Posted on 06/02/2023 9:19:17 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Beatles once sang, “All you need is love.” But will Kamala Harris’ professed LOVE for electric school buses – plus the $1 billion in taxpayer subsidies she announced last October – be enough to usher in the new paradise?
Hmm. Let’s do the math. The $1 billion in rebates pledged is to help purchase 2,500 electric school buses in some 391 school districts around the nation. But there are in fact about 500,000 school buses transporting children to and from school, to and from ball games and other events, nearly every school day.
By simple calculation, this suggests it will take a $200 billion investment just to replace existing school buses – which must be done, Kamala tells us, by the 2030 deadline or else CHILDREN WILL DIE.
Do factories, batteries, and other raw materials exist to build (or retrofit) 500,000 school buses – and every other vehicle in America today – by 2030? By 2050? Does that much money exist? Does that much electricity exist?
To be sure, the demand (from mostly leftist school boards) is out there. Nearly 2,000 school districts applied for the free money last year, pushing the demand SO HIGH “that the EPA had to double the amount of funding” from the initial pledge of $500 million.” Should Kamala keep her job in 2024, the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program is committed to handing out another $4 billion over the next five years.
Nearly 2,000 school districts applied for the first round of rebates from all 50 states, including Washington, D.C., U.S. territories, and federally recognized tribes. The demand was so high "that the EPA had to double the amount of funding" from its initial pledge of $500 million, a White House official tells Parents on background.
A total of 391 rebates were awarded, and the Vice President anticipates thousands more applications as the EPA's Clean School Bus Program awards a total of $5 billion over the next five years. That’s 12,500 down, just 487,500 to go!
School districts NOT getting the federal free money are faced with a much different scenario. Even the smaller electric school buses today cost about $250,000 compared with just $50,000 to 465,000 for a diesel-powered bus of the same size. The larger battery-electric buses can run from $320,000 to $440,000 versus just $100,000 for a diesel bus.
Take the Dallas (TX) Independent School District, which has about 860 buses. To replace the entire fleet with large diesel buses would cost, therefore, about $86 million. But those 860 buses, if battery-electric, would cost a minimum of $275 million. And that does not include the cost of charging stations and retraining mechanics. That’s over three times as many taxpayer dollars the school district would have to extract from voters.
All this, of course, has been under the assumption that electric school buses are just as reliable as diesel-powered buses – and that they can keep children warm in winter and cool on hot days as well as buses with diesel engines.
The Ann Arbor (MI) Public Schools Board of Education learned recently from its environmental sustainability director, that the electric school buses they bought have “a lot of downtime and performance issues” and “aren’t fully on the road.” Moreover, the infrastructure upgrades needed to use these buses, which were estimated at just $50,000, “ended up being more like $200,000.”
To the surprise of many educators, electric school buses may break down and require towing. As with any electric vehicle, this poses risks not common to gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicles. One is that they are heavier – and thus require larger tow trucks (remember, tow trucks only tow the cabs of 18-wheelers, not the trailers). Towing capacity should be about half the weight of the towing vehicle, and the typical electric school bus weighs 36,000 pounds.
Another thing the electric bussers ignore is the wear and tear on bus tires, which cost about $3,000 per set (likely higher by now, with inflation). Goodyear notes that electric school bus operators have to consider the extra weight of the buses, which makes balancing the tires for load capacity and durability even more important – and more frequently done. The extra weight also means that the tires do not last as long as on lighter weight diesel buses.
Electric bus enthusiasts like Kamala Harris will tell you that spending an extra $150 billion or so is worth the price to theoretically save children from diesel exhaust (despite the major improvements in diesel technology and much cleaner diesel fuel mandated in recent years). But they are silent about the number of actual lives lost by children mining the raw materials for electric vehicle batteries.
Using data supplied by Pacific Gas & Electric, Colorado journalist Cory Gaines noted that the $260,000 cost differential between diesel and electric school buses means that any school district wanting to take advantage of the predicted much lower operating costs will need major help with the huge upfront capital costs. Which means both federal and state subsidies – and higher taxes to pay for the subsidies.
Noting that electric buses have longer downtimes and higher towing costs, plus require (again upfront) costs for installing and maintaining charging stations – and other hidden costs, the payback on the electric school bus (at an average of 16,000 miles per year, a high-end estimate) comes out to about 20 years – longer than the lifespan of the bus. And that’s if nobody dies or is injured by a school bus fire.
Gaines, who runs the Colorado Accountability Project on Facebook, gives an additional caveat for buses operating in cold climates (like the Colorado mountains, the Great Lakes region, and Alaska, where today there is but one electric school bus).
Unlike diesel buses that scavenge waste engine heat for passengers, electric buses have to divert battery energy into heat. On very cold days, the amount of energy needed to keep children warm could exceed the amount used to travel the route. That may not matter on short trips to and from school -- but imagine a basketball or hockey team on a bus trip to a game across the state.
