but for everyone. This process of releasing this toolkit has been a two-year undertaking so far, and it's nowhere near finished. There's lots of plans to continue expanding it adding more resources, adding more pages continuing to refine the resources that are already there. So I have to shout out the main Toolkit team, which is John-Michael Cross and Miguel Yanez-Barnuevo from EESI who are so critical to this work and do so much work around utilities every day at EESI. There have also been two consultants who have been working on the toolkit, Kellen Lynch and John Jantz who have been instrumental members of the team. Thank you to all of them for all the work they have put into it so far and will continue to put into it in the future. If you liked the story and you want to keep learning more, head to our website eesi.org. Also follow us on social media at @eesionline for all of our recent updates. You can listen to The Climate Conversation wherever you get your podcasts and just published a supplement to our bi weekly newsletter, climate change solutions, go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.
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