Oakland’s new school buses don’t just reduce pollution — they double as giant batteries
A new fleet of buses can send power back to the grid, stabilizing it instead of straining it.
Pretty easy for something to "double" as a giant battery when it has a giant battery in it
They also double as buses.
Though it’s a car cry from perfect grid storage, as the vehicle isn’t connected during the morning and most of the evening spikes, and ideally needs to recharge overnight to be ready for the morning route so it can’t discharge at the time when grid storage is needed most in a place with plentiful solar.
Not to mention the amount of carnage and pollution created to build these monstrosities.
Is no one aware of the amount of populations being killed due to the extraction of metals requires to build these batteries?
Biodiesel would be a FAR GREENER alternative to this nonsense.
Have they thought this through? To install batteries that are much heavier than what the bus trip requires makes the bus less efficient. Research in the UK found that a bus carrying 5 people is about as efficient as 5 cars each carrying 1 person. That’s because of the weight of the bus. So the goal should be to fill the bus with people, not excessive batteries and overhead that need not move back and forth from A to B which then requires more riders to maintain the same efficiency.
Sure they need to store energy for to smooth out peak grid consumption but probably smarter to do that with stationary batteries -- if they must use batteries. Another way to store energy: pump water to the top of a mountain and open a dam that turns a hydro turbine when they need the energy back.
from the article:
Pollution from buses and other vehicles contributes to chronic asthma among students, which leads to chronic absenteeism.
Seems like a stretch. Even if they can attribute chronic absenteeism to air pollution and keep a straight face, moving the pollution of a fleet of buses that makes 2 trips/day from the street to the power plant isn’t going to change the absenteeism by reducing asthma. This claim only signals a bit of desperation to get support.
