Now that your school district is working under new sustainability expectations, some changes need to be made. And it doesn’t stop at buying buses and chargers.
Is your site ready for electric vehicle (EV) charging? Is it designed to get your buses charged and on the streets on schedule? Will it be ready to accommodate more vehicles or the inevitable updates in technology? In short, is your infrastructure up to the challenge?
K-12 school bus fleets have been powered by fossil-fuel infrastructure for decades. In order to convert to EVs, that needs to change as well. You need to set up your depots for success — not for bottlenecks and change orders. But can the EV school bus dealers you’re talking to provide the services that prepare your vehicles for the long run?
Making the change to EV takes more than a one-time purchase of chargers and buses. Let’s talk about the infrastructure your EV fleet needs. After each section, ask yourself if you trust your EV dealer can handle it – or if you’d prefer an end-to-end EV fleet charging provider instead.
We’ve even included a checklist to go over with your dealer. If they can’t meet these needs, you might want to think twice about working with them.
Your steps to a viable EV infrastructure
Before those first vehicles enter your depot, you’ll need an infrastructure that can support them. Make sure you have a vendor who can help you cover these five bases:
- Discovery: Survey your depot and determine how you’ll store, move, and charge your fleet every day.
- Chargers and equipment: Purchase and install your charging equipment, mapping out cable management and safe service access.
- Utility and service planning: Make sure your electrical grid can serve your EV buses — now, and when the fleet expands.
- Site preparation: Complete the make-ready changes your depot will need to install your EV chargers.
- Software and network management: Set up processes for monitoring, troubleshooting, and reporting.
We’re presenting each step separately to make them simpler to understand, but many of them overlap and may need to be done in parallel. For instance, “post-installation” software and services should be defined long before you un-crate your first charger.
Part one: discovery & operating plan
Once you’ve decided to convert to EV, your district’s next goal should be to build an efficient ecosystem around it. That starts with making sure the storage, movement, and charging of your fleet is a polished routine, rather than a daily mess. What will a typical operating day look like for your fleet?
Survey your site. Camber’s Sr. Director of Operations, Yasmin Mahmoudian, advises that you estimate an ideal typical day for your transportation team (drivers, service, security).
“Understand the process and frequency of buses going in and out,” she suggests. “For example, if half of your depot is used for mid-day layovers, you might not want to put charging there because it could disrupt that activity.”
To define the logistics of your fleet, ask your team questions like these:
- Where will your drivers pick up the buses?
- How do the buses get out of the lot in the morning? How do they get back in the afternoon?
- Will they have enough room to turn, to back out, to exit in case of emergencies?
- Where do they stay in between?
Use the information collected here to help build your site map or layout.
Part two: charging equipment
Even if you have a vendor for hardware purchasing and installation, remember that you’ll need to do more than just snap up chargers and cables. Your next steps include:
- Finalizing electrical and civil design
- Selecting hardware
- Planning installation
- Determining cable reach
- Creating safe access for your maintenance team
- Testing and commissioning the system
- Testing the buses and chargers together
“Try to think about everything that could affect the site, from now through the charger’s life cycle,” Mahmoudian suggests.
Part three: utilities and service
Is your site ready for the new energy demands of an EV fleet? Utility service upgrades can become one of your largest, least predictable costs.
Once you understand the energy requirements of your chargers and fleet, you’ll need to upgrade your site’s ability to meet them. It’s possible the current service your utility provides might be enough. But a larger rollout — especially if you’re adding buses in phases — may require you to upgrade your electric service or build a new one. You can use resources like the chart on this page to get a rough estimate of the amount of power your new fleet may require.
Your next step will be to work with your local utility to provide it. The utility usually performs utility-side upgrades, like installing new power lines up to your depot. It’s your district’s responsibility to contract and fund the on-site upgrades, like transformers, switchgear, panel upgrades, wiring, conduit, and trenching. Fortunately, many utilities offer incentives, rebates, or make-ready programs that can help offset those costs.
These types of build-outs take 12-24 months or longer, depending on the level of upgrades you’ll need. Make sure to factor that into your conversion plans.
Part four: site preparation
At the same time as you’re contracting this electrical work, you can plan the construction that prepares your site. This includes civil construction, conduit and panel work, and of course any permitting needed to get all this done.
Don’t forget to plan for climate protection. For instance, locations where flooding is a risk need to avoid drilling near drains, and may require concrete “skids” (elevated pads where charging equipment can be bolted on and kept away from standing water). High-temperature areas may need canopies for shade. Colder regions may need to plan for battery preconditioning and longer warm-up times. Coastal regions need to prepare for wind, salt air, and corrosion. And of course, you may need charging equipment that can handle extreme cold or heat.
As with each of these steps, you’ll want to prepare the site not just for your phase-one vehicle purchase, but for any planned phases over the years.
This stage of planning helps you to limit expensive changes down the line. Any updates after this could require additional conduit, design changes, new permitting, and expensive change orders.
Part five: software and network management
And while steps 1-4 will get your fleet up and running, you’ll also want to make sure it runs reliably, efficiently, and cost-effectively for the long run. Post-installation software and services keep your systems running, uptime high, and costs down, long after your initial purchase. “The goal for these services,” Mahmoudian explains, “is to create the most efficient path to a lower monthly utility bill.”
They include:
- Charger monitoring to support uptime
- Remote diagnostics and resets to quickly solve issues that don’t need in-person repair
- On-site maintenance services when solutions escalate to in-person attention
- Time-sensitive intervention that accommodates morning pull-out and dispatch windows
- Charge scheduling to set cost-effective charging times that still preserve route schedules
- Periodic billing review to keep costs low as rates and operations change
Next steps: find the right vendor
Infrastructure: It can make the difference between a reliable, cost-effective EV fleet and a change-order-ridden nightmare. Before you start laying out your district’s precious transportation budget on electric buses, make sure you’re getting the end-to-end service an EV fleet requires.
Consider working with a company like Camber that provides end-to-end EV school bus fleet charging solutions every day. Camber specializes in comprehensive electrification solutions, offering end-to-end services encompassing planning, design, build, and reliable operation of fleet-specific EV chargers. Contact us to find out how we can help with the lifecycle of your district’s fleet-charging system.
