The key to a successful school bus fleet electrification project
Dans cette série d’articles, nous démystifierons les grandes étapes d’un projet d’électrification de parc d’autobus scolaires grâce au guide Transporteur+. Ce guide a pour objectif d’offrir un accès facile et direct à des ressources, de clarifier les étapes, les enjeux ainsi que les conditions et mesures facilitantes pour une transition réussie vers l’électrification.
The secret to any major successful transformation project starts with good planning. The topic of school bus electrification raises several questions, and knowing where to start can be challenging. This article goes over the main steps of properly planning a school bus electrification project.
Before embarking on a project of this magnitude, you need to clearly identify your current and future needs. Start by putting your short-, medium- and long-term vision on paper, and ask the right questions. How many buses need to be replaced every year? What are my daily service requirements? What will my future electrical needs be? This planning phase is crucial and must be carried out in advance, even up to a year ahead of time, to ensure that you establish an effective transition plan that will not be the source of headaches!
Optimize your transition process
Each school bus operator has specific needs. At this stage, properly identifying the needs of your service and the situation in which your electric vehicle will develop is crucial. Identify the number of kilometres driven per day; the number of daily exits from the garage, including downtime at the garage/parking site; the types of trips and the route geography (city, country, paved or gravel roads, predominantly flat terrain or hilly); etc. Each element needs to be factored in! Don’t forget to check whether your electric vehicle will have to do long routes, like school trips, and if your electrical installation will allow you to charge it.
Make effective financing arrangements
After you have properly identified the needs of your school bus fleet, you can plan the financing structure of your electrification project and identify the different financing methods available. Plan for two primary cost categories:
- Operating costs : These include electricity, vehicle and charging infrastructure maintenance, fuel for auxiliary heating, licensing fees for software and access to real-time data, training, insurance, etc.
- Capital costs : These include the acquisition of vehicles, warranties and repair contracts, the acquisition of charging infrastructures, connection with Hydro-Québec, building reconfiguration, installation of a new distribution system, updating tools for maintenance and computers, battery replacement, etc.
Implementing a pilot project
The very last thing is implementing your pilot project, as it allows you to conduct a post-mortem analysis to correct the full fleet deployment strategy. This test phase should be planned and orchestrated using the same requirements as those identified to deploy a full fleet of electric buses. In this way, the pilot project will help validate as many hypotheses as possible.
To find out more, see the Transporteur+ webpage and the Transporteur+ guide.
This project was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Government of Quebec, the Trottier Family Foundation, the Greater Montreal Climate Fund and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ. Propulsion Québec would like to thank The Transition Accelerator and the WSP Canada team for their critical contributions, as well as all the experts involved in the development of this guide.
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