By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
It sounds like a futuristic scenario. During the day electric school buses quietly deliver students to and from their schools with zero emissions and at the end of the day park and provide the power their families use to cook dinner.
It turns out the future is now. We recently spoke with Jeremy Kureluk of Rental Bus Lines in Stony Plain, Alberta about how much they liked their electric school buses. At the end of our interview Kureluk mused that they hoped one day to use their electric school buses as virtual power plants to feed electricity to the grid.
That same week we met Rob Safrata at the Decentralised Energy Canada Forum at Whistlers in B.C. and he’s starting a company to do just that.
“I own two transportation companies. One’s a courier business, Novex Courier,” says Safrata. Novex was the first courier company to reach carbon neutrality in North America.
But Safrata also owns “West Coast Sightseeing. It’s a tour bus company. And I’ve been trying for six years to figure out how to electrify our entire fleet of 60 buses.
He wants to electrify his fleet of touring buse, but “They’re too expensive and the infrastructure is complicated and expensive and that’s the genesis of FUSE Power Management,” says Safrata.
Enter FUSE Power Management
FUSE is Safrata’s Vancouver-based startup and the idea seems to have legs.
“Medium heavy-duty buses or trucks have huge electric batteries, 200 to 500 kilowatt hours,” he says.
And yet when they return to base they often have 50% or more of their battery power left.
“That power is very useful, and very important to the grid for peak shaving,” says Safrata.
“So when I’ve got 50, 60, or 70 per cent battery life left and I’m not using the bus for three or five hours, I can sell that power back to the grid,” he says.
And here’s the thing peak electricity is quite valuable and could provide a significant source of revenue for fleet owners.
He says there is already four times more energy storage in electric vehicles than in stationary storage in the U.S.
And this is infrastructure utilities and therefore consumers won’t have to pay for it. They simply have to pay the virtual power plant owners for the peak power the grid desperately needs.
Safrata says this could save billions and billions of dollars for all concerned.
B.C. Hydro wants 500 megawatts of rolling storage
FUSE is a startup, but they are already working with B.C. Hydro on its second pilot. B.C. Hydro wants 500 megawatts of rolling energy storage to help manage peaks in electricity demand.
“We did it, the first test in Canada a year ago in 2023,” says Safrata. That first pilot was with just one bus. ”And so now we’re doing it with five [buses]. And they want 40, the year after. And that’ll give them two and a half megawatts,” says Safrata.
Using school buses as an example, here’s how it works.
“Most school buses don’t drive very far daily, and their schedule is like clockwork. They know that 60 per cent of their fleet is back at the base by 5 o’clock, 5 days a week,” he says.
“So, from 5 o’clock until 10 at night, when the utility needs the peak to be shaved, they can be giving power back to the grid.”
In the case of Safrata’s tour bus company, the buses sit idle in the winter offering an entire season of availability for virtual power plant service.
How this can help bus companies
The contract model FUSE is working with now goes like this:
FUSE would enter into long-term contracts with a utility like B.C. Hydro to provide peaking power.
Then “We can go to a fleet manager and say that truck or school bus, costs you $220,000 after all the grants and everything, and a diesel vehicle costs you $160,000. We’re going to give you maybe $80,000, so it costs less than the diesel version,” says Safrata.
This model is based on Safrata’s own experience with his own tour bus company. The bus company then gets electric buses at a comparable price and benefits from lower operating and maintenance costs over the long term.
FUSE then sells electricity to the grid when the buses are parked.
“What about battery degradation? It’s the first question, so I might as well answer it right away. In controlled tests battery degradation is reduced by 10 per cent,” says Safrata.
Battery degradation
There has been a fair amount of research on how to minimize battery degradation and to optimize the trade-offs between battery degradation and profits from power delivery. Many experts suggest avoiding taking your battery to zero charge and avoid charging it to 100%.
The pilots are going very well and there are already two other companies doing this in the U.S. so Safrata is confident they will be rolling out virtual power plants as early as 2026.
“We’re already advance ordering electric vehicles and chargers and things like that,” he says.
The idea makes energy storage available to the grid without having to invest in the hardware or expand the grid. It will help make more efficient use of existing grid infrastructure and bring a source of revenue to virtual power plant operators and fleet managers keen to use electric vehicles.
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