First Student and Con Edison have completed the first phase of an electric school bus project serving the New York City Department of Education.
The project includes electric school buses, First Student’s First Charge modular charging infrastructure together with bidirectional charging and load-management software.
The First Charge system uses an above-ground, trenchless design intended to reduce the construction required for fleet charging installations.
At the New York site, the approach reduced infrastructure construction costs by 13%. The modular architecture is also designed to make future expansion easier than conventional buried-cable installations. Load-management software schedules bus charging during off-peak periods to reduce demand on the electrical system and lower charging costs.
The project builds on earlier work by First Student and Con Edison around vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-everything applications for electric school buses, where bus batteries can potentially serve as distributed energy resources when the vehicles are parked.
Filed Under: Charging, Technology News