Charging the battery for an electric school bus takes up to eight hours using AC power, but with a diminished range in cold weather taking children on long bus trips for any purpose might require an extra day on the road in each direction. That means an extra day each way of feeding and housing the children (and keeping watch over them).
Or school districts could just say, Sorry, kids, no more school travel. We can’t afford it!
Duggan Flanakin is a senior policy analyst at the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow who writes on a wide variety of public policy issues.
Isn't it grand that one can just wave a magic ($$-taxpayers-$$) wand and.....poof! DOUBLE the amount of funding.
These electric busses are soon going to join the wind farms in the ash heap of history.
You can Ven Diagram that.
I wonder what will be the range of battery-powered refrigerated semis.
School buses.
George Wallace in 1968 used to denounce the cowardly adults safely in the distance who “used little school children” to take the risks of being bused to potentially dangerous confrontations in schools while adults watched. True, the adult faceoffs were often avoided (lunch counter service denied and other battles followed by marches and arrests) while children continued to be bused.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bI-Cb8ADUI
He won 9,901,118 popular votes (out of a total of 73,199,998)— 13.53% of votes cast nationally—carried five states - Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi - won 45 electoral votes plus one vote from a faithless elector, and came fairly close to receiving enough votes to throw the election to the House.
In 1968, Wallace pledged that “If some anarchist lies down in front of my automobile, it will be the last automobile he will ever lie down in front of” and asserted that the only four letter words that hippies did not know were “w-o-r-k” and “s-o-a-p.”
no problemo. just pritn up a new batch of money.
problem solved.
Why is DeSantis participating in this bullsh!t ?
He doesn’t need to do this. It is discretionary.
Back around five years ago....new E-bus was delivered to Trier, Germany...to be part of their future operations (the first one). This was in mid-winter.
On the very first day of operation, they had a ceremony and the driver left the depot. About 30 minutes later, he calls back...the meter indicates less than one-third power left, and he was returning to the depot.
What they determined was that to keep the interior warm (in winter)...it was using just as much power to heat, as to keep the bus moving. So they had to lessen the heat in the bus...to get any real use out of it.
“You can Ven[n] Diagram that.”
I think that all of the dystopian novels should be at the core of current HS English/WesternCulture classes.
What safety features are there for children to escape if the bus spontaneously bursts into flames?
This man ends any argument on the subject
There’s nowhere near enough power on the grid to convert the U.S. truck fleet to battery electric.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aCoAsPtgRKg&pp=ygUaRWxlY3RyaWMgdHJ1Y2tzIHBvd2VyIGdyaWQ%3D
“ One fleet tried to electrify just 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois. Local officials shut those plans down, saying that would draw more electricity than is needed to power the entire city.
Another California company tried to electrify 12 forklifts. Not trucks, but forklifts. Local power utilities told them that’s not possible.”
So a tow truck would need to be 72,000 pounds. Add a 36,000 pound bus to that and you have 108,000 pounds total. Several states would have to increase their maximum weight limits in order to allow this combination.
And wear and tear on the roads? I'm sure some Anthony Fauci type "scientist" on a government payroll somewhere would be able to explain how this would not affect road breakdown.
“What safety features are there for children to escape if the bus spontaneously bursts into flames?”
None.
When the first school bus goes up in flames in seconds and there are 40 or 50 school kids reduced to ashes, that will be the end of electric school buses.
You know it will eventually happen and the State Run Media will do everything to try to hide it, but won’t be able to. Then we’ll have another $200 Billion boondogle.
Another thing to consider is they may not be able to run on roads in the north when frost laws are in effect due to the extra weight.
A few years ago the Bloomington, Minnesota school district went all in on using biodiesel, a mixture of petroleum based diesel with plant derived oils, in their school busses. On a bitter cold day, school had to called off as many of these busses stalled as their biodiesel turned to gel. I expect similar problem with electric busses.
Back in the early 80’s, a Coca Cola delivery truck driven by a trainee hit a school bus and knocked it into a chalice pit in South Texas.
Lawsuits sprung up and a crazy amount of money was passed around, with a third of it sticking to the grubby fingers of law firms.
At least a half dozen masters and doctoral studies looked into the results of the accident and the Massive amount of money poured into a poor South Texas town. A tragedy by any measure.
And does anyone expect the next electric bus accident to be any different?
I pity the children who will be trapped in one of these electric boondoggles for several hours per day.
How many children must die before the powers that be realize the errors of their ways?
Animal farm also coming.
I would say the expert misspoke. Joliet is a town of around 150K. The town consumes giga watts of power per day, not a few mega watts. Tesla has some large supercharging stations in California that would rival what the trucking company wanted to do. I am more inclined to think the trucking firm’s problem is an infrastructure problem. It is just not cost effective to wire up that much power where the trucking company is located.
That said, a few mega watts here and there add up to giga watts..
